“It’s so unsuspectingly natural, easy, and common to fall into traditional practices, that I think it takes great attention and practice to out the subtle coercion that infiltrates families insidiously.”
– Francine Lucidon
I was thrilled to see that people are still discovering the Taking Children Seriously website and to learn that another book has been written about the outstanding ideas there. Aaron Stupple has written The Sovereign Child with Logan Chipkin. Kudos on a brilliant title, always a good start!
The book is a valiant attempt to present and explain a complex philosophy about children being sovereign people whose autonomy should be accepted and supported, family relationships, avoiding coercion and finding consent, learning, rationality, fallibilism and so much more.
These are not simple ideas, especially when most of the world views children as “less than” and believes they need adults controlling them. I’ve always felt that changing from a conventional family to taking children seriously required a great deal of study, observation and practice. It’s so natural to have blind spots, like thinking you agree coercion is bad but you believe in exceptions around safety, or perceiving Taking Children Seriously as a set of how-to’s that can be implemented piecemeal, relaxing one rule at a time, or not seeing that your “personal boundaries” are points of coercion. It’s so unsuspectingly natural, easy, and common to fall into traditional practices, that I think it takes great attention and practice to out the subtle coercion that infiltrates families insidiously.
Even the most loving families typically have areas where they are willing, and indeed think it’s entirely necessary, to coerce their children. Coercion is having to enact one theory while another theory is still active in one’s mind. It’s a conflict that is not only very uncomfortable, but a real monkey wrench in one’s ability to think clearly and find good solutions to problems of interest. It impedes problem solving and the growth of knowledge.
The author does an excellent job of pointing out the poor thinking about children that has become embedded in our culture. Some of my favorites of these gems include the following:
“There is a sense among parents that kids should have limits set on things they want, because they want it and regardless of what that thing is. I call this sense that it’s wrong for a child to satisfy their wants The Greedy Child Fallacy. This idea… has evolved over centuries and manifests so frequently that we take it for granted.” (page 25)
“Rule enforcement damages the relationship between parent and child in several ways. … I’ve seen parents bemoan how deceptive even small children can be, while ignoring the fact that they’re the ones who gave the kid a reason to deceive in the first place.” (page 66)
“All understanding is built up inside of the individual’s mind. This process is critically dependent on feedback from the outside, but the building—the conjecturing—itself happens internally. Learning is a sovereign act.” (debunking the bucket theory of the mind) (pages 178-179)
The one false step I believe Stupple may have made is that he leads with a ton of anecdotes about his own family on issues of concern to mainstream parenting, ie, food, sleep, screen time, etc. Their presentation at the start gives the whole thing an oddly ordinary how-to parenting book slant. I suspect some readers will read it as “yes it’s possible because we make up clever games etc.” On a podcast about the book a participant said he “does” around 30/40% of what Stupple advises, as if Taking Children Seriously is an alternative set of parenting how-to’s you can estimate you’re doing X% of! That misses the mark. It’s a different life philosophy viewing children as sovereign human beings. It’s not a list of how-to’s.
There’s no menu from which to select a how-to as in the traditional parenting world. When there’s a disagreement in the family, the parents are not weighing up whether it’s “OK” or “not okay” to use coercion re “this topic.” Taking Children Seriously is not about how parents are to manage their children or how to handle clashes over toys or screens or which parental rules to relax or not relax to minimize chaos. We’re starting from a different place than that, a place of knowing we’re all equal and all equally fallible. It’s about trusting that knowledge can be created and how valuable discovering errors in thinking can be, and understanding that we will inevitably make mistakes. It’s a matter of examining the ideas and working with your family so everyone gets what they want and understanding why that’s important at any age. It’s as unique to each family as are each family’s problems to solve. It’s an approach, a different view of children, looking ahead and taking into account the wider context in which decisions are made. It’s a moment by moment practice of finding real, innovative solutions among each other (often a creative and joyful endeavor!). It’s not hands-off, there’s much theory sharing and creative exploring within the family.
Near the end of the book, Stupple has a chapter on philosopher Karl Popper and how his ideas on epistemology inform Taking Children Seriously (though Popper stuck to philosophy and not children’s autonomy). This chapter is very good but by this point it seems Stupple has already established this as a how-to parenting book. Maybe it’s simply my interpretation but what I found so fascinating and liberating about Taking Children Seriously was fundamentally about truth seeking with your family… and how we get (fallibly) closer to what’s most likely true… and how knowledge is grown that way. I think while the Popper section is very good he hasn’t emphasized fallibility enough or invalidated authority of the source etc. or shown how that’s relevant. Focusing on how to “get” children to get into their pajamas, or to leave a place when you think they should, entirely misses the point. Where’s the critique of current parenting ideas to show where they hold families back from truly respecting one another? This is the problem with presenting the book as a parenting how-to. The culture’s traditional assumptions and limited ideas remain only superficially critiqued.
A final word on the “sharenting” in this book. This seems to me an invitation for those new to these ideas to think “that would never work with my kid” or “oh well, I agree with the section on sleeping but must coerce my children around ice cream consumption.” While the specificity may have seemed necessary, it reinforces, once again, the appearance of a parenting how-to book. But what makes it even more problematic is that it’s violating the children’s privacy. Protecting our children’s privacy is a very low bar of respect, yet Stupple includes numerous anecdotes about his own children’s private lives. Readers will likely incorrectly infer that sharing about children is taking them seriously!
Before you read The Sovereign Child, I suggest you first read the decades of valuable writing about the concepts and their practical application on the Taking Children Seriously website (including one or two long ago articles by me!). Then start with Chapter 10 of this book (the excellent philosophy chapter), then read the book from the beginning. All the same, it’s exciting to see this new book about these remarkable ideas. More please!
See also:
- Read The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple!
- Taking Children Seriously: a new view of children
- Why epistemology matters for parents
Francine Lucidon, 2025, ‘Book review of The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple with Logan Chipkin’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/book-review-of-the-sovereign-child-by-aaron-stupple-with-logan-chipkin
For better or worse, I am not sure that too many people are impressed with theoretical consistency.
They have intuitions about what should happen, but will change their mind if someone comes up with examples showing that things that they initially worried about are not really something to be concerned about.
In that sense Dr. Stupple’s book is quite good.
People would like not to coerce their child: they want that. But they worry that if they don’t force them to eat good foods, take vaccines, etc., bad things will happen.
So showing how you don’t have to force kids to do things and yet children can still be safe and healthy, is a good thing.
Dr. Stupple shows how a parent can relatively straightforwardly be creative and thoughtful, and encourage their kid to do likewise, and they can together solve common problems that would otherwise endanger the child or other family members.
Yes, the book is still vaguely recommending paternalism, a bit. The parent is setting the agenda when he thinks something is very important. But it’s absolutely a step in the right direction.
No, it may not be “Taking Children Seriously”, exactly, but it’s a good book for parents, it’s a step in the right direction, and will help children.
Examples can be very helpful in illustrating an important point. There’s a concreteness to examples that often helps a reader understand an idea more deeply. However, Joe doesn’t need to share personal examples about his wife Becky, nor does Pat need to share personal examples of her son James. Does putting Becky or James on public display take them seriously? Even worse than violating their privacy, one run’s the risk of objectifying these real human beings in one’s own mind which can easily get in the way of really seeing/helping them in ways that are meaningful to them. Why not simply offer hypothetical situations when telling your story and avoid those problems altogether?
Fair enough.
But real world examples do help.
People relate to circumstances, and understand them in a way that is not often conveyed with hypothetical examples. To the extent that is true, it also makes sense that many people would not be too impressed with seeming or maybe even actual theoretical consistency.
People want to see what *actually* happens when ideas and theories are enacted, to help them determine what they should think.
I suspect there is good reason for that. It is a mistake, in my view to make a clean divide between philosophy and science as David Deutsch and Karl Popper seem to do. Our mind and brain are making measurements all the time, to help us determine (rule out) what we should not think. Thus actual measurement, and therefore actual rather than hypothetical examples, often are more useful (and tend to precipitate more knowledge growth) in people.
That’s probably why actual examples resonate so well in the real world, and why Dr. Stupple’s book is powerful in that way. His examples are really good and he shows how, yes quite imperfectly, he is keeping his children, safe, and (in general) not coercing them.
But having said all that doesn’t negate your moral argument, even if everything I said above is true. Ultimately, I think your moral argument is true.
Although maybe being a bit paternalistic myself, I am not sure his children really can consent at their age, though I can’t imagine that he did not attempt to obtain their whole-hearted agreement, given his argument in the book.
If he did obtain their seeming consent, would you still say he should not use those examples, and if not, would that not be a bit paternalistic, or anti-taking children seriously?
Please bear in mind that arguing that a child can’t possibly agree to give consent because the child is too young to understand, or because the parent couldn’t realistically know how to obtain full consent, but nonetheless knows the child shouldn’t give consent, is itself a paternalistic (anti-taking children seriously) stance.
So I must (logically) admit to being a bit paternalistic myself. I don’t think I know how to get a three year old to fully understand the implications of having their life circumstances shared on the Internet, even if they explicitly say they want it in the form depicted in Dr. Stupple’s book.
Thus, even if that child says, in a matter of words and acts that he would like his or her story shared in the father‘s book, I still wouldn’t have done it, because I think the child might regret it later. So I agree with your point about that.
Is that an example of well intention paternalism because it is thwarting the child’s seeming wish.
Yes.
As you quite correctly point out, we are all very fallible.
This book is the best parenting book we’ve read, like ever. We never knew there’s other books out there about Taking children serious. What are they???