Nicomachean Ethics & Bedtime Tantrums

The Practical Polymath #103

Nicomachean Ethics & Bedtime Tantrums

Sunday, 7pm. My six-year-old is ignoring my pleas to brush his teeth. He’s too busy emptying a box of wooden tracks onto the floor — the same box I just spent ten minutes putting away. My nerves snap. “Fine, if you won’t listen, then no bedtime story tonight!”

Ironically, I’ve just finished reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The book argues a good life requires embracing virtues like patience. But here I am, losing my temper. So I wonder — does 2,000-year-old philosophy have anything useful to say about bedtime antics?

Me: “Okay, Aristotle, help me out here — am I a bad parent for getting angry?”

Aristotle: “Getting worked up isn’t the problem. Not everything can be solved with a deep breath. The challenge is getting angry for the right reasons, at the right person, in the right way.”

Me: “Well, I got angry because my son wasn’t listening... but it was probably the fatigue talking too. And taking away his bedtime story was maybe pushing it a little.”

Aristotle: “See, when you break it down, you start to realize where you might have hit the mark and where you might have missed. That’s the kind of internal check you want to run before you act. That’s where practice comes in: virtue is like music or sport — the more you practice, the better you get.”

Me: “Wait a minute — so you’re saying there’s no such thing as character flaws, only poorly trained virtues? When one piece of chocolate escalates into a full bar, I can’t blame my sweet tooth — it’s my temperance that needs more practice?”

Aristotle: “That is the inconvenient truth. Every action is an opportunity to practice virtues like courage, temperance, truthfulness — or in your case, gentleness.”

Me: “Well, my patience wasn’t the only thing on trial. My son accused me of being unfair because he’d been nice to his sister all day. How do I go about explaining that one good behavior doesn’t cancel out a bad one?”

Aristotle: “He’s treating justice like a ledger, where good deeds offset bad. But justice doesn’t work that way. Setting things right means addressing each act on its own. But you did say taking away the bedtime story might have been too much. Maybe he has a point on that front.”

Me: “I see a bit of a paradox though: you get better with practice, but no two situations are the same, so you can’t just rely on experience — there’s got to be something else.”

Aristotle: “Indeed, that something else is the wisdom to know where to aim. Practice is the muscle memory of virtue, but just like a musician needs to know the scales, you need the judgment to hit the right note in each moment.”

Me: “Onto the next bedtime battle, then.”

Lateral Thought

“But the virtues we do acquire by first exercising them, just as happens in the arts. Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.”

Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics)