Featured today on takingchildrenseriously.com:
Horizontal vs vertical relationships

Taking Children Seriously: no one’s ideas are deemed to have authority; all the ideas are on the table

Noncoercive horizontal relationships (vs vertical ones in which the parents are in charge and moulding and managing the children from above)

The vertical relationships created by authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved parenting styles

What is Taking Children Seriously?

“Horizontal relationships with our children?! How are parents and children are equals?!”

Why is imposing “loving limits” regarded as good for your relationship with a child, but unacceptable (or even abuse!) with your adult partner? Most have a blind spot about the illegitimacy of paternalistic parent-child relationships

Children taken seriously consult others just like we all do, but they do not ask permission the way children in other families do. Why is that? Because they have not been taught that they are in subjection and not free to control their own lives.

‍How is the word ‘parenting’ not taking children seriously? It suggests a vertical relationship

Doling out or withholding approval to manipulate children from above is not taking them seriously as sovereign individuals whose lives are their own

Instead of ruling or being ruled, we stand side by side, no one managing from above, each of us free, all of us full people, having fun sharing our lives together

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