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.
giving children ‘choices’
What Taking Children Seriously is, and what it is not
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
Consistent rules set in concrete or children thinking for themselves with parents available to advise
Parents value consistency in themselves but when their children are consistent, the parents call them ‘stubborn’ or ‘strong-willed’.
Advice to parents
Parents do not “need to be advised to manipulate their children with guilt, implied threats, and bribes”—they do this anyway. But they do need to be reassured that it is OK, and therefore that it is OK for them progressively to expunge the opposite impulses from their minds.
Fake choices and other covert coercion advocated in Kids Are Worth It
Most parenting books purport to be about how to be a nice parent instead of a nasty one, but under the surface veneer we find the same old rubbish about how to make children do what you want them to do: they do not take children seriously as full people whose lives are their own.
How would you like it?
Imagine if your husband denied you dinner because you had not yet completed the chores he had decided you must do before dinner…