“The trouble with prejudging an issue is that even if a solution might look something like that in effect, you and your child will never find that solution because he can see that you are not open to reason. Why should he bother putting any effort into thinking how to make everyone in the dispute happy, when his own effectively counts for nothing?”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
From the archives: Posted on 1st January, 1995
Eric wrote:
“Saying that young children do not find reason persuasive means more than saying that it is not easy to talk them into accepting the adult’s views.”
What then?
I had said
“If you are not open to criticism, as most parents are not, then if you ever were wrong, you’d never know.”
Eric replied:
“It is clearly true that a dispute is evidence that at least one of the parties is wrong. This is because the truth of a proposition is evaluated by seeing whether it corresponds to reality, and reality can match at most one of two conflicting views.”
This seems a twisted way of putting it. It is just a logical matter—all this evaluating it to see whether it corresponds to reality stuff is mixing up the logic with muddy theory.
Eric wrote:
“To say that you would side with the child in the majority of cases is silly, provided the dispute is indeed about facts. For if we are dealing with factual matters, the experience, mental capacity, and logical ability of an adult makes it very likely that it is the adult who is right.”
Only a priori. I refer you to my posting of Sat, 17 Dec 1994 01:27:58, Subject: An epistemological difference (was Re: Coercion) [retitled here: Young children, reason and creativity]
“Note that many, perhaps most, disputes between parents and children are not about facts, and I’ll have more to say about this later.”
I’d like to hear more about why you make this distinction. (I agree.) Problems are solved (i.e. knowledge grows) in matters of ethics as well as in the factual (in the sense of facts about physics, say) realm.
“The ability to understand a threat and the ability to understand an argument are different things.”
Well if this is the way you talk, quite possibly: 🙂
“If you do not do Y, there is a small (but not negligible) chance that at some time in (what is to your personal time scale the far distant) future you (or I) will suffer some complex abstract penalty (such as incurring expenses, having difficulty getting into college, or losing flexibility in the joints).”:
“Suppose a five-year-old has just received a new set of soccer cleats. He loves them, and wants to wear them all the time. The parent, knowing the ruinous effects of cleats on the floors, does not want them worn indoors. What is the root of this dispute?”
It is that the parent takes a materialist approach rather than a human one: it is that the parent values the floor more than the child.
“(It is also likely that even if the child understands and accepts all these things that from time to time he will just run right into the house completely unaware of what is on his feet. But this is not an example of disagreement, only of error.)”
If it is not a dispute but an error, it is not relevant to the discussion.
“Perhaps when Sarah said that she would side with the child in most disputes she was referring to these disputes about values.”
No, I am referring to all disputes in which the adult has already put his best case to the child, yet the child still disagrees. (I refer you to the post I mentioned some moments ago.)
A previous poster had written:
“My 18 month old has never liked getting his diaper changed (after all, it’s a transition from warm to cold), but it is a matter of his health and well-being that the diaper get changed.”
I had replied:
“You have a fixed theory about nappies, and about babies not liking having them changed. One view might be that they are perfectly right not to like the cold or whatever, and that it is up to you to remove the cause of their distress (change them in front of a warm air heater, perhaps?) and that then they will enjoy having their nappies changed. Or maybe they don’t want to wear nappies at all.”
Try as I might, I could not remember this nappy business being a problem, but I thought that might be explained by my selective memory rather than anything else. So I sought the counsel of a wise (Popperian of course) friend, who just happens to have a young baby at this very time. He reacted rather dramatically, describing statements of the form: “Babies don’t like X” as being “fascism”, “hogwash”, and “moral rot” and so on. He said that there is nothing predictable that his baby even dislikes, let alone hates, and that in accepting this idea that babies hate having their nappies changed, one is then abandoning all creative endeavours to find a way of making the experience pleasurable for the baby. He then started spouting creative solutions to possible problems, which most parents, just assuming that there is no solution (in the case of their particular child, who is always “more difficult to please” than other children) never try, never even think of.
Eric wrote:
“I’m confused by your use of ‘theory’ here. I’d use it to describe the parent’s view that it is unhealthy to remain in soiled diapers, though there is certainly ample evidence in favor of this theory. It isn’t a theory that babies don’t like to be changed, but an observation that applies to this particular child.”
I am saying that this “observation” is a theory of the parent, with which I disagree. (See above and see another note I may post simultaneously with this one on my use of the term “theory”.)
“To extend the cleats example, what are the possible solutions to the dispute?”
You will never find a solution to this dispute while you hang on to this entrenched theory that cleats must on no account come into contact with the floor (see your own words in the next paragraph for evidence of this fixed theory). This is an example of what I mean by prejudging the issue, and when one has that sort of attitude, even if a solution might look something like that in effect, you and your child will never find that solution because the child can see just as clearly as anyone else can that you are not open to reason, that you already “know” the answer. Why should the child feel inclined to put any effort into thinking how to make everyone in the dispute happy, when his own view effectively counts for nothing?
“Sarah will react to the tricky one of training the child from the earliest age that outdoor shoes are not worn in the house (with both the parent and child always removing shoes as they come in). This sort of indoctrination can be done while the child is in what Dave calls the pre-rational stage and judged from the ability to make the child do what we want, can be very effective.”
Sounds like coercion to me—or hideous manipulation—either way it is anti-rational and inimical to the growth of knowledge. What you are suggesting is to forget reason and rational problem-solving, and go for indoctrination. Just better hope that you know what you are doing—and that the ideas you indoctrinate are true. Godlike…
“Does the mental anguish at seeing the floors get scuffed count for anything?”
This mental anguish is just an entrenched (irrational, therefore) theory. If you and your child were a rational problem-solving entity, as opposed to your having an entrenched theory and not being open to criticism, there wouldn’t be any mental anguish, because you’d be likely to have solved the problem. You’d have found a solution you both prefer, not one that rides roughshod over your wishes or those of your child.
“Who gets to decide whether to replace the floors or to use that money for travel? Or to do both but put nothing away for retirement? Whose house is it, anyway?”
To all these questions, there would be answers the family would all prefer, if only the parents were not so lacking in creativity and rationality. (Oh, and of course, I include myself in that, as I tried to indicate in my silly posting on housework.)
I had said:
“If you start with this irrational attitude that you know it is the truth because it is medical or that the idea is justified by some source, then by that posture, you do blind yourself to any growth of knowledge that there might otherwise be. So once you are saying that a child must have his nappy changed because Health Requires It (silent addendum—regardless of how much he hates it) then you are saying that his suffering in this case is already dealt with, justified.”
Eric replied:
“This is something of a straw man. The scientific or medical proposition is that it is necessary for health reasons to change the diaper, not that it is necessary that the child be uncomfortable. The key idea of problem solving is to solve the right problem.”
Okay, cut out the bit in brackets and read it again. You have not answered my point.
I had said:
“On the other hand, if you take the view that so long as he is objecting, there is something wrong, and that if he is objecting a lot, then there is something badly wrong, then you will be looking for the answer…”
Eric replied:
“I’d like to think that we all do what we can to see that our children are comfortable, safe, happy, and free. When an infant cries, we do what we can to give the child what he wants.”
Creative use of the word “can” here, eh?? I think your meaning is nearer “choose” than “can”. All parents say this, don’t you think? But I am sure you’d be just as appalled as I am by some of these parental “efforts”.
“The interesting questions to me are how we are to trade off those values against each other…”
The problem with this conflict-of-interest analysis is that it assumes that reason is simply a matter of picking “the right answer” from those available. It singularly fails to account for new ideas, real solutions, discovered through human creativity. Rationality is not about trading off anything; it is about what to do in the face of conflicting theories; it is about creating new knowledge.
I had said:
=“Whether children are rational as babies or not, it seems grossly out of proportion to use issues such as nappies to set at risk their future rationality by this coercion you advocate. Rationality is disabled by certain things that happen to one—including by coercion.”
Eric replied:
“Are you saying that changing diapers in spite of tears sets the child’s future rationality at risk?”
Yes.
“When you consider what children have grown up with through the ages, facing pain they did not understand and could not control, this seems pretty trivial.”
By comparison, yes, but:
“This is not to say that we shouldn’t work to make our kids lives even better,”
So why mention the comparison then?
“but as you have pointed out, children come around pretty quickly when you start to treat them rationally.”
This is interesting. You are quite right to point out that there seems to be a contradiction here. On the one hand, I say coercing a child puts at risk his rationality; on the other, I have said that children seem to bounce back when treated rationally. The first of these two ideas is the epistemological one; the second is a comment on my own experience of coerced children. Yes, I have been surprised to find that children whose parents are coercive (and BTW, they are “noncoercive” by average standards—radical-edge Holtian home educators and the like) seem to respond positively to being treated rationally. But as Greg (I think) pointed out in an early posting on this list, children who have been severely messed around are too damaged to recover.
I want to make a couple of points about this proposed strategy of starting off conventionally coercive and then (when the child is deemed rational presumably) moving to a noncoercive system. First, relationships can’t just be switched on and off in the way this would require. It is a risky strategy to think you will change at some point in the future, because in the meantime, your relationship with your child will be developing along the conventional hierarchical adult-child/coercer-coerced/controller-controlled lines. Coercion (unless it is singularly unsuccessful) always causes psychological damage, and the way a child might get out of that would be by some creative act—by solving a wider problem that supersedes the entrenched theory (the damage, in other words). In suggesting that one might jump from coercion to non-coercion, you are making a big assumption about future creativity, but creativity—new knowledge—can’t be predicted, by its very nature, so this strategy does seem very risky to me.
Finally, whilst I may be particularly irrational and uncreative and not an example of how things might be for someone else, it has taken me years to feel comfortable with the actual practice of consensual problem-solving (it turned out to be much harder than I had expected before having children!), and it is still the case that I fail often (particularly when tired or stressed). The thought of postponing the effort a few years, by which time my children will at the very least find it difficult to trust that we are striving to find real solutions and that consent is now the criterion, is—well—rather you than me, Eric!
See also:
- The Original Sin argument
- The joy of consensual parenting
- Children’s welfare secondary to a dogmatic ideology?
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1995, ‘Disputes with children’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/disputes-with-children