coercion – Taking Children Seriously

How do you tell pre-verbal children about dangers given that they do not understand explanations?

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?”

Free to learn: the immorality of compulsory schools

Dead Poets Society is not taking children seriously

What if your child runs into traffic?

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

What do you mean by ‘coercionist’?

Fallibilism as a way of being and acting

The relationship-building power of explanations

What do you mean by non-coercive? What is the difference between coercion and non-coercion?

Non-coercive = embracing others exactly the way they are, and they can change if they want to and they don’t have to. Coercive = trying to control, fix or change others against their will.

Surely it is cruel to force people to live with the consequences of the ideas and preferences they had when they were children?

Surely studies show that parents have little impact on how people turn out?

Surely kids need to be forced to learn maths?

How do you handle the issue of other people coercing your child?

Unnatural consequences revisited

How can I drop the anti-rational part of my mind that interferes with me taking my children seriously?

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

If anti-rational memes are compelling me to coerce my children, what hope is there?!

Why did my mother’s coercive words fly out of my mouth?!

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

If a parent has an aversion to something a child enjoys doing, how do you solve that problem?

Such questions are in effect asking how we and our children can solve the problem created by us in effect having a visceral aversion to our children innocently enjoying themselves learning. Why is that the case, and when we are in such a state, what can we do about it?

If coercion has impaired my ability to correct errors, is taking children seriously even possible?

Why does it sometimes hurt to think about Taking Children Seriously?

Surely we should communicate our disapproval to our children?

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

What do you do about vaccinating your children?

What is wrong with loving limits for children?

Adding “loving” to “limits” does not make the limits non-coercive, 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.

If you are not coercing your child, what do you do instead of coercion?

This question is like a coercively controlling husband asking: “If you are not coercing your wife, what do you do instead of coercion?” A paternalistic husband who controls his wife out of the best of intentions because he honestly believes that it is for her own good, could ask the same question.

What is the relationship between Karl Popper’s epistemology, the ideas of David Deutsch and Taking Children Seriously?

How do you determine what food to give your children?

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?

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

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.

Surely suffering and frustration make us stronger?

Why not say that the policy is non-coercion except on important issues?

If we are fallible and not omniscient, surely it is exaggerating to say it is always possible to solve problems without coercion?

What to do when your child says “Go away” or “I don’t want to talk about it”

“What if…?” questions revisited

Is hiding medicine in your child’s food wrong?

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

How can we communicate urgent information to our pre-verbal toddlers?

Surely children need discipline to teach them self-discipline?

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.

Why not argue for Taking Children Seriously in terms of rights?

Who am I to criticise someone else?

If criticism is valuable why not be more critical?

Surely criticism is always good?

What if your child wants to drive?

I’m a vegetarian. What if my child wants to eat meat?

How do you intervene non-coercively when one child is attacking another?

Is coercion always wrong?

What do you have against gentle coercion?

Do children not taught that they can’t always get their own way become entitled and inconsiderate?

Is the purpose of taking children seriously to avoid the harm coercion would do?

If I am not allowed to coerce my child, surely I am being coerced myself?

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

What do you have against coercion?

Surely children are not born knowing right and wrong?

Does Taking Children Seriously mean children always getting their own way?

Surely it is natural for parents to control their children?

What do you mean by ‘paternalism’?

Paternalism is the idea that certain people or groups need to be controlled (in a benevolent fatherly way) for their own good.

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.

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.

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.