Is hiding medicine in your child’s food wrong?

What turns taking medicine from something neutral or mildly unpleasant that you are willing to do to help you get better, to something terrifying and traumatic that you would rather die than do, is not actually the horrible taste of the medicine, it is the lack of control, the fear of being forced, the violation of your bodily integrity—which is a violation of your mental integrity, your agency. Something can feel fine if it is voluntary, but extremely traumatic if it is involuntary.

Medical emergencies

When medical disaster strikes, as sometimes it still does, children can show the most amazing courage imaginable. People from the future are like that.

Doctor, please do not hurt my child

The difference between taking children seriously and merely loving them or caring about them, resides in whose concerns about the children’s well-being take precedence: the children’s or the adults’. Conventional wisdom tries to blur this distinction by portraying children’s concerns as somehow less valid or less significant than those of adults.

Taking sick children seriously

We parents often think we have a good reason not to take our child seriously, but when our actions are not consistent with our seemingly good reason, what is really going on?