DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM

Rule 5 is about parenting — specifically, not letting your children do things that make you dislike them. This was a challenge for me, given that I don’t have any children to dislike.

Instead, I fretted about the children I might have in the future, and how I’ll probably ruin them. So much for not judging myself too harshly.

The problem, according to Peterson, is that Parents These Days are apt to spoil their children, to let them become little tyrants without discipline or boundaries. “They are doughy and unfocused and vague,” he writes. “They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be.”

There seem to be so many ways of damaging children irreparably, I thought. Either parents are too involved with their children, or they’re not involved enough.

“Talk about setting parents up for failure,” said Kathleen Gerson, an American sociologist and an expert on gender roles and changing family life.

I’d called Gerson because I genuinely worry about this. How to have kids who are well-adjusted and disciplined and neither smothered nor neglected? Peterson seemed more interested in criticism than in providing a roadmap for success, other than to tell parents they should “come in pairs” and should discipline their children.

“This notion of perfect parenting and how we’re all falling short is part of a culture of ‘You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t’,” Gerson told me.

Gerson believes we’re “living in a 21st-century economy that still relies on 20thcentury institutions.” Both parents generally work, not necessarily in stable jobs, while expectations around parenting have not kept pace. “We have this very (privatized) family-centric and, unfortunately, still womancentric, notion about what caregiving should be and who should be doing it.”

I told her I worry about finding what seems like an impossible balance if I become a parent. “You sound like the people I’ve interviewed,” she said. Gerson published a book in 2011 called The Unfinished Revolution, and she found that most young couples want to share work and caregiving equally. “Despite this ideal,” she said, “very few of them were optimistic about their ability to achieve it.”

Gerson said men and women tend to have very different back-up plans if an equal division of labour proves to be impossible. Women are more likely to say the most important thing is for them to earn a decent living and be self-reliant, while the fallback for men is more traditional — the father working and the mother at home.

Still, she told me, I’d figure it out. After all, humans have been figuring it out forever. “We’ve managed to keep the human species going in difficult circumstances for millennia and we will keep doing so.”