“With family and close friends, it is possible to solve problems in ways everyone involved prefers. But I can’t tell you what the solution will be in any given situation, because it is not possible to predict new knowledge in advance of its creation.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
From the archives: The original post was posted on 1st January, 1995
Grace S. asked:
“This is one area that I have not seen addressed by Sarah Fitz-Claridge at all. What happens when there is a disagreement about a situation and it involves multiple people? Say, I need to run an errand to have groceries for dinner, and one of my kids does not want to go. Dad is out of town, and I don’t have a babysitter handy (nor might I have the extra $$ for a babysitter just so I can run errands). This is the time when it will work for me to go (Maybe we spent the afternoon doing some kid-based activity).”
I too am often surprised when, in such circumstances, with so many different people involved, that we ever find a solution we all prefer. But we do. Certainly it is harder when there are more individuals involved, because there tends to be less commonality of interest; but with family and close friends, it is possible, if your whole mode of existence is geared to consent as a criterion for decision-making. Obviously, I can’t tell you what the answer will be in any given situation, because it is not possible to predict new knowledge in advance of its creation. All I can say, is that at the time, given creativity and rationality and good will, a solution everyone likes will be found.1
“In that situation, Sarah seems to be suggesting that I should always honor the child’s desires over my own. This does not seem to me to be any more right than always honoring mine over the child.”
This suggests that you are seeing this in terms of conflicts of interest, in which the options are all at hand. Finding a real solution is not the same as picking one of the initial competing theories. Finding a solution everyone involved prefers is finding a new theory, a new idea, using human creativity. I completely agree that it is absolutely not the right thing to do (it will not lead to any growth of knowledge; it is not solving a problem) to just willy-nilly sacrifice your desires and give in to your children. That is almost as bad as doing the opposite.
But were you perhaps referring to the fact that I have said that in cases where my children and I fail to find a solution we all prefer (this is now thankfully much less common than it was, BTW2) I favour the idea of giving in to them rather than overriding their wishes?3 This is merely the lesser of two evils; I am not advocating self-sacrifice as a matter of course. The reason I advocate this default rather than the usual one (the adult gets his way) is that building consent-based relationships is not easy, and a major factor in whether it stands a chance or not is whether there is trust and good will. Since children are constantly being harassed and coerced by adults, and our whole culture is biased towards stomping on children’s wishes and ideas, it seems to me unlikely that a child would feel able to be committed to the creative rational endeavour required if he knew that in tough moments, his wishes would be overridden.
Another important reason for this default is that children have had fewer years to become irrational, to adopt and entrench theories, and if they have not been significantly coerced, they are likely to be much more rational and creative than any adult, so if we really can’t agree, the chances are, they are right—or more right than I, anyway. And, BTW, I cannot recall a single incident in which that turned out not to be the case. It still surprises me when they are proved right and I wrong. We adults do tend to suffer from delusions that we know best, don’t we? Ah well, maybe this year… 😉
Notes
1. There can be no guarantee. I just meant that the more you manage to create real solutions everyone involved prefers, the easier it feels to do so. I think that what is actually going on is that when we all feel confident that a solution will be found, we all have the wherewithal to create one, whereas when family members fear that it is impossible, there is a pessimistic why-bother-trying attitude. Obviously a solution will not be created unless creativity is being brought to bear on the problem.
2. This looks deluded to me now, decades later. Wishful thinking. It would be a mistake to think that I or anyone else have arrived at the dizzy heights of perfectly able to solve every problem, perfectly noncoercive. I am still to this day discovering and correcting hitherto unnoticed coercion!
3. Unfortunately, this and other such posts of mine created the misunderstanding that the right thing to do is in effect to default to self-sacrifice, especially given that I talked about self-sacrifice here in answer to Grace’s important question about what to do when there are multiple conflicting wishes. One of the mistakes people make when shifting to taking children seriously is to replace the pseudo-solution shortcut of coercing the children with the pseudo-solution shortcut of self-coercion. But contrary to the impression I seem to have given in the post above, coercion anywhere in the decision-making system is a problem, including within your own mind. Wherever it is, it is a spanner in the works of the growth of knowledge. It adversely affects the whole system (everyone involved, the evolving family decision-making system including the children’s minds), not just the self-sacrificing parent’s mind. And actually, self-sacrifice is not just self-coercion, it is directly coercing the child for whom you are self-sacrificing. (I need to put up my piece against self-sacrifice!)
See also:
- “How do you solve problems where there is a conflict of interest?”
- Do the kids rule?
- Merely desisting from coercion is not enough
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1995, ‘Solutions are created at the time’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/solutions-are-created-at-the-time/