Now that my daughter’s birth is only a month away, I’m gonna start documenting the adventure here on Steemit. Sure, in most respects, it’s just another baby on the way but I’ve noticed that eyebrows tend to raise when I mention my unusual approach to it. Simply put, I treat the matter as a business venture. As far as I’m concerned, parenting is a service and so it follows that parents are service providers. With this firmly in mind, everything ends up looking quite a bit different. Since I’m straying from conventional perception, some may take offense at some of what I say along the way and I’m okay with that. My goal will never be insult but nevertheless, jimmies are sure to be rustled.
My partner and I aren’t all that different than any other pair of friends that decided to start a business together as equal partners. With my real estate development business, Fort Galt, I already have some valuable experience with this. In that business, which is a little over three years old, I have three equal partners and it has been full of ups, downs, and important lessons along the way.
Unlike the speed and efficiency of sole-proprietorships or single parent domestic dictatorships, equal partnerships can be a bit slower at times because of the need to reach agreement before implementing policies and taking significant actions. Sometimes, compromises have to be made and this isn’t always fun when you’re the one giving up ground for the greater good. Nevertheless, I still firmly believe it’s the best way to go because it ensures that nobody steamrolls over anyone else, which would create all kinds of animosity and could seriously damage the business. Countless companies have fallen apart because of that sort of thing so the inconvenience of having to arrive at a consensus would appear to be an acceptable price to pay.
I came out of my childhood very dissatisfied with my parents’ performance. As a result, I committed to thoroughly studying the subject of parenting before ever having children myself. I couldn’t help but noticing how few parents bother to study the subject at all and it struck me as very strange. We’re always told to study before the most trivial of exams in school and if we fail those tests, we’re chastised for not preparing enough. Isn’t raising a child vastly more important than any test one could possible take in school? Shouldn’t we then prepare even more for it? Why are most people content to just fumble through it all the way their own parents did? Is it because they don’t want to face the truth of their own parents’ failure? Would they rather pretend that they “turned out just fine” than admit that they were probably messed up pretty good? Whatever the reasons, it seems to be a perpetual pattern of unprepared parents raising kids to become unprepared parents. For my partner and me, this is all about breaking that pattern and committing to provide our little client with the best service possible. The working theory is that by disrupting the old ways and establishing a much higher standard, we can do our part to produce a new generation of vastly more peaceful and productive individuals.
In keeping with the rest of our lives, my partner and I are basing all of our policies and decisions on the Nonaggression Principle, which we apply consistently to all sentient beings. As such, we consider children to be just as deserving of basic property rights as everyone else. As a sentient creature, our daughter owns her own body and cannot rightfully be treated as property. This unfortunately means that we can't adopt many of the parenting norms we grew up with. We had to rethink everything from the ground up and make sure that logical consistency is maintained as we serve our new little client.
There’s an endless number of sub-topics to cover and they’re all interconnected so rather than trying to do everything at once, I’ll try to keep these entries down to a reasonable length. I’ll write about various things as they come up and you can contribute to the process as well. We’d like to extend an open invitation to everyone that’s interested in parenting to follow our blog here and feel free to chime-in however you like. Questions and criticisms are always welcome and we’ll do our best to keep the conversation flowing in a productive manner. One day, our young one will be able to look back at these entries and see how it all began. Thanks in advance for whatever role you play in writing her story.
- Gabe & Tanisha ( @piedpiper & @tmendieta )