Inducing autonomous/undirected behavior

I often worry about my future children falling victim to the curse of the Western modern life, wasting their life away sitting around watching TV, surfing social media and getting mindlessly engrossed in other soul sucking activities. I worry that they will get addicted to eating unhealthy process food, to sitting, to staying in their comfort zone, to passive entertainment. How do I get them to love learning, thinking, challenges, physical activities  and just growing in general?

When I was younger, I often fantasized about having some kind of tiger mom regime for my kids. Well, thank God I didn’t have kids at 16. Those regimes will create passive compliance and kill any personal inner drive and initiative. I was so foolish to want a system that would need my supervision 24/7. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have a autonomous system- I just set up some infrastructures or rule and then off they go on their own (mostly, not completely, like a mixed economy)? 

As I grew older, I have become more and more libertarian, not on political matter, but rather, on issues regarding my own mental physical health. That is, my body, with its impulses, reflexes and conditioning, is like a country. I constantly ponder how to manage and govern it. When I was younger, I was too much of a helicopter parent and a micromanager of my body. Now I learn when to step back (emphasis on when- not always. I’m anti-extremism.) and delegate tasks to the unconscious and the Lower brain. It definitely helps so much, not just with posture, dancing, exercising, but also with creativity, thinking, resilience and empathy (with others and myself). 

However, one can’t simply just leave a system to itself and expect everything to work out fine. Try just leaving any students, kids, economy, teams completely unsupervised. The art of lassaifairing is not as simple as it sounds. First one has to trigger the system- remember the law of inertia? One has to create a momentum first, otherwise nothing will run. There are many ways of triggering such motion, e.g. priming and conditioning are some basic examples. But today I want to talk about triggering via pleasure.

The reason I like exercises, stretching, Alexander techniques or dancing is not because I know that they are good for me. I don’t do them purely because of a sense of responsibility or discipline. Rather, I derive great joy and pleasure from them. For exercise, yoga, qigonhg and general stretching, a large part of the pleasure comes from eradication of tension, pain and sluggishness. So actually having those negative sensations was a good thing- it intensifies the pleasure I have when I exercise. Once I have experienced the consequences of not exercising and notices the change when I exercise, it naturally leads my body to crave exercising. It associates exercising with that positive sensation, thus triggering dopamine release at the anticipation of exercising even. This is analogous to the case of overeating- the method that both I and Milton Erickson use to reduce craving and addiction to bad food. It creates a positive feeling associated with not having the food. I have been adopting this method “too much pain to the point of letting go” in life since that crazy arguments we had at Conic in 2007 with my roommates. The release I felt then was magical. So whenever things go bad these days, I actually know that once enough pain accumulated, it will force me to let go, thus creating a wonderful release. So a way of freeing myself from attachments to certain ideas and people is to instead of forbidding it, letting myself be exposed so much that the pain become overwhelming. 

In terms of parenting, I should create situations in which the kids can actually feel the pleasure from being resilient, from physical activities, from exploring or from meeting challenges. I should set up activities in which kids can derive pleasure and see the pay off from grit. That internal reinforcement will condition them to build a habit that won’t need will power or my control to maintain. In a sense, I am trying to establish/calibrate a good utility function for them- one that assigns high value to the right things.