Misery-free treatment of a child’s lice infestation
Coercion is absolutely NOT necessary to treat a lice infestation. It was not even true 30 years ago, in the days of the nasty nit comb and stinky skin-peeling shampoo.
bring creativity to bear
“How do you intervene noncoercively when one child is attacking another?”
Meet the aggressor where she is, without resistance, as opposed to disapproving from above; see it from her PoV; what was this about?; what led up to this? How can we proceed positively from here?
“How do you solve problems where there is a conflict of interest?”
We look at our respective reasons for wanting what we initially want, and we create a way to proceed that we all prefer—a new idea that did not exist at the outset.
What if my child doesn’t want to leave the park?
How things can go better if we adopt a Taking Children Seriously approach, and what that means in practice.
Taking toys seriously (yes, really)
Taking children seriously involves not just solving obvious problems when they arise, but thinking about and experimenting with different ideas about how to make life even more delightful.
Be a bystander who makes a difference
If you are a bystander when a parent is coercing a child, you have to let the child know that you disagree with the coercion, otherwise you become part of an adult conspiracy against the child. Maybe you can make a difference for them too.
Both coercion and “doing nothing” are mistakes
Children have to do what they themselves think is right, with no pressure whatsoever—that’s what non-coercion amounts to—but they also have a right to be told morality as best we see it.