What Taking Children Seriously is, and what it is not
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
For any human being who is not actually facing death by starvation or the firing squad, the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want—far from it—it is finding out (or rather, creating) what you want. That is what we deprive children of when we channel them into ‘keeping their options open’. It looks as though they are keeping their options open, but at each stage they are actually presented with only one option—the option where you do the standardized thing: something you can do without being human, by sacrificing the human part of yourself, the individual part.
We all have blind spots. We all delude ourselves. This is especially common when it comes to parenting, because of all the antirational memes operating in this sphere.
All choices restrict future choices. The real question is whether one is learning and growing through one’s own free choice, or not.