Help! My baby hates diaper changes! Ideas for baby-pleasing solutions
Solutions many babies have loved!
Solutions many babies have loved!
Children should not only not have any medical procedures performed on them without consent, they should be in control throughout. That applies to vaccinations and everything else.
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.
When medical disaster strikes, as sometimes it still does, children can show the most amazing courage imaginable. People from the future are like that.
Whatever argument you apply to adults about refusing medical treatment should apply to children too.
Practical suggestions about a child not wanting to wear a prescribed eyepatch.
In a medical emergency do whatever you have to do to save the person’s life.
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.
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?
Any rational system has virtually no knowledge compared with what is possible. The whole point of rationality is what to do in the face of ignorance. It is not what to do when one already knows everything.