I. Thou shalt not lie to your children, for any reason, ever. Remember this and hold it dear to your heart. You child will believe everything you say in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine as adults, and their trust in you, and therefore their sense of security about the world, will be based entirely on how honest and reliable a source of information you are about the world. So never, ever lie to them. Not because you are afraid the truth will upset them, not because you are trying to preserve their innocence, and certainly not because it’s simpler or you don’t know the answer and don’t want to admit it. Trust me, they will sense that you are not being honest with them, even if they are not old enough to consciously recognize it, and the moment they realize you have lied to them, their universe splits into two halves, and they will never entirely trust either of them again. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything or always be right, it just means that you never say to them that which you know is untrue.

II. Thou shalt not punish in anger. There has been much debate over the years about corporal punishment and the form of parental discipline, but I think that entirely misses the point. The form does not matter, what matters, what is most crucial, is whether or not the child feels you are punishing them for doing something wrong, or punishing them simply because you are angry and can make them suffer and they can’t do anything about it. They may not be able to articulate the difference, and they certainly are not going to thank you for punishing them, but deep down, your restraint or lack thereof will have a profound effect on how they see the world and whether they think the world is fair and safe for them, or whether they think the only safety is being bigger and more powerful than others… in being the punisher and not the punished. Needless to say, this is a very important distinction, especially if, like any good parent, you are concerned with what kind of a person you raise : a good person, or a clever brute. A time-out given in anger to punish the child for upsetting you, with no sense that an important rule (apart from “don’t make Mommy/Daddy mad or they will hurt you) has been broken, will do far, far more damage than a firm and painful spanking which is just and fair ever could.

III. Thou shalt not confuse a gratified child with a happy child. But discipline you must. The mistake overly permissive parents make when raising children is confusing what the child wants with what the child needs. It is an especially tragic mistake, because while the overly permissive parent wants to make their child happy, the sad truth is that an undisciplined child is not a happy child. They tend, in fact, to be very angry and bitter children, because their urge to discover the limits of their world has met no resistance, and so they continue to act out, seeking some kind of structure or rules that do not bend to their will and therefore can form the solid walls of their lives. And this irony is all the crueler because the child could not possible articulate why they are so unhappy. After all, they get everything they want, which is something other children would love to be able to say. So what’s the problem? That is why it is so vitally important for you to be the adult and take the responsibility for setting the rules and enforcing them fairly and reliably, and knowing that this means struggling with your child, enduring their anger and tears and recriminations and holding firm… for your child’s sake.

IV. Thou shalt not confuse doing for you child with doing with your child. It has become a truism, but only because it’s true : there is nothing more precious to your child than your time. Children inherently and instinctively want to be with their parents. Time spent with you, and not just with you but with you paying attention to them, validates them in a way absolutely nothing else can. There is no substitute for time with your kids. This is especially true in the years between toddler and Grade 1. The sense of your presence, that you are there for them when they need you and that you value them and what they have to say and what they do, will be a vitally important pillar of the self worth of the person they become. If you find yourself spending less time with your kids in order to earn something for your kids, ask yourself which they would prefer, if they were being honest.

V. Thou shalt not transfer responsibility for their lives to your children prematurely. Part of modern parenting philosophy states that it is good to consult your child about what they want and what they like because it gives them a sense of autonomy and power. This is absolutely true, and letting your child make some of their own choices is absolutely a good thing. But like all good things, taken to excess it can become a bad thing again. Give your child choice in small things which do not matter and will not have much of an impact on their lives. Let them pick their toys, their ice cream flavour, even their clothes when they are old enough. But you will not be doing them any favours by giving them larger decisions before they are old enough to understand and handle them. Taken too far, what you are doing is abandoning your parental responsibility to look out for your little ones when they are too small to look out for themselves, and that is one of the worst forms of child abandonment.

To be continued. Probably. Depends on if I can think of five more of these.

I consider myself to be an environmentalist, by my own definition.

My definition is simple : I firmly believe that humans beings, at our current level of technology, are powerful enough to completely destroy or ruin the ecological system(s) in which we live, making human life drastically more difficult to sustain and causing civilization as a whole to suffer in terms of quality of life, cultural development, and potentially even rendering the whole globe unsuitable for human life at all.

Believing, as I do, that this is a distinct possibility, then I have no choice but to therefore believe that reasonable measures of law restraining individuals and corporations from doing harm to the very Earth that sustains our lives are quite justified, and no measure of profits, jobs, corporate interest, or individual desire can possibly outweigh the right of the billions of human beings on Earth today, not to mention those yet unborn stretching off into the millennia, to live in a world as least as good as the one we inherited when we were lucky enough to be born.

In short, I am an environmentalist because I am a realist and a humanist. Being a pragmatic realist, I am incapable of accepting any convenient but unrealistic delusion that might let us, as a species, go on thinking that we can do whatever we like to our biosphere and somehow it will have no consequences. That is the thinking of irresponsible children who burn down the family home because they were bored and decided it would be fun to play with matches. It is not how a grownup thinks.

And as a humanist, I care deeply about the fate of humanity and the future our grandchildren will inherit. I want the human race to continue its evolution towards a saner, safer, more just, more enjoyable, more pleasant future and eventually reach outside this home planet to live on other worlds. We can’t do that if we foul our nest before we even have the wings to fly out of it.

So as a humanist environmentalism, I share many of the same goals as mainstream environmentalism, and I have been pleased to see the tenets of environmentalism accepted into mainstream political thinking within my lifetime. Very few people, in this day and age, would remove all environmental legislation and make it legal to dump toxic waste in playgrounds, for instance.

But sadly, the clock is ticking on many environmental issues, and progress towards a sustainable future erratic, half-hearted, and ponderously slow, and we have to start asking ourselves why this is.

Many of the problems are obvious, of course. Powerful vested interests in the corporate industrial word use their vastly superior power and access to legislators and the media to delay, confuse, distract, and prevent having to behave like actual citizens, with responsibilities towards other citizens, not just the privileges.

But I also think that mainstream environmentalism shares some of the blame. Despite the best of intentions and many worthy noble goals, environmentalism is plagued by some attitudes and influences which run counter to the goal of generating the necessary democratic political will to save humanity from its own shortsightedness and stupidity.

Some of them are :

Earth Mother/ Gaia Mysticism. This is a tricky problem to address, because the line between “useful metaphor for discussing the global ecosystem” and “whacked out hippy crazy talk” can be mighty fine sometimes. But in general, going on about Mother Earth, life force, and other Wicca-inspired mystical and poetic talk is simply not going to gain your ideas any traction in mainstream culture. Sure, your fellow greenies will love it, but they are a tiny fraction of the population, and if you truly believe in helping save humanity, you have to leave your cloistered world and talk to people who are not like you at all.

Open and spiteful misanthropy. It is unsurprising that part of the fallout of the realization of the damage we human beings blithely and ignorantly perpetrate upon the very systems which keep us alive is a bitterness and anger towards such a blinkered and shortsighted species. One only has to look at how many of the old-school environmentalists like Doctor David Suzuki have become intensely bitter, angry, and unpleasant people in order to see this effect in action. But misanthropy never sells and it never will. Nobody is going to be led into common cause with their fellow humans beings by a hate filled, bile spewing grump who shrieks and shrills and tells them they are scum for just being human beings. If you truly care about the cause, choke back that bile, put a smile on your face, and make friends with people.

Unrealistic methods. Environmentalists, and left-leaning advocates in general, tend to put a lot of stock in “raising awareness”, and similar concepts. The unspoken assumption is that the only thing between the average citizen and being a greenie just like them is a few pertinent pieces of information, and that somehow, all people who know the right things will come to the right conclusions. And the best way to get that information to the public at large is to do what liberals like to do anyhow, like go to concerts and rallies and protests, and talk to and hang out with and deal with only other greenies, and somehow that will make it all come true, right?

Unrealistic goals. Give up on trying to convince the world to radically change their lifestyle. Yes, it’s possible to change your life and become carbon neutral. All it costs is a lot of money, time, personal upheaval, effort, energy, and willingness to change your whole life. Sure, when you are a twentysomething college student, this seems reasonable and even fun. But most people have lives, problems, bills, kids, jobs, stress, and no room for big changes. Most people are juggling too many balls at once to try to handle changing them all at once. It’s simply not going to happen. You can encourage gradual, easy changes, but those are never going to solve the big problems. The solutions will come from science and government, not pamphlets and blue bins.

Anti-science and anti-techlogy bias. Regardless of whether you believe that science got us into this mess (it did), the truth is that science and technology remain the most effective way to solve any real-world problems, so it is vastly irresponsible to ignore solutions based on science and technology simply because you are angry with them and/or uncomfortable with them. Science and technology got us into this miss, true. But they are also the only things which can get us out again.

Anti-capitalism and anti-business bias. If your world saving plan starts “First, we overthrow capitalism… ” then brother, you are never going to change anything but your Facebook status and you are honestly doing your cause more harm than good. Like it or loathe it, consumer capitalism is the best system we have ever come up with and it is not going anywhere. All you are doing is associating environmentalism with communism in the public mind, and that is pure political death.

Lack of prioritization of goals and/or understanding of the public’s concerns. Most people, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, don’t care about disappearing species. Tell them the candy striped skunk moth is on the verge of extinction, and they will agree that sounds like a bad thing, but they really don’t see it as a vital issue. Same with disappearing rain forests, the plight of the piping plover, and (in North America and Europe especially) the fate of the world’s drinking water. All of these are problems, but in terms of the future of humanity, they are not as high a priority as, say, ending the global warming trend, and only serve to cement the public’s impression of environmentalism as solely belonging to the freaky hippie greenie types who get all strident about things which don’t matter to people. All environmental arguments need to be put in viserally humanist terms in order to get people to care. This isn’t about some bug they have never heard of. This is about whether their grandchildren will eat.

This is, of course, an incomplete list, and not meant to be exhaustive or fully descriptive. It’s just a place fr me to point out some of the problems that I think face environmentalism due to the lingering aftereffects of having been born (necessarily) out of far-left liberal sources who lack the ability to understand and connect with the middle class mainstream of society.

If we are serious about saving the world, we have to meet people in the middle, not just yell at them from the comfort of the sidelines.

One of the most profound natural gifts that a person can be blessed with is a high degree of native intelligence. Being born intelligent opens up a lot of doors to the individual which are inaccessible to the average person, and pays off in countless personal and transpersonal ways for the individual’s entire lifetime. The gift of intellect is so profound and deep that it puts other people in awe of the truly bright. In many ways, being born intelligent is like being born rich or beautiful, but with the added benefit of it being a fortune that is impossible to lose and unlike beauty, does not fade with age.

But like all profound gifts, intelligence does not come without its own problems and pitfalls, and these start at a very early age for the gifted individual.

The one I wish to talk about in this article is what I call the “Prodigy Trap”. The basic outline of the problem is that the experience of being a child prodigy has the potential problem of creating in the child an entirely unrealistic and maladaptive idea of how the world worlds and what life will be like for them, and if left unaddressed, this can cause problems for the individual their entire lives.

To understand how this happens, we need to take a look at the world from the gifted child’s point of view. At quite an early age, they discovered that things which were to them quite easy and natural gained them a highly disproportionate amount of praise and positive attention from adults. Things which other children struggled hard a long to master came to them easily, even effortlessly. Being so young, you have no idea why this is, what it means, or what it is like to be any different. You can’t imagine why other people find these things so hard when they are so easy for you. And it shows.

Already, this separates you from the other children. Even if you are otherwise well socialized and have a supportive and stable home environment, this places consider stress on your social relationships. You lack the common experience of life skills and academic struggle that binds your fellow children together like a common enemy. This alone makes you stand apart.

Potentially compounding this is a lack of common interests with other children your age. The age-appropriate activities they enjoy simply don’t appeal to you, because intellectually (but not emotionally) you are well in advance of your peers and so, understandably, what they enjoy and what you enjoy are not likely to overlap by very much. Imagine a six year old trying to play and enjoy games with three year olds. It is not a matter of snobbishness or elitism. They are just not into the same things.

A third aspect of this dilemma stems from the different approaches modern society takes towards academic education versus social education. When it comes to the traditional academic skills, we teach, we test, we grade, we monitor, we pay very close attention. A child who does poorly gets extra help. A child who does well gets extra praise. It is a well honed system that has stood the test of time.

But when it comes to socialization and social skills, we do practically nothing. We just put the kids in a group and assume it will all sort itself out somehow. This, when we know full well that when they grow up, social skills will be at least as useful to them as history or chemistry.

The average kids, having no particular pressures pushing them towards developing either side of the social versus academic skills equation, develop, by default, with a decent balance of both.

But the gifted kids live in a far more polarized world. The academic part is so easy for them that even assuming the social skills are no more difficult for them to acquire than for other kids, the difference will naturally lead to the gifted children favoring academic and intellectual development over social.

When you fold into that the problems posed by the previously mentioned barriers of lack of shared experience or interests with their peers, and the constant specter of the bullying their innocent nonconformity tends to attract, it is no wonder that so many gifted children grow up to be so, well…. different.

It is my hope that if we search beneath the dazzle of their intellects and take a good look at the problems gifted children face, we can develop educational strategies to compensate for this problems and hopefully nip them in the bud before they take root.