Misery-free treatment of a child’s lice infestation
Coercion is absolutely NOT necessary to treat a lice infestation. It was not even true 30 years ago, in the days of the nasty nit comb and stinky skin-peeling shampoo.
experiment playfully
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.
Taking ourselves seriously
Many people undervalue what they want to do compared to what they think other people want them to do. They think that they need to be obedient, without understanding or feeling good about why they have chosen to do so. Doing this to yourself is bad enough. But doing it to someone else, such as your child, is even worse, because now it is not just yourself and your own reason you are violating and harming, it is another person.
“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?
“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?
“How do you solve problems where there is a conflict of interest?”
We look at our respective reasons for wanting what we initially want, and we create a way to proceed that we all prefer—a new idea that did not exist at the outset.
Doing something fun helped
When you don’t know what you want, going things you find fun can spark further ideas for what you might enjoy, leading to discovering important wants.
Taking toys seriously (yes, really)
Taking children seriously involves not just solving obvious problems when they arise, but thinking about and experimenting with different ideas about how to make life even more delightful.