“How do you tell whether something is necessary or not? And, if it is necessary for the good of the child, then how does that grant anyone else the authority to force the child to do it?”
– Tim Starr
From the archives: Posted on 23rd November, 1994
[This old post is for historical interest only. See also this old reply.]
I agree with Sarah about the evils of coercion, but I’m afraid I’m in the camp she considers to have an unduly narrow definition of the term. In defense of my use of the word, I’ve consulted 3 dictionaries thus far, including Black’s Law Dictionary, and all agree that an essential part of “coercion” is physical force or the threat thereof. As an alternative, I suggest she substitute “influence” in place of “coercion” to refer to all the things she wants to include in the category.
Why would attempting to influence children to do what they don’t want to—without force or threat thereof—be necessarily bad? Why wouldn’t it depend upon the goodness or badness of what the children are being influenced to do?
Someone wrote:
“I believe in letting children do what they want, when they want—so long as it’s not dangerous.”
Everything’s dangerous. Life isn’t risk-free. So, clearly, what you must really mean is that you don’t believe in letting children do what they want if it’s too dangerous—right? How do you tell whether something’s too dangerous for you to allow children to do or not?
The argument that “I, as the parent, have to pay for their mistakes” is easily solved: don’t pay for their mistakes if you don’t want to. If you don’t want to pay their dental bills if they neglect their teeth, then make that clear to them ahead of time and stick to your position. Let them pay (or not) for their own dentistry.
If they don’t have any income, then they’ll have to take that into account in deciding whether or not they prefer not brushing their teeth and having to get a job to pay for possible dentistry in the future or not. If you tell them: “Do it, but if you don’t I’ll pay for your dental work anyways,” then they’ve got less incentive to prevent the dentistry in the first place.
I submit that “no coercion” is a bad ideal. If Sarah has been able to avoid health-related coercion, this says more about her particular children than the general case.
“I readily agree that coercion in general is bad, but I do believe that holding Absolutely No Coercion as an ideal to work towards is not just unrealistic, not just impossible, but potentially damaging to the parent (and their child) who believes that they should not be coercing yet finds that coercion is the only way to get their child to do something that is necessary. Obviously, there are very few such things, but they do exist.”
How do you tell whether something is necessary or not? And, if it is necessary for the good of the child, then how does that grant anyone else the authority to force the child to do it?
Someone else wrote:
“…if the decision affects only him, then he has the right to make whatever decision he wants. Fine. But, if that decision affects other people, then the rights of the other people come into the situation as well.”
Everything affects everyone else. There is nothing you can do that doesn’t affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. So, you must also mean something else. What? You might mean to say that people can’t do anything which causes others to lose something they value, or which causes something they have to lose its value—but all sorts of things which are generally considered permissible do this, too. If the Post Office makes one stamp that is valuable for its rarity which you then buy for that value as a collector, it loses at least some of that value if the Post Office prints up any more of them. Should that be impermissible?
I’d submit that it’s not enough for an action to affect others, or even for an action to cause others to lose some value of theirs for that action to be impermissible. I submit that the action would have to involve forcible aggression against the rights of others.
See also:
- ‘Influence’ versus ‘coercion’
- Avoid coercing other rational beings
- Why should we treat our children any differently from how we treat adults?
Tim Starr, 1994, ‘Coercion and influence’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/coercion-and-influence