An Assortment of Ideas on How Machiavelli Relates to My Childhood

I think of my parents.  

Both my mother and father are trained in attachment therapies, they both worked as emergency foster parents, and the nature of my dad’s job causes him to specialize in teaching parents how to parent kids with attachment disorders and children on the autism spectrum. In August of 2000, two months after I was born, my siblings were officially adopted after a traumatic first couple years of life. I had a wonderful childhood. To some, my childhood could be described as an eighteen-year therapy session. In order to give my siblings and I the love and care we needed, my parents had to be deliberate in toe-ing the line between structure and rules and tender love.  

Some examples of my parent’s parenting strategies, how Machiavelli would approve, and why it isn’t so bad. 

Parenting Strategy	Machiavellian Principle	Comments and Explanation
If you were fighting with your brother or sister, you were forced to do chores while your ankles were tied together like a three-legged race.	Page 65: Machiavelli urges against encouraging internal conflict	My parents, like Machiavelli, realized that internal conflict (between their children) was not a good thing. The strategy they employed caused us to realize there are consequences for fighting, and it forced us to work in solidarity, often united in our annoyance with our parents.
We have an entire shelf worth of books on children’s psychology and parenting philosophies. My parents were deliberate in their parenting style. They parented while consciously gleaming lessons from their own parent’s parenting styles, and they kept well read on different philosophies and techniques put out by experts in the fields of child development.	Page 47: Machiavelli encourages leaders to look to past leaders for inspiration and guidelines.	My parents, being as brilliant and humble as they are, realize that there is a wealth of personal experience and experts to learn from as they designed their own parenting strategies.
Positive reinforcement of getting a toilet shaped puzzle or optical illusion books if you cleaned the bathroom correctly doesn’t work on everyone. Neither does the reverse-psychology-strategy of making a big deal about how happy you are that your kid isn’t listening to you in order to actually get your kid to do what they were told. It worked for us.	Pages 64 and 75: Machiavelli remarks on the importance of adjusting to one’s circumstances and the times.	My parents were well aware of the need to adjust techniques to a particular situation and child. If my siblings didn’t come from the past they did, would I have experienced the same upbringing? Who knows. But I do know it was exactly what we needed.   As we got older and matured, my parents rules laxed and changed. As the oldest, my sister will comment that it’s just me reaping the rewards to her sort of war of attrition, but Machiavelli and I will call it ‘adjusting to the times’. 😊
We never got allowances for doing chores like our friends did. We didn’t ever get the newest technology as it came out, but my siblings got treats for good grades, we got take out and a movie every Friday, and we got to do fun things if we were behaving.	Page 49: Machiavelli discusses the pro and cons of generosity. In my interpretation, he claims that generosity is important, but you should be wise in how often and through what means you do it.	My dad is a big believer in positive reinforcement, not negative. In order for it to be effective, my parents couldn’t generously give in to our constant stream of wants. In contrary, they had to be strategic with their generosity.
We never got away with anything. I mean anything. One example: We have an important rule in my family that you are to eat whatever is put in front of you. My brother and I were once served yogurt for lunch which neither of us were huge fans of. We then conspired to spill it on the ground and say that we dropped it in the hopes of being served something else. My dad didn’t fall for it. We were told to clean up the yogurt, and then found ourselves sitting in front of yet another cup.	Page 38: Machiavelli theorizes that while good laws are great, you need a good army to make them effective.	Due to the effects of trauma, ‘oppositional defiant disorder’, and, honestly, just good parenting, my parents recognized the need for enforced rules and structure to foster a sense of stability and safety. Just rules (or laws) did no good if they were not enforced, and trust me, all rules were enforced.
We are terrified of lying to my mother to this day. She always knows. We are pretty sure she is superhuman. We are terrified, because we know, when she inevitably calls us out on it, there will be consequences.   On the flip side, every morning of our younger years, my siblings and I looked forward to hopping into my parents bed and snuggling for a few minutes before being told to go get ready for the day.	Chapter 17 and 18: Machiavelli advices that an effective ruler should be both feared and loved but not hated.	My parents prove the fact that you can be loved and feared, and that the balance of love and fear is healthy. My dad would tell me when I got older, that whenever he had to discipline us, he consciously tried to do so with ‘warm eyes’, something he has always believed kids pick up on.  Their goal was to give us the structure we needed, not to never allow my siblings and I to doubt their love for us.
My parents don’t lie to us, they don’t admonish us for our feelings, they always show up when we need them, and have proved to be trust worthy supports.	Page 55: Machiavelli lists the qualities he believes leaders should appear to have: compassionate, trustworthy sympathetic, honest, religious, and reliable.	The most poignant difference between Machiavelli’s guidelines and my parent’s parenting, is that my parents genuinely do care, they are compassionate, trustworthy sympathetic, honest, religious, and reliable. For them, unlike for Machiavelli, it is absolutely vital that they are genuine in those characteristics, for that is what guided their decisions.

  My parents certainly didn’t adhere to every Machiavellian principle, but the thought that they naturally followed a good chunk of them and seeing how well it worked out, makes me think that maybe Machiavelli isn’t so terrible after all.