Every parent is, though many will deny it. The repercussions of doing so without intention and without admitting it are already severe. Every parent is likely to traumatize their child in some way, including the trauma of protecting them from trauma to the point that they don't learn to heal through it. I'm ok with intentionally experimenting and normalizing healing within our family.
Also, it's already paying off tremendously. When repercussions can be severe, so can rewards. We have a 2-year old who is incredibly emotionally aware, has a huge vocabulary, enjoys eating anything, explores freely, is learning to play multiple instruments, draws with a pencil grip in both hands, can sit to actively listen to music for 20+ minutes at a time, and learns lyrics incredibly fast.
If you have specific fears, I'm interested in hearing them because that gives us an opportunity to prepare.
That's a good observation! I have no specific fears at all, since I was wondering what sort of "experimentation" it involved.
I wonder if the drawback will be that he/she will be incredibly bored once released to the "normal" world and the slower development pace of contemporaries and may feel out of place and frustrated. It's the curse of the gifted.
Here's a list of some of what we're doing. We haven't been very diligent about keeping track of it all, so listing it here is kind of an exercise for me to start working on that.
We're working hard to keep from using judgmental/subjective words like good/bad, like/dislike, etc. We're also starting to incorporate Nonviolent Communication patterns and concepts. We use they/them pronouns instead of gendering them. If they want to do something, we strive to help them do it as long as they wont be maimed or killed. We ask them for consent before changing their diaper, touching them, picking them up, taking things from them, and performing medical/dental procedures on them. We've named them Uni Verse All. They wear whatever clothes they choose, no matter what gender they may seem created for. I'm genderfluid and do the same. I also shower once every 1-2 weeks, stopped using shampoo about a year ago and am about to stop using soap on my body, too. We aren't teaching them about property currently and may not ever, choosing to instead describe things as "living with" someone. I'm developing a spirituality with a component I call "radical ignorance," which is essentially a sort of Zen "beginner's mind." It recognizes that ignorance isn't an excuse, but a spiritual reason for doing things, which runs counter to the US's legal reasoning of "ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law." My partner and I are intentionally staying out of the workforce, instead choosing to serve people in our community alongside Uni, which allows both of us to be available so they can have their choice between us. Anytime one of us is choosing to not let them do something without there being a safety issue, the other ideally defaults to helping Uni do what they want. When they get hurt, we bring their attention to the pain and teach them to mindfully experience it while breathing through it.
As for the drawbacks, we're currently designing a community anti-adultist homeschool model that focuses on collaboratively learning our needs over what schools typically teach and allowing the students (of age 0-200+) to choose the contexts for learning. So they'll probably have an interesting intergenerational peer group to blow past the world with.
Viewing your child as an optimisation problem centred around your subjective view of good and bad could be all the trauma you need to inflict. Of course that's anything but a new pattern, parenting is training and training is optimising. However wielding extensive tracking & data to make your imprinting even more precise & targeted would certainly - for me - eliminate the joy of seeing someone grow into someone I admire, possibly in ways I never expected.
What you're describing is definitely not something we want to or are choosing to do.
The primary purpose of the recordings isn't for the sake of analysis, but for documentation. I think the only time we'd probably "go to the tapes" is for reliving what we call "sacred moments" (like last night when they began playing the pump organ in ways similar to me without me doing more than playing and explaining a little bit of the mechanics of the machine) or for when there's a dispute about things. My partner has an automated process of constructing exaggerated narratives and is still learning to notice when it's happening. The videos are more about capturing when we're carrying our own traumas into the relationship and visiting them upon Uni.
If this turns into something where I'm poring over videos, I'm relapsing in my information addiction hard.
Parenting is, ideally, training a new person to know/identify what their needs are and how to meet their needs, including safety, autonomy, exploration, acceptance, and interdependence. Our goal is to only stop them from doing something when they might die or be maimed. And then to get out of the way. Parenting as it's classically been done in many cultures around the world is incredibly adultist, with all kinds of assumptions about what children can and can't do. Even neuroscience and the medical field uses "childhood development" as a reason for ignoring childrens' pains, consent, and autonomy. We don't play that way. Uni is "behind" on their vaccinations due to them not yet saying yes to the ones we're at. We tried respecting their consent for the first few, but the nurses weren't onboard. Even when we had someone setup to receive a flu shot first, the nurse administered it when Uni wasn't looking, keeping them from actually seeing what was happening.
No, if anyone will be analyzing the videos, it won't be us. It'll be other people and algorithms. Any suggestions coming from the analysis will be converted into experiments to conduct with Uni's full informed consent.
Does that make things clearer about what we're trying to do here?
Also, it's already paying off tremendously. When repercussions can be severe, so can rewards. We have a 2-year old who is incredibly emotionally aware, has a huge vocabulary, enjoys eating anything, explores freely, is learning to play multiple instruments, draws with a pencil grip in both hands, can sit to actively listen to music for 20+ minutes at a time, and learns lyrics incredibly fast.
If you have specific fears, I'm interested in hearing them because that gives us an opportunity to prepare.