[aaronem]

Your erstwhile instructor seems to be a professional troll, which is probably good work if you can get it, but I'm not joking. GP's comment casts the options available to him in the following duality: either

1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or

2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.

Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.

Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.

Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.

I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.

A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.

[taliesinb]

I enjoyed the rest of your comment, and I share some of these sentiments, but don't agree about Benatar being a troll. I'm confident he actually believes the positions he espouses.

Also, I want to know, what are the best modern examples of enclaves? Are they all bespoke? Some likeminded parents getting together? Something more formulaic that has actually scaled out without becoming a self-parody or a lifestyle brand?

[aaronem]

Oh, it's quite possible for a troll to believe what he says. The essence of trolling isn't bullshitting; it's knowing how to get a rise out of people.

To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.