Selfish Parenting at Its Best

Rational Jenn has a very inspiring report on an articlethat calls for parents of gifted children not to homeschool, but to keep their kids in public school for the sake of everyone but themselves.  Why is her report inspiring?  Because of the excellent responses in the comments section of the article which adamantly reject this call for sacrifice.

Thank you, Jenn, for pulling out these gems and republishing them.  I always think of parenting as one area where people are very screwed up by the idea of sacrifice and duty, so to see this kind of display of pure moral goodness from so many people made me cheer with delight!

Speaking of Rational Jenn, did you know that she and Kelly Elmore now have a parenting podcast and new blog called Cultivating the Virtues?  I'm listening to their second podcast and I'm finding it to be very enjoyable, and I expect to get a lot of great parenting advice from it.  Kelly and Jenn are just fun to listen to!  They play really well as a team and you can tell that they are enjoying the discussion.  I'm loving the "situation of the week" segment because hearing "war stories" from Objectivist parents is so incredibly valuable.  This week, Kelly explained how she handled a situation where her daughter couldn't find a shoe she wanted to wear, but they needed to leave the house for Kelly's own selfish reasons.  What struck me about the story was that, in deciding whether to let her daughter find the shoe or to leave, and in deciding what to do and say and ask, Kelly didn't think in terms of permissiveness or strictness at all.  The real issue became Kelly's effort at understanding what her daughter really needed and wanted, in a much larger sense that wanting to wear a particular shoe.  And she did it while still drawing a firm line and remaining selfish.  The podcast format seems to be really good for this kind of storytelling and I look forward to more more more!  You can listen or subscribe through their blog.