What happens when a self-professed "die-hard, bleeding heart liberal" becomes a parent of twin daughters? A very revealing opinion piece in the Washington Post last week reveals that the travails of raising two six-year-olds can stretch many progressive dogmas to the breaking point. It might be a secret sauce for building a lasting conservative majority, especially among women.
Darlena Cunha is a former television producer turned stay-at-home mom who wrote the surprisingly frank exploration of how her political beliefs (no doubt honed in a graduate school by a handful of childless professors) have ruined her ability to parent.
Take a recent incident, involving some candy. I’d given each girl the same number of gumballs. But one of my daughters lost some. She then implored me for extra. "Now I have less and that’s not fair," she moaned.
"But they’re my candy! It’s not my fault we lost some of hers!" the other one replied.
My solution — to put all the gumballs together in one bowl and split them equally — was unacceptable to both. All afternoon, they threw tantrums, slammed doors, or tried to slyly outwit me, crumbling when I didn’t fall for it.
"How about we keep our own gumballs and I get an extra other kind of candy that she doesn’t get?" said one.
"Why am I being punished for her missing candy?" asked the other.
Why, indeed.
Don't misunderstand my optimism, the article is actually designed to preach the gospel of leftist economics as Cunha validates the tortuous process she endures in imparting "lessons" to her children about the so-called "pay gap" and the obligation of the wealthy to give to the poor through coercion. Cunha doesn't actually see the larger lesson revealed in her anecdotes, but it's too late for her. Any other parent, or prospective parent, can read her analysis and walk away with a very different conclusion.
For instance, this tale Cunha imparts about a time one of her daughters wanted her mother to buy her some extra candy:
"Mom," my daughter said, "people without money need help, and people with money need to help them."
"Yes, that’s right," I said.
"Well, I don’t have money, and you do, so you need to help me and buy this."
A perfectly well-reasoned, thought-out argument.
When the answer was still no, she tantrumed and screamed, and I had to drag her out of the store. She did what I’d taught her; she still didn’t get what she wanted. I didn’t get what I wanted. Everyone was unhappy.
"Everyone was unhappy" could very well be the motto of larger societies that follow Cunha's worldview and apply it to public policy.
She reaches the ultimate conclusion that although her philosophies on how a society should run are absolutely correct, it doesn't translate to parenting children. Her kids, she opines, are too young to grasp the brilliance of liberal policies. So she's changing her approach.
But for now, I’ve taught the wrong message — that life should be fair and there is no other acceptable option. I did it before the girls had the capacity to understand the meaning of fair. Fair became "what I want right now because I want it."
I should have stuck to the well-worn, well-tested "life isn’t fair, and I call the shots" route when my girls were babies and toddlers.
Because what isn’t fair is asking children to think and behave like adults before they have the mental ability to do so.
Liberalism ruined my parenting, but I’m slowly getting it back.
The irony is that the opposite is true. Her strategy to raise her children to follow leftist dogma fell apart when even a six-year-old could see how illogical they were and how they were inherently contrary to human nature.
"Why am I being punished for her missing candy?" is basically the pure essence behind the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. A six-year-old can see it. An adult living in the former Soviet -bloc nations can see it. But an American liberal faced with the cognitive dissonance of seeing everything she has known to be true fall apart when applied to the oldest social construct in human history, parenting, cannot see it.
The sooner more liberals can get married and begin the process of raising children, the sooner they'll start understanding that Dad was right, life isn't fair. They'll also figure out how offensive the "you didn't build that" dogma is and they'll start voting Republican.