Parenting

Unrated • Daily Wire+

Jordan Peterson has likened trans surgeries to “lobotomies and eugenics,” once also medically approved practices. His potent criticism of progressive gender-identity ideologies reaches millions of social media followers in part because he’s one of liberal academia’s own. Or was. In 2021, legal and professional blowback led to Peterson resigning his psychology professorship at the University of Toronto.

Peterson is also a married father of two. In the new series Parenting, Peterson says he has “distilled” decades of his academic and clinical work into “the lessons every striving mother or father needs to learn.” Episodes 1–3 were available at the time of this writing, and so far his advice largely aligns with Biblical principles.

Grainy home videos, movie clips, and actor portrayals convey traditional family values. (Cautions include brief nudity in a childbirth scene and a few mild expletives.) Peterson is a caring counselor, but his naturalistic worldview—he’s not a professing Christian—hits some snags.

Parenting frames each episode around an interview with a married couple. Episode 1 covers toddler misbehavior. In Episode 2, Peterson talks with the parents of a tantrum-­throwing 13-year-old boy. Viewers might want to jot down Peterson’s keen insights. Two examples: A lack of discipline produces a child who doesn’t get along with other people. Spoiled children “stay overgrown children.”

But Peterson can’t domesticate absolutes. He says, “You want your child to be maximally socially desirable” then adds “parenting should never be about what other people think of you.” Huh? How can a child reared on social acceptability not become an adult concerned with what is socially acceptable? Moreover, why bother with behavior modification of the human animal if death erases existence? Maybe one day Peterson will see the big picture: Children’s hearts need shepherding toward the God who created the family unit.