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.
Happiness is not about how much you create compared with how much you might have created under some different circumstances; it is about whether you are solving the problems you actually have.
Moving forward not back.
You don’t have to be infallible or perfect to improve things. That is what excites me about Taking Children Seriously. You don’t have to get everything right! You don’t have to start out right and have unlimited this, that, or the other, all you have to do is to try to set things up in such a way that what is wrong can be altered, and that what is good can be made even better. Taking Children Seriously doesn’t mean attempting to create a problem-free state, it means having fun solve problems rather than being stuck. Happiness is not being without problems, it is being in the process of solving your problems.
Sometimes there can be coercive pressure on our children to help us do cleaning and tidying, for example by making our children responsible for our wellbeing.
Taking Children Seriously is neither utopian nor revolutionary. It is fallibilist and respects tradition as well as the growth of knowledge.
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.
Creativity, knowledge, happiness, unhappiness and coercion: how we parents inadvertently kill our children’s creativity.
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!
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.