Raising Little Fido

by digby

I enjoy the Dog Whisperer as much as anyone. He has a special way with man’s best friend. But according to this article, some parents are so into his techniques that they think they should raise their children like he raises dogs. And they think it’s such a nifty idea that they actually talked to the New York Times about it.

Cesar Millan doesn’t talk about this on his shows, but he did explain how this whole thing might work when the reporter questioned him about it:

Mr. Millan says parents question him all the time. “I’m going to give them my point of view — I’m a father myself,” he said.

As a native of Mexico, he said, he adheres to a more traditional, hierarchical child-rearing philosophy, which he considers effective in both the pack and the family. There, “for thousands of years, the elder has always been the pack leader, it’s never the child,” Mr. Millan said. “In America, kids have too many options when they only need one: ‘Just do it, because.’ ”

If that doesn’t work you can rub their noses in it.

Seriously, it seems like every generation rediscovers the patriarchal model and calls it progress because it turns out that authoritarian domination makes for less rambunctious little humans. Go figure. And if humans were as simple as dogs they might even willingly succumb to this order. Unfortunately, human beings evolved into creatures that have free will and a highly complicated psychological and intellectual framework, so these sorts of arrangements end up affecting them in less predictable ways than it does dogs.

Discipline is part of parenting, of course, but designed for the human psyche please, not for Fido. Even children who behave like animals aren’t dogs.

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