When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer/Oh, superstitious thick identities ain't the way...

Most libertarians admit that children, like national defense, are an exception that proves the ideology, but libertarianism's inability to deal with children demands more of an explanation than simply that. After all, every grown man acts like a child sometimes, and children need to be raised with an eye to the fact that one day they will be adults with adult decisions to make. Will Wilkinson addresses the latter problem by condemning parents who "attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children":

Liberals who worry about religious home schooling are not wrong to worry. I defend home schooling not because parents have a moral right to indoctrinate their children. Indeed, parents have a moral obligation not to. They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds. Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children’s psychological freedom. They deserve condemnation and ostracism, not interference from the state. I defend their political right to potentially behave immorally—to harm their children’s capacity for the full exercise of their rightful freedom—in part because I appreciate how accommodating pluralism reduces social conflict. But, perhaps more importantly, because I think that full-fledged competitive diversity in education will help erode superstitious thick identities, that it will help fosters a sense of contingency in inherited identities that make it easier to slough them off, or at least easier to wear lightly.

James Poulos's response that "wearing your thick (i.e. unelective) identity lightly is a really humane and apt vision" sounds about right, but it doesn't answer practical questions like "Should I insist that my children adopt my own religion?", "Should I mitigate their religious and ethical instruction with lots of 'But that's just my opinion; you should decide for yourself?'", and "While it's obvious that I should make my children keep going to church if their reason for not wanting to go is that they'd rather spend Sunday mornings playing stickball, what if they decide that they just don't believe in God?"

If the goal is to raise children who are neither completely unmoored nor completely uncritical—and James is right that whether you can play around with your unelective identities is a good way to tell if you're striking the right balace between independence from and investment in—the answers to the above questions are "Yes," "No," and "Almost always." John Darnielle is actually talking about grandeur in heavy metal here, but his basic idea is universal:

You have two choices confronted with something like The Headless Children: you can make fun of it, which is what most people will do; it will be noted that I can't really resist the urge to do so, either. But the braver choice, and the one I end up making by time I've been listening for a few songs is to let it take you up; to give yourself over to it and see how it feels... To get to that light, you need to be willing to invoke big concepts — evil, death, history, all that jazz. But invoking is enough; go any further, and you're a boring blowhard like your present correspondent, trying to "say something" instead of just letting some images and names loose for the sake of an effect. But an effect — a vibe — a sheen — is a bigger thing than we think it is, because it's looser and consequently more useful. A big idea coherently stated and well-defended leaves no room for play; the same idea clumsily deployed and gleefully exploited lets the listener keep it for himself. It belongs to the listener, and its truth is non-different from the truth he gets from it. That's what W.A.S.P. were about, whether they thought so or not: making the big gesture and letting it go, and giving to the listeners the gift of their own imagination.

Wilkinson suggests that parents should only teach their children those things they can explain and prove. This is bound to make a child's universe very small, not just because it cuts him off from "superstitions" like faith and family honor, but because, as Darnielle says, defining concepts with exact precision limits a child's ability to breathe life into them and make them his own. He can play around with a tradition in a way that he can't with a "big idea coherently stated and well-defended." It's also true that a person can only play around with a tradition if he takes it seriously, which leaves us with a picture of parenting that looks like imposing the trappings of unelective identities on your children until they reach maturity and move out, at which point they can decide for themselves.

I don't buy the idea that imposing a tradition on a child will make him any less capable of making decisions for himself later on. Eve explains why "the idea that authority and individuality are at odds is just, you know, wrong" (and the idea that "there’s more agreement between Nietzsche’s concept of becoming who you are and MacIntyre’s than either would care to admit" is just, you know, right):

Submission to authority always involves a degree of awe; thus it approaches the sublime. And an encounter with the sublime will necessarily draw people out of our usual submission to culture and to whim; it will change us and, under certain circumstances (such as a philosophical debating society that demanded personal integrity and rigorous self-examination), it will make us more our own than we could ever have been without that awe.

There is still a danger that parents will treat child-rearing as an exercise in propaganda rather than education, but the migration to Wilkinson's end of the spectrum is a problem, too, and, I think, a much more common one.