Listen, by Patty Wipfler: the missing connection
On Patty Wipfler’s book, Listen: Five simple tools to meet your everyday parenting challenges, and on taking connection seriously
children are people
Taking Children Seriously is a new view of children, not merely a new ‘do’
It is understandable that parents see Taking Children Seriously as being about how to be kinder to the inmates, but actually it is more like correcting the idea that they are criminals.
Is your baby trying to tell you something?
Young babies’ language decoded! Your babies can get their needs met.
Speaking as a former no-nonsense parent…
Real life with children causes many parents to rethink their original plan to be no-nonsense parents. In some cases, that means shifting to taking their children seriously.
Dynamic tradition and children
Determining which guidance to explore and which to reject is a very subtle skill, and it cannot be learned in an environment where guidance is compulsory.
Welcome to Taking Children Seriously
Peter Strömberg warmly welcomes parents new to Taking Children Seriously.
“How do you raise a child to believe in freedom?”
This question is in effect asking “How do I mould and shape my child into a person who believes that individuals should be free from unwanted moulding and shaping by others?”
“What is the psychological impact of not taking children seriously?”
Whatever might happen in the future, it will still not have been right to behave immorally today.
“When a solution is not found, is it always the parents who must bear the brunt of the sacrifice?”
If you think there is a brunt to be borne that is intolerable, what makes you think that it is OK to have a defenceless child bear the brunt of it?!
“In what ways is Taking Children Seriously different from simply taking everybody seriously?”
That parents have obligations to their children that their children do not have to them is not because children are lesser humans. It is because we parents have freely chosen to place our children in the positions they are in, living with us instead of having been adopted at birth, say. It is we parents who have the obligations to our children, not our children who have obligations to us.
“What kind of children is Taking Children Seriously not a good idea for?”
Everyone should be taken seriously irrespective of age and other such attributes. The question assumes that Taking Children Seriously is a parenting method but actually it is a new view of children—children are full people.
“What do you do about vaccinating your children?”
Children should not only not have any medical procedures performed on them without consent, they should be in control throughout. That applies to vaccinations and everything else.
“Equal relationships with our children?! How are parents and children are equals?!”
Children are no less creative and rational than adults, whether or not they yet have the explicit language in which to express themselves.
“How do you determine what food to give your children?”
How do you yourself determine what to eat? It is the same with children. What we eat is determined by a number of things, including what we feel like eating, which may be affected by our ideas about health and other things.
“Surely children need to learn to deal with restrictions to prepare them for life in society?”
How do you distinguish between restrictions on our behaviour that are good for us and those that aren’t? The restrictions on our behaviour that are good for us are ones we agree with. And when we agree with them, they are not restrictions on our behaviour anyway.
“I’m a vegetarian. What if my child wants to eat meat?”
Our children are not us. They may well have different ideas from ours. Our ideas might be mistaken. We are fallible. That our ideas feel right does not justify coercing our children. Our children are sovereign beings who do not belong to us but to themselves.
“Is coercion always wrong?”
It is not that coercion is always wrong. Self-defence and the defence of others is right. Otherwise evil could win. But when we do intervene to stop one child attacking another, that is a damage limitation exercise, to try to preserve any knowledge creating going on.
“Is the purpose of taking children seriously to avoid the harm coercion would do?”
Even if childhood coercion has virtually no effect, it would not change what it is right or wrong to do to people. And it is not right to do things to people that will impair the growth of knowledge.
“If I am not allowed to coerce my child, surely I am being coerced myself?”
Assuming you are happily married, would you ever be thinking: “If I am not allowed to coerce my wife, surely I am being coerced myself?”?! No! Never! Not even in your worst moment ever! You take your wife seriously. You are not trying to train or change or improve your wife. You are not trying to win at her expense. You want both of you to win! You love her just as she is. You two solve problems together rather than coercing each other.
“Which parenting style is Taking Children Seriously? Authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or uninvolved?”
Taking Children Seriously is not permissive, uninvolved, authoritarian or authoritative. Those approaches coerce children instead of taking them seriously as full people whose lives are their own.
“Children fending for themselves like adults?!”
Children very much need our love and protection, our care and attention, fun and play, support and vast amounts of engagement with their ideas and interests. They are not born able to survive and thrive without us. Only in the case of children do people think that needing support, protection, assistance, information and other things implies not having the same freedom, rights, respect and control over their lives as others.
“What is Taking Children Seriously?”
Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: like other groups of human beings, children are people, not pets, prisoners or property. Full people whose lives are their own, not a different kind of person – full, equal humans who should no more be coerced and manipulated and moulded and shaped by others than we adults should be.
Taking Children Seriously: a new view of children
Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: children do not actually need to be controlled for their own good. An Oxford Karl Popper Society talk.
Imposing rules so children feel secure?
A rule imposed on someone for the purpose of helping them to feel secure, is ludicrous. If I expressly don’t want something, yet it is imposed upon me anyway, how does that help me to feel secure? The opposite is the case.
What Taking Children Seriously is, and what it is not
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
Whose ends?
Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.
The One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest school of parenting
Parenting books often advocate being calm and ‘empathetic’ in our coercive control of our children, instead of shouting at them. This makes the coercive control chillingly Nurse Ratched like in its double binding mixed messages.
“He would say that, wouldn’t he?”
Adults often discount children’s ideas with ad hominem psychologising, dehumanising them as though they do not exist as people.
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.
Why epistemology matters for parents
All interactions implicitly assume epistemological ideas, so it is worth considering what those ideas are and whether they are true or not.
Bathtime and hairwashing
In their anxiety about dirty hair, parents often forcibly wash their children’s hair or try to get them to allow shampoo on their hair. Bathtime then becomes a battle instead of fun, the child feeling as frantic to maintain control over what happens to them as you or I might in a similar situation. Exerting more coercive control over the child is a recipe for disaster.
Why discussions take a philosophical turn
When people ask about a child staying at a friend’s house with no parents, do they want not only to know how they might handle it, but why that way, and why not the conventional way. Those whys are philosophy—ideas. That is why we get philosophical.
‘Tantrums’ are a response to coercion
The ‘tantrum’ is a response to the treatment of the child. Ignoring the child in this circumstance simply reinforces the child’s notion that the parent is not listening to her legitimate objections to being treated as a mere object of parental attention, as opposed to a sentient subject with wishes and feeling of her own.
“What if they bring home objectionable literature?!”
What if a child develops an interest in reading unsavoury literature?
Running into the street
About the worry that a very young child’s brain and cognitive function and reason might be insufficient to prevent them inadvertently killing themselves by running into the road.
Whose values matter?
When children’s wishes for their own lives clash with parents’ wishes for the children’s lives.
Children are not irrational
The myth that children are irrational
Singling out children
If adults sometimes make bad decisions just like children to, why treat children differently?