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
consent
“What do you mean by noncoercive? What is the difference between coercion and noncoercion?”
Noncoercive = 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?”
If, when you were five, your parents had told you that you would thank them later for the coercive education to which they were subjecting you, would you have believed them or not? And what would have made you think that they were lying to you?
The rationalist mistake
Reducing/equating solving interpersonal problems to having explicit discussions is making the rationalist mistake of fetishising the explicit and ignoring everything else.
“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.
“Do children taken seriously ever ask permission?”
Children being taken seriously are not subject to an authority from whom they need permission, so they no more ask permission than we do.
What to do when your child says “Go away” or “I don’t want to talk about it”
If you think your child needs you, maybe experiment, tentatively trying different ways of being there for her and making sure she knows you are there for her and want to do what she wants and not what she does not want.
“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.
“If criticism is valuable why not be more critical?”
Subjecting anyone of any age to coercive education (unwanted criticism) is not taking them seriously. Nor is it even taking the valuableness of criticism seriously! Let alone taking the growth of knowledge seriously.
“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.
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.
(NOT) listening to children
Taking children seriously means taking a child’s wish/decision to go to school seriously too.
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.
Is Taking Children Seriously revolutionary?
Taking Children Seriously is neither utopian nor revolutionary. It is fallibilist and respects tradition as well as the growth of knowledge.
Punishment as a teaching tool
Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why bother with the philosophy?
How you think people learn informs all your interactions with your children. If you view learning as a creative act in a critical-rational process, you will value highly the idea of consent in decision-making. If you believe people learn through divine revelation or by having knowledge poured into them, that will inform your interactions in a different way from if you think that they learn through conjectures and refutations: you may well think coercion necessary.
The joy of consensual parenting
Taking children seriously is such a joy compared to the constant battle or successfully suppressed children of conventional parenting.
Children’s legal status: a defence
Further arguments in this thought experiment about children’s legal status
Why allow minors to disregard the guidance of their elders?
Does financial supporting our children mean they must obey us? Is it right to expect quid pro quo for our support?
Collaborate with a child when I disapprove?
Children’s lives are theirs not ours. Their decisions are theirs, even if we disapprove, just as ours are ours even if someone else disapproves.
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.
Questionable motives?
Why it can’t be morally unobjectionable for an adult to engage sexually with a child
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.