Rules, authority, and compliance in parenting

I have a lot of resonance with many takes on different sides of the carrot thing and I think it's really interesting and I'm glad to see people talking about it in public our family has a philosophy of "few rules, but consistently enforced". not sure when that'll bump into this:

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕 @jeremykauffman · Jan 12, 2026

When one of my children was 2, he dropped a carrot on the floor and refused to pick it up. He was told he would not be allowed to do anything fun or have any privileges until he picked up the carrot. He refused for hours. He cried and screamed. He even napped, woke up, and

quoting @CharlotteFang77: Scott Alexander revealed yesterday he has no control over his toddlers. SF’s most influential grey tribe rationalist wordcel, one of our generation’s few categorical “public intellectuals”, and a psychiatrist (lol), outsmarted by his own children—from 6 months every child is http

Jan 15, 2026

People project a lot of things onto that story that aren't directly included, like the idea that the parent was being cruel or cold while insisting on compliance with this apparent "you pick up after yourself" rule. But it seems to me it's *possible* to do this kindly. Hard tho!

I'm unclear whether this parent *also* has a "children comply with parental commands" rule. In general, rules need scope. What's the scope for that one? Til they're 18? Presumably it isn't a hard cliff. How explicit does the command have to be? How clarified is this?

there's also like... you need to be calibrated on where the kid is at, as to whether they can learn a given lesson is there an age before which you ever ask a kid to do something? presumably the 1yo is free to throw things on the ground? when does it change?

the question of how to sanely engage with these questions in a way that developmentally meets kids where they're at and invites them a bit further is one of the things I've been most excited about with parenting, and it's just starting for me (my kid is 17mo)

I think that in general kids do want to know how to be a good part-of-a-whole, and they ALSO want to see what they can get away with. solving the free rider problem is kind of the whole puzzle to superorganisms, culture, etc. I'm glad to see people trying a wide range of tacks

life wants to minimize free energy. if you, a free-energy-minimizer, can get away with letting someone else minimize your free energy for free, then you want to do this... except... that'll cause an increase in free energy for the thing you grow in. uh-oh.

Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels · Feb 18, 2022

EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING LIVES & GROWS INSIDE SOMETHING ELSE

as I read all of this, I also legit wonder the extent to which certain approaches might be more/less/not-at-all viable for different types of people. people have really different temperaments! some of this runs in families (some doesn't!)

Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex · Jan 12, 2026

@jeremykauffman I think you're imagining me as not being capable of this. It's actually the opposite - I have so much of this instinct that I feel contempt for your son for giving in. Obviously once something has been turned into a direct conflict of wills, the only honorable solution is to hold

QTing more takes that I like: discerning between legitimate and illegitimate authority is not necessarily easy, which means that even if some submission is good you can easily train an antipattern here scott also re this: x.com/slatestarcodex…

Nathaniel Lugh @NathanielLugh · Jan 12, 2026

@slatestarcodex @jeremykauffman One of the most important human capacities for the protection of sovereignty and agency is to detect legitimate/ illegitimate rule and to protect against illegitimate rule at all costs. Training a human to submit to illegitimate or uncertain rule is unwise in the long term for

physical escalation as the place where things bottom out, but not where they start, makes sense to me. we're weirdly divorced for this in the 2000s, to our detriment. not remotely clear how to apply that though.

Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowski · Jan 12, 2026

@slatestarcodex @TrumpWasHere Behavior of others in your imagination has little to do with the actual efficacy / consequence of a strategy. Physical feedback has its place: predictably, and at the end of an equally predictable and consistent chain of non-physical escalation. This parallels the dynamics of

this seems probably right. I also like @visakanv's reply: "it’s the wider ecology of everything that matters. we look for what others really feel/mean"

Matt Bateman @mbateman · Jan 12, 2026

A perhaps flippant take: Issues of limit setting—enforcement, punishment, authoritarian/permissive modes—matter less than positive issues: cognitive/moral/aesthetic enrichment, real affordances, valorization of independence, love. These are semi-orthogonal. Consider…

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

quoting @slatestarcodex: More seriously, my wife and I already set plenty of boundaries for our kids, like "no hitting", and discipline them when they disobey. In my essay , I talked about things like my kids constantly changing their minds about what songs they want to hear, or inventing tactics to