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.

He set it up, and, voila!  Sammy now gets her own yogurt and cheese whenever she wants it.  In fact, she loves serving yogurt for two.  She’ll get the two containers of yogurt and place them at our respective places at the table, then she will get 2 napkins from the shelf she can reach, and 2 spoons from her low cabinet.  Then she asks, WOULD YOU LIKE HAVE YOGURT WITH ME, MOMMY? 

We plan on putting more food in the fridge for her, but yogurt is her main refrigerated snack.  We do have a small pitcher of milk in there (you can buy the pitcher from For Small Hands for $7.50), but she hasn’t had the guts to try it herself yet.  Once she does, she’ll be able to get her own cereal for breakfast.  And that will bring me one step closer to my selfish goal of having her be totally self-sufficient in the morning.  Interesting how my selfish goals seem to coincide with what is best for her, isn’t it?

Adam and I have never managed to do this.  We’ve been out alone together here and there since Sam came along, but never as a regular part of our lives.  We have a good excuse though: all that moving around.

The kind of sitters you can find on sittercity.com or through the local college charge $20/hour plus tip.  That means that just the babysitting for a quick dinner-date costs about $50-60.  Add a movie and you’re talking about $100 or more.  We don’t have that kind of money to throw around.  We have not lived in one place long enough to make local friends to share babysitters with, we have no family nearby, and we’ve never had time to tap into the local teenage pool of sitters, who are considerably cheaper.  Well, the last part has changed.  We have a few teenagers living within walking distance.  We’re using one tonight for the first time, and she only charges $9/hour.  I offered her $10, but with a no-tip policy.  The best part is that her parents live directly across the street, so if she is uncertain about something but hesitates to call us or make a decision, she’ll certainly go straight to them for advice.  Of course, I still made sure she had real sitting experience and checked her references.

Let the date nights begin!

The selfish parent gets her child’s hair cut nicely because she likes to look at the child and so wants to make him or her as beautiful as possible, and because it keeps the hair out of the child’s face, which makes life more pleasant for both of them.

The selfless parent might get the child’s hair cut out of a duty to groom the child, or to impress other people, but she will never allow herself a motivation that is selfish.

Selfishness does not always manifest itself in radically unusual actions, but there is always a difference in motivation and resulting satisfaction when one is selfish instead of altruistic.

This is another example of selfish parenting.  My motivation here was not to find something interesting for Sam to do, but to keep her occupied so I could get my own things done.  It worked out well for both of us.