Think flow.
One common misconception is that Taking Children Seriously simply replaces coercion with win-win problem-solving when there is an obvious problem like a clash between parent and child.
creativity
Is your baby trying to tell you something?
Young babies’ language decoded! Your babies can get their needs met.
The evolution of culture
How anti-rational memes sabotage culture, education and the Enlightenment.
“What if your baby keeps grabbing your nose ring and cannot be reasoned with?”
Babies are full human beings with astonishingly amazing creative minds. They are absolutely fascinating. Enjoy every precious moment with them.
Criticism scheduling and privacy
Unwanted criticism can cripple thinking, destroying the means of error correction and the growth of knowledge.
The can-do attitude versus the can’t-do attitude
We may fear that a given problem requires coercion or self-sacrifice on our part, but if we nevertheless assume that our fear is mistaken and have fun coming up with possible solutions, often, that can-do attitude can make a difference.
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.
“Unless we get children try different things, how will they ever learn which things are fun and which are not fun?”
Having a rule which overrides your reason is at best going to entrench bad habits. How do you know the thing you are forcing yourself (or your child) to do is actually right? If it is right, why can’t you (or your child) feel good about it?
“How can I drop the anti-rational part of my mind that interferes with me taking my children seriously?”
When you struggle against or take a coercive approach with another person, the natural response of that person is to defend their corner and fight back. The same happens inside our own minds. When you are fighting a part of your own mind, that causes the part you are trying to stamp out to dig in, to entrench itself, to defend its corner more vigorously.
“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.
“How can I overcome the antirational memes disabling my creativity, with my disabled creativity?!”
Although antirational memes as it were fight attempts to criticise an drop them, that does not mean that they are immutable. We can use our creativity to dissolve them. The situation is not as devoid of hope as “disabled creativity” makes it sound.
“If antirational memes are compelling me to coerce my children, what hope is there?!”
There is every reason for hope! And the fact that we have noticed that coercing our children is problematic is progress compared to how things were in the static society of the past. (And hey, maybe the fact that coercionists these days seem to feel more need to justify their advocacy of coercion is itself progress?)
“Why does it sometimes hurt to think about Taking Children Seriously?”
Life can be messy for all of us. Sometimes when we try to make improvements, part of our mind panics, and that can hurt.
“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.
“Surely suffering and frustration make us stronger?”
Suffering does not help people learn. It impedes our ability to think. It impairs our creativity.
“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.
“What do you mean by ‘creativity’?”
Creativity is what makes us human—our capacity to create new explanations, to solve problems, to come up with new ideas.
“How do you intervene noncoercively when one child is attacking another?”
Meet the aggressor where she is, without resistance, as opposed to disapproving from above; see it from her PoV; what was this about?; what led up to this? How can we proceed positively from here?
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.
Why stuff-management matters
Rather than shutting the door for fear of coercing, rather than waiting for the kids to ask for help, sometimes it’s better to find new good ways of helping and offer them with generous enthusiasm.
We go forward with hope
Moving forward not back.
Against ego-centric epistemology
A discussion about Karl Popper’s epistemology, reason, the growth of knowledge, relativism and certainty.
How they feel about the coercion at the time
Can one be taking children seriously if one defines ‘a good relationship’ in a way that is independent of how the children feel about it at the time?
No way out—and loving it
What if the thing that the child wants to risk is specifically a matter of not being able to easily get out of the situation? What if Jane wants to go pack-packing in the wilderness without a phone or radio? What if she does not want an escape route?
In praise of ignorance
Innocence, properly conceived, is a positive attribute. It is the ignorance that comes from a voluntary decision not to engage (or not to engage yet) with a particular area of complex knowledge. Innocence in that sense is essential for all genuine learning. Compulsory teaching is the destruction of innocence, forcing the victims to waste the opportunity, which comes only once in each lifetime, to encounter that knowledge for the first time.
From attachment parenting to Taking Children Seriously
Like many parents new to these ideas, Brooke was initially shocked by Taking Children Seriously, but two years in, much has changed. This is her story.
The Keeping-One’s-Options-Open mentality
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.
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.
Are children being taken seriously good at detecting coercion?
Unfortunately it is not true that children taken seriously are good at identifying coercion (except perhaps overt coercion).
Punishment as a teaching tool
Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
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.
Objectifying education sabotages learning
Learning is different from looking at one’s learning. Objectifying education as a thing to look at and judge interferes with learning.
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.
Experimental evidence
In this heyday of scientism, all sorts of experiments are performed to back up every conceivable view of education, and people simply cite the ones that confirm their prior beliefs and ignore the rest. Hence they are asking other people to abandon their opinions in deference to a type of ‘evidence’ which they themselves would (quite rightly) not pay a moment’s attention to if it had gone the other way.
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.
How defining yourself in terms of injustice sabotages your life
When one is the victim of a great injustice, there is a tremendous temptation to define oneself, and one’s life, at least partly in terms of this injustice. The victim mentality is a terrible mistake because it sabotages the vital process of learning how to have a happy life, solving problems as you go along.
Defining “coercion”, “coercive”, “coerce”
Definitions of words commonly-used on the Taking Children Seriously site: “coercion”, “coercive” and “coerce”.
Creativity and untidiness
David Deutsch explains why he says that he could not be very productive without also being untidy.
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.
A big killer of creativity is having your creativity coercively diverted for someone else’s purposes
Creativity, knowledge, happiness, unhappiness and coercion: how we parents inadvertently kill our children’s creativity.
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.
It is impossible to control for all the variables in any experiment involving human psychology
No sample can be large enough to control for all the variables in any experiment involving human psychology, because the variables include the ideas in people’s minds, and he number of possible ideas that a single mind could hold is far greater than the number of people on Earth.
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!
Coercion is irrational
How (logically) coercion interferes with creativity in the mind.
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.
Solving problems takes creativity
Learning involves changing preferences. Resolving disagreements involves changing preferences. People’s preferences are not fixed: they naturally change all the time. Problems are soluble!
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.
Young children, reason and creativity
Why it is a mistake to think that you are seeing evidence that reason only develops later in childhood.
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.