“How is the parent-child situation more complicated than the adult-adult one?”
Why parenthood can seem unexpectedly challenging even if you have thought about it beforehand.
dangers
“My child refuses to wear a coat in the cold! Help!”
There is a reason a child doesn’t want to wear a coat, and with a bit of creativity and effort it is possible to discover the reason and (dis)solve the problem.
“How do you tell pre-verbal children about dangers given that they do not understand explanations?”
With pre-verbal children we have to be creative and come up with concrete ways of conveying information about dangers, rather than just giving explicit explanations. (I suggest both.)
“Our 15-year-old wants to hitchhike to Outer Mongolia by herself. We think she is not yet ‘street-wise’ enough. What should we do?”
Our children’s lives are their own. We can explain our concerns and make suggestions, and ultimately, help them do what they themselves want to do. Has she hitchhiked long distances before? If not, perhaps she would like to try the Outer Hebrides as a trial run before Outer Mongolia.
“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.
Coercively protecting children
Protecting children should be done non-coercively.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
Explanations and experience
Sometimes you can explain in terms of your experience; but not when it comes to drinking bleach, presumably!
Genuinely protecting children versus coercing them
Children’s lives are their own, and they are far more competent than many parents think they are.
“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.
“What if…?” questions
What if [insert feared disastrous outcome here] happens as a result of taking my children seriously instead of coercing them?
There is no safety in ignorance
American children should be prepared for the playmate who reaches into his parents’ drawer and comes out with a loaded gun
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.
Keeping children safe without imprisoning them in the home
Relying on a policy of imprisonment to keep children safe is risky: there will come a time when young people do venture out alone.