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
force an outcome
“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.
“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 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?
“What do you have against gentle coercion?”
If the coercion is as soft and gentle as you think it is, how is it having its intended effect of forcing the child to obey you? You see the soft gentleness of a velvet glove; your child sees the iron fist inside. It is the iron fist that is doing the work. It is the iron fist that is the underlying reality, the coercive substance under the surface velvet.
“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.
“If I am not allowed to coerce my child, surely I am being coerced myself?”
Assuming you are happily married, would you ever be thinking: “If I am not allowed to coerce my wife, surely I am being coerced myself?”?! No! Never! Not even in your worst moment ever! You take your wife seriously. You are not trying to train or change or improve your wife. You are not trying to win at her expense. You want both of you to win! You love her just as she is. You two solve problems together rather than coercing each other.
“What do you have against coercion?”
Coercion impedes progress by impairing error-correcting processes. “The right of the parent over his child lies either in his superior strength or his superior reason. If in his strength, we have only to apply this right universally, in order to drive all morality out of the world. If in his reason, in that reason let him confide.”
“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.
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.
Stumbling towards taking children seriously
Beginning to think about taking children seriously brings up many hitherto hidden problems. We are all in the same boat. No one has ‘arrived’.
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.
Whose teeth are they anyway?
Parents sometimes forget whose teeth they are, and that parents have obligations to their children that their children do not have to them. These issues inform decision-making.