coercion

Free to learn: the immorality of compulsory schools

The school system isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s further from the truth than Karl Popper. It’s wrong like the Catholic Church was wrong in refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentrism and in locking him up so as to protect their worldview.

Dead Poets Society is not taking children seriously

Dead Poets Society is not taking children seriously. Taking children seriously is not just being a bit kinder to the inmates, or being a tiny bit rebellious against an authoritarian system you nevertheless continue to work in, it is a different thing entirely. It is about children actually being free.

“Why do you like IFS but not ‘Self-led parenting’?”

Coercion, including covert coercion imposed with a soft voice and loving words, is deeply disconnecting, and it certainly does not feel compassionate to the person on the sharp end. What seems to be called ‘Self-led parenting’ is a far cry from the deeply respectful, non-coercive spirit of the Self of IFS when they are talking about adults.

“What do you mean by ‘coercionist’?”

The word ‘coercionist’ distinguishes between those who advocate coercion (or who take the view that some problems are inherently not solvable) and those who think that problems are soluble (i.e., thoroughly non-coercively).

Fallibilism as a way of being and acting

People sometimes say explicitly that they are fallibilists, but inexplicably they are ‘saying’ that they are infallibilists. They say people are fallible and not omniscient, but they act as if they think people see the truth yet are wickedly choosing evil.

“Surely kids need to be forced to learn maths?”

If it were true that maths is boring at the beginning and only becomes interesting later, then no one would ever have discovered all the mathematics that has been discovered, because it could not have been being forced on children before it had been discovered. Each bit of maths was formed by somebody who had not been taught it but who did it purely because it was interesting.

Unnatural consequences revisited

How viewing other people as wilful perpetrators embodies the mistaken theory that problems are not soluble, and thus can interfere with problem-solving and result in our beloved children being distressed.

“How can I become more aware of anti-rational parts in my mind?”

Drop the second guessing and scrutinising and judging. It is as toxic for us as that kind of thing is for our children. If you are not feeling free—free to think, free to be and free to act in accordance with your own ideas, your thinking flying free as a bird—it might be that you are seizing up your thinking with scrutiny and judgement, objectifying yourself as a parent.

“Why do parents coerce their children despite having been through it themselves?”

If parents knew that they could reject the conventional approach and it would not ruin their precious child’s life, many more would do so. If you cannot see that rejecting the status quo is not only right, but also will not have any disastrous unintended consequences, it feels safer to stick with the tradition of paternalistic coercion.

“If we should take babies seriously, should we not take pigs seriously too?”

Babies are obviously nothing like pigs, because fast forward a year or two and one is talking to you whereas the other never will. And they are talking to you because of something that happened in that year or two, and it isn’t something that happens in pigs, ever. This is not a small difference, it is a radical difference.

“What is wrong with loving limits for children?”

Adding “loving” to “limits” does not make the limits noncoercive, it just adds confusing mixed messages to the coercion. The parents are coercing the child while acting as though that is not what they are doing. They are pretending that they are not responsible for the distress they are in fact causing.

“How can we express approval when our children do something good without manipulating them by implying that we would disapprove if they had made a different choice?”

The kind of expressions of approval that are not manipulative are the ones that bubble out of you without any forethought. Anytime you are wondering if what you were planning to say might be coercive approval, it probably is. Is what you are saying the kind of thing you would naturally say to an equal, a friend, or your boss, say? Or does the idea of saying this to your boss seem highly inappropriate?

“What if my child both hates school and likes being in school with all his friends?”

If neither option appeals to the child there are reasons for that. What are the reasons? There is a problem to solve. There will be something good that the child wants, and something bad that the child wants to avoid. We just need to find out what those things are, and start thinking laterally to come up with a solution that provides the good and not the bad.

“At what age should children first leave the house on their own, visit their friend next door on their own, go to the cinema on their own, hitchhike from coast to coast on their own, etc.?”

In a relationship characterised by consent, on those occasions when the other person is warning us that our proposed course of action may be unwise, and explaining why, we have every reason to trust that such warnings are not attempts to thwart us and ruin our fun, but are actually important—that it is actually in our best interests to heed the warnings.

“Why not say that the policy is noncoercion except on important issues?”

That’s like saying: “The police force should respect human rights except on important issues”. I’d rather say “let’s have a police force whose ethos embodies respect for human rights”—and know that there will be some failures to respect human rights—than have an ethos which embodies systematic disregard for human rights in some areas. Similarly, with our children, having systematic exceptions to the ethos of taking them seriously instead of coercing them, makes the whole idea incoherent.

“What if…?” questions revisited

Losing sight of others’ good intentions is a mistake. Reacting badly, as if truth is obvious and we ourselves are in possession of it, tends to be coercive.

“Is hiding medicine in your child’s food wrong?”

What turns taking medicine from something neutral or mildly unpleasant that you are willing to do to help you get better, to something terrifying and traumatic that you would rather die than do, is not actually the horrible taste of the medicine, it is the lack of control, the fear of being forced, the violation of your bodily integrity—which is a violation of your mental integrity, your agency. Something can feel fine if it is voluntary, but extremely traumatic if it is involuntary.

“Surely it is necessary to coerce children to avoid them doing unsafe or unethical things?”

It is far safer to show children potential dangers and how to handle them safely, than it is simply to rely on them never interacting with such dangers. Even if you yourself keep all the dangerous items and chemicals locked up, there will come a day when your child is somewhere else, where that is not the case, and then your child is potentially navigating dangerous things with no knowledge of how to do so safely. Taking our children seriously is so much safer than the alternative.

“Who am I to criticise someone else?”

Not all criticism of other people’s ideas is good. Indeed some of it actually interferes with the person’s own criticism in their own mind. Wanted criticism is valuable. Unwanted criticism can be coercive and destructive of knowledge-creating processes that are happening.

“Surely criticism is always good?”

he idea that criticism of others is always good is a mistake, just like it is a mistake to think that education is always good. It may be good if it is wanted, but not if it is unwanted. Coercive education is not and never has been Taking Children Seriously.

“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.

“What do you have against gentle coercion?”

If the coercion is as soft and gentle as you think it is, how is it having its intended effect of forcing the child to obey you? You see the soft gentleness of a velvet glove; your child sees the iron fist inside. It is the iron fist that is doing the work. It is the iron fist that is the underlying reality, the coercive substance under the surface velvet.

“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.

“Surely coercion is ok when the parent is right and the child is wrong?”

Being fallible implies that we can be mistaken including when we feel certain that we are right. And because we are fallible, there is no reliable way to know who is right and who is wrong. Disagreements can either be resolved through reason, or they can be dealt with coercively. So no, feeling that we are right does not justify coercion.

“What do you have against coercion?”

Coercion impedes progress by impairing error-correcting processes. “The right of the parent over his child lies either in his superior strength or his superior reason. If in his strength, we have only to apply this right universally, in order to drive all morality out of the world. If in his reason, in that reason let him confide.”

“Surely children are not born knowing right and wrong?”

Children are not born knowing right and wrong arises out of the paternalist view of children, which mistakenly holds that children learn moral knowledge through coercion, and that no one would have any interest in improving their moral knowledge unless forced to do so. But actually, coercion impedes and impairs learning, including of moral knowledge, and the vast majority of people including children are trying to do the right thing and trying to improve, including morally, and no one has perfect moral knowledge.

“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.

“Why does parenting feel so hard?”

What most parents think they need to do as parents—moulding and shaping their children—is an impossible task. No wonder parenting is a nightmare for so many parents! But there is an alternative!

How to read this site

Ultimately, we all (including our children!) have to do what we ourselves think best, what feels right to us ourselves, not what someone else says is right. We are all moral agents in our own right. When we self-coercively override our own wisdom and do what someone else thinks we should be doing, we are acting wrongly by our own lights. No good can come of that. Treat this site as a source of speculative guesses and interesting arguments, not as an authority you should obey.

Medical emergencies

When medical disaster strikes, as sometimes it still does, children can show the most amazing courage imaginable. People from the future are like that.

The paradigm shift

Taking Children Seriously is one of those types of knowledge that cannot be taken back—once understood, it constitutes a true paradigm shift within the individual mind.

Whose plan was this?

Parents often expect a solution to be found from within a small set of parent-approved options, and then they dislike what the child does, and think that that means (more) coercion is necessary.

Question or command?

Parents sometimes imagine that phrasing a command as a question will somehow make it more palatable for the child, but it doesn’t.

What does “active” mean if not “preferred”?

You are under coercion if and only if you have two or more incompatible wants and are acting on one of them (e.g. currently eating health food and not junk food) while another is active (there is a wanting-junk-food process currently under way in your brain).

Risking coercion due to conflict-aversion

Sometimes it takes courage to risk confrontation with a coercionist adult to avoid risking coercing our beloved child. But seeing the wider perspective can help.

Children do not need what conventional wisdom says they need

None of the reasons why enforcing “clear borders” is good for coerced children carry over in any way to children who are in consensual relationships with their parents. On the contrary, enforcing fixed borders and bottom lines is irrational and coercive, and sabotages the very means by which such children remain happy.

Inculcating consent?

The idea that coercion is needed to make it possible to have creative, consent-building relationships with children is incoherent.

Protect the victim

Protecting the victim should not involve intentionally punishing the aggressor, either physically or by even frowning at the aggressor.

Respecting other people’s wishes

When I go to other people’s houses, I try to abide by their wishes in respect of their property and so on. I try to make my visit add to their lives rather than detract from them. I try to be sensitive and (to the extent that I think they will want this) helpful in a non-intrusive way. We all want to do the right thing, including our children.

Choosing to go to school or Iraq

Lots of things ‘suck’ for most people, but very few things suck for everyone. People are very, very different, and there is a danger in just assuming that a child is acting out of desperation when in fact they are quite healthily pursuing their own ends. The danger is that one will then, in effect, be refusing to help them pursue these ends, and, in effect, start to undermine them by constantly seeking alternatives and constantly acting on the assumption that there must be something wrong with them, or with the alternatives that you are providing for them, if they persist in wanting this.

Moving, improving: punishment will not help

Pretending that the road to improvement lies in receiving punishment, or in exposing one’s life to public scrutiny so that one won’t dare do the wrong thing is just horrible. A grave mistake. It really can’t help, and for the same reason doing that to children can’t help, only hinders their improvement.

Can an emotion be wrong?

We all feel angry sometimes, but we should take great care not to act out the accompanying impulse to blame, shame, hurt or threaten the other person. We can admit to our child that we feel angry and try to make sure that the child knows that this is a fault in us and not in the child. It is vital not to make our child feel responsible for our anger. It is our own stuff, not caused by them, no matter how it seems to us in that moment.

Does your child love visiting the dentist?

The dentist needs to know that when our child is having dental work done, if the child raises their hand, the dentist must pause immediately. It is the child’s consent that matters, not the parent’s. The child must be in charge. If it does not seem as though they are to them, then they are not in charge. If they do not have control over the inside of their own mouth, what do they control? Your duty as a parent is to enforce that control come what may.

Whose ends?

Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.

Identifying coercion is itself a creative task

Overt coercion is less likely to corrupt children’s interpretation of what is happening to them. But given that part of our self respect as parents taking our children seriously comes from being non-coercive, it might well be that the coercion we inadvertently engage in is interpretation-corrupting double binds. So we need to be particularly aware of the subtle mind-messing forms of coercion.

Possible subtle housework coercion

Sometimes there can be coercive pressure on our children to help us do cleaning and tidying, for example by making our children responsible for our wellbeing.

Fake choices and other covert coercion advocated in Kids Are Worth It

Most parenting books purport to be about how to be a nice parent instead of a nasty one, but under the surface veneer we find the same old rubbish about how to make children do what you want them to do: they do not take children seriously as full people whose lives are their own.

Advice to parents

Parents do not “need to be advised to manipulate their children with guilt, implied threats, and bribes”—they do this anyway. But they do need to be reassured that it is OK, and therefore that it is OK for them progressively to expunge the opposite impulses from their minds.

How to make time outs work

Changing the word ‘child’ to ‘wife’ and ‘parent’ to ‘husband’ highlights the reality of what is being advocated and the paternalism in the conventional view of children.

Natural consequences and “enabling”

It can be a big step forward to get that kids want to be responsible, contributing, loving people and that trying to push them in that direction is more likely to derail that than help it.

The dark side of John Holt

John Holt was so critical of school that sometimes he appeared to suggest that even children who want to go to school should not do so.

Parental rules mess up children’s thinking

Life is not black and white, but rules are. Punishments try to make the world fit into the categories of black and white but kids judge that there are greys anyway.So we help our children learn about those greys instead of just ignoring them they way many parents do. Iit leads to safer children.

‘Protection’ against a child’s will is coercion not protection

How would you feel if your partner took it upon himself to ‘protect’ you from something you do not want to be protected from, or he rode roughshod over your wishes with respect to the protection he was offering? It is dishonest to call something ‘protection’ when it is against the will of the person being protected. It is a parent’s responsibility to protect children from harm as perceived by the child.

Where is the choice for the child?

When children know that if their parents deem them to be watching too much TV, their parents will ban TV-watching, they self-coercively limit their watching out of fear of losing it altogether.

Never make a child feel bad

When one child hurts another, forget about trying to establish the motivation. The truth is likely to be either that it was an accident, or that it was caused indirectly by coercion on our part, so any asking the child about his motives is likely to cause yet more coercion.

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.

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.

The Taking Children Seriously survey

The survey showed that favouring coercion over any one issue is not a good predictor of favouring coercion over any other issue, even an issue that the majority considers more important. The fact that so many parents believe that so many others have got their priorities the wrong way round is very hard to explain in the conventional terms of ‘strict’ vs. ‘lenient’ enforcement of a larger or smaller core of objectively important things. Most of us can see quite easily the irrationality of many other people’s justifications for coercing children. But it is in the nature of irrationality that we cannot see our own.

Requiring children to do chores

Parents often believe that their financial support and other services for their children morally obliges the children to provide certain services in return. But there is no justification for that belief. It is just a rationalisation of the traditional status quo between parent and child. The truth is that there is a moral asymmetry between parent and child: in the event of an intractable dispute between them, the parent chose to place the child in the situation that caused the dispute; the child did not choose to place the parent there.

The importance of video games

Videogame players are learning not just knowledge of the overt subject-matter of the game, but inexplicit knowledge that applies in all creativity in the world. In a way, they are (mainly inexplicitly) learning how the universe works.

Children who prefer to go to school

The assumption that there are things all children must know provides the justification for the provision of standard academic subjects and their non-curricular counterparts. As soon as a child is expected to devote time and attention to those, there is coercion.

Unhappy with natural consequences

Parents call punishments ‘natural consequences’ when they are unwilling to accept responsibility for the unhappiness that is being caused, but accepting responsibility may be a necessary step to solving such problems.

Unnatural consequences

So-called ‘natural consequences’ are a strategy for coercively controlling children while pretending not to be responsible for and intentionally imposing the coercion.

Coerciveness vs non-coerciveness

What distinguishes families taking children seriously from those in which the parents favour coercion, and why compulsory school is necessarily coercive.

Scientism vs morality

How scientism allows one to escape from the merely human arena of morality with a single bound. Parents’ disputes with their children are over a moral issue—what they should do, or what should be done to them. While professionals may have some expertise over factual issues, that does not entitle them to pose as authorities on the moral issue. To assume that it does is anti-rational. It is scientism.

Biting lessons

Biting children to deter them from biting—like hitting children to deter them from hitting?

Coercion—the meaning of the word

Discussion of the word ‘coercion’. The idea is not: “We want to be noncoercive. Now let’s consider what that means.” Nevertheless, there used to be a lot of argument about how we use the word here.

Clarifying Karl Popper’s epistemology

Karl Popper’s theory prevails because it solves problems other theories of the growth of knowledge fail to solve, it is a better explanation than its rivals, and it unifies ideas previously thought to be unconnected.

Is creativity a boon to the affected individual?

Creativity is about solving problems, and every single area of life there is involves solving problems. The alcoholic, the drug addict, the person whose relationships are destructive, the person who is unable to support himself—all these people lack creativity in those areas. Coercion causes a lack of creativity. Let’s try not to impede and impair our children’s creativity!

Is creativity even desirable?

Creativity is not caused by problems, otherwise anyone who had a problem would solve it straight away. The only way to solve problems is through a creative rational process.

The language of parental power plays

Saying “Sand is not for throwing” is a euphemism for “I have made the rule that you may not throw sand, and I am going to enforce it.” This euphemistic construction is ubiquitous: “Food is not for throwing” (“I have made the rule that you may not throw food, and I am going to enforce it.”); “Hitting is not appropriate,” (“I have made the rule that you may not hit, and I am going to enforce it.”).

Why giving children rules and boundaries is a mistake

Children are not born knowing the truth, so we should tell children our best theories, explain why we advocate certain forms of behaviour and not others, and try to persuade them through reason of the truth of our own ideas, but not coerce, manipulate or in any way pressurise them into enacting our theories. For our theories may be false: even becoming a parent does not confer infallibility upon us!

How would you like it?

Imagine if your husband denied you dinner because you had not yet completed the chores he had decided you must do before dinner…

Punishing children using so-called natural consequences

The natural consequence of breaking something is that you have a broken thing. What happens after that is something someone or other decides. Describing making the child pay as a ‘natural consequence’ is at best misleading.

Merely desisting from coercion is not enough

Non-coercion is a necessary but not sufficient condition. We have to be working together to find real solutions to problems, not merely avoiding forcing our views on each other.

“There are some issues on which I am authoritarian”

Coercion is stressful because it conflicts with most people’s wider ideas about morality, human relationships, and how to run a society, etc. Unless one mentions children or parenting, everyone agrees that consent-based solutions are better that coercion every time. That theory is held on some level by most people. They just suppress it in their parenting.

Philosophical theories are refuted by argument, not empirical tests

There is no point demanding testability of an educational theory. What one can do with philosophical theories, is refute them by argument. Empirical testing is just one of a number of types of intersubjective criticism, and the vast majority of all criticism is by argument, even in science. Most scientific theories are refuted before they even get to the stage of empirical testing.

Coerced to change their values

One of the common responses to coercion is to lose interest—to no longer care—about the thing you previously cared about but were coerced out of or whatever. That is not really surprising if you think about it. That was the whole point of the coercion. To force the child to no longer value that thing. In order to not feel distress, the child has to change her values, to not value that thing any more. This is a change for the worse, by her own standards.

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.

Time out is not taking time out

There is a difference between sitting on a chair to relax, and enforced sitting on a chair. Or is being strapped in the electric chair also not a punishment?

Children do not want parental coercion

Children do NOT want to be coerced. What some school children want is for their parents to help them resist peer pressure to do what they don’t want to do in the first place.

What if your child wants a dangerous substance?

Reason keeps a child safe because the child has the correct theory (that the stuff is dangerous); coercion is risky because the child’s theory is not based on the reality of the substance, but upon the possible punishment for an infringement of the parental rule.

Ideas colour experience

People’s notion that young children are irrational or that teenagers are obnoxious colours their view of what is happening in reality. They see irrationality/awfulness where none exists.

Don’t children prefer strict rules so they know where they stand?

The ‘Don’t children prefer strict rules so they know where they stand’ argument is based on an equivocation between two meanings of the word ‘strict’, namely (1) harsh, coercive, and (2) well-defined, precise. People do like to know the rules under which they are living, i.e. they want strict(2) rules. But they do not like getting hurt, so they do not want strict(1) rules.

Common emotional blackmail

Using love as leverage to double-bind children to obey—threatening to withdraw the relationship—is wrong. Children have a right to our love.

Coercion, manipulation, reason, persuasion

Many have suggested that my use of the word ‘coercion’ is non-standard and that I should find another word, but I think that is the quest for a euphemism. People don’t like using a harsh word for something they think is morally right. But if you prefer, use the word ‘manipulation’ instead—as long as it is clear that manipulating children is not taking them seriously either.

‘Influence’ versus ‘coercion’

If I disagree with the substantive theory assumed by your word choice, you can’t expect me to build that substantive theory into my language, because if I were to, I would be being forced to lie or contradict myself every time I use your term.

Dental coercion disaster

Brushing and flossing coercion can have disastrous unintended consequences. Those best able to take responsibility for their own dental health are those who have not been subjected to dental health coercion in childhood.

Whose teeth are they anyway?

Parents sometimes forget whose teeth they are, and that parents have obligations to their children that their children do not have to them. These issues inform decision-making.

Never made to write essays?

If children are not made to write essays, will they ever learn? Does the hoped-for end result justify the coercion? An argument with a coercionist college professor.

How to talk so your kids will be manipulated

The Faber/Mazlish How To Talk So Kids Will Listen books are not taking children seriously: they advocate double-binding and lying to children to manipulate them into going along with the parent’s agenda that is independent of and impervious to the child’s own wishes.

Coercion punishes children for reasoning

The problem is that when coercion is used, it really doesn’t matter whether your reasons make sense, or whether the task is the right thing to do. They have to do it regardless. It precisely blocks their thinking in that area.

Is unschooling taking children seriously? 3

Having pessimistic educational theories like ‘not everything that is useful is (in itself) interesting’ suggests there are things children need to learn that they will not willingly choose to learn, therefore educational coercion is necessary. That is a mistake. Educational coercion impedes and impairs learning. It does not help.

Covert educational coercion

My re-wordings of what people say about a child, usually to make it about an adult, but in this case making it about learning to breathe instead of whatever the poster was saying children need to learn, aims to show the reality of what is being proposed.”

The education game

Unschooling or home educating parents often draw distinctions between what they are doing versus what a school teacher or homeschooling parent would do, but I often see little difference between schoolish educational coercion and what they themselves advocate. There is a pedagogical agenda in both cases.

Who wouldn’t be ‘school phobic’?

Most people hate school but do not feel entitled to say so, and many can’t bear to think about it so they hardly even know how they feel. Children are not the problem: coercion is the problem. Being forced to go to school is the problem.

Coercing children to play an instrument

For every one person who ends up loving music after being coerced to learn an instrument in childhood, there are countless thousands for whom playing an instrument is ruined, for whom playing music will forever be associated in their minds with all that pain and anguish, countless thousands whose ability to play music has been handicapped by such coercion, not helped.

The social, educational, economic and political oppression of children

Parents and teachers do far more to oppress children than the laws do, and could perfectly legally desist from most of this oppression if they so chose. There is no legal requirement upon parents to punish their children for a wide range of perfectly legal activities, yet they choose to anyway. There is no legal requirement upon parents to insist that their children live with them, and yet parents whose children seek other guardians usually invoke their legal right to force the children to return. There is no legal requirement to deny children freedom of association, and yet many parents do deny their children that. There is no legal requirement to assault children, yet, in the name of discipline, many parents do so. There is no legal requirement to deny children access to information in the home, yet many parents go to extreme lengths to do so. There is no legal requirement upon parents to subject unwilling children to extra-curricular activities such as piano lessons and Girl Guides. Indeed, there is no legal requirement for parents to force their children to go to school, yet most do.