Paternalism is a lot less annoying when you get to be the paternalist – at home with the kids, as pater- or materfamilias.

Let’s begin by acknowledging two basic facts.

First up, most things that parents do to try to improve their kids’ long-term fortunes do not work.

Meeting a minimal basic standard of loving parenting and not dropping the kids on their heads too often – that matters. Otherwise, it’s hard to find environmental interventions that really work. It looks like the most important thing anyone can do for their kids is being careful in choosing the kids’ other parent.

So whatever dreams you might have had of paternalistically shaping your kids … they’re probably a waste of time and a recipe for mutual frustration.

But that brings us to our second basic fact. Paternalism, as usually practiced but never admitted, is not really about making the object of paternalism better off as that person sees it. It’s about making the paternalist better off.

We hear a lot more about soda taxes than we do about taxes on expensive sweet coffee drinks, and a lot more about taxes on fat in burgers than in finely marbled steaks. Paternalists are trying to shape the world to make it more enjoyable for them, and they do not enjoy seeing other people enjoying things that they do not like.

And so let’s go back to the home, and think about the paternalisms that can make your life better as parent.

When other parents complain of long car rides listening to the Wiggles, I’m puzzled why those kids even know that the Wiggles exist. Let the kids choose anything they want, among things that you and your partner enjoy! Our kids fight in the back seat about whether we’ll listen to Rush or whether we’ll listen to more Sherlock Holmes audiobooks. And you’ll get to enjoy wonderful surprises, like the kids recreating Tennyson’s great sea battle poem The Revenge, in the bath. 

We are living in an age of wonders. The world’s stock of cultural capital is available at prices so close to free as to make no odds. Is there any greater joy than sharing the things you love with your own children? Give the kids all the choices they want, among the things you love too. You’ll be happier, and that will make them happier too.