Misery-free treatment of a child’s lice infestation
Coercion is absolutely NOT necessary to treat a lice infestation. It was not even true 30 years ago, in the days of the nasty nit comb and stinky skin-peeling shampoo.
medical issues
“Help! My baby hates diaper changes! Ideas for baby-pleasing solutions”
Solutions many babies have loved!
“What do you do about vaccinating your children?”
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.
“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.
Coercively protecting children
Protecting children should be done non-coercively.
The right to refuse medical treatment
Whatever argument you apply to adults about refusing medical treatment should apply to children too.
Help! Child hates eyepatch!
Practical suggestions about a child not wanting to wear a prescribed eyepatch.
Carseat in a medical emergency?
In a medical emergency do whatever you have to do to save the person’s life.
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?
Scientism vs morality
How scientism allows one to escape from the merely human arena of morality with a single bound. Parents’ disputes with their children are over a moral issue—what they should do, or what should be done to them. While professionals may have some expertise over factual issues, that does not entitle them to pose as authorities on the moral issue. To assume that it does is anti-rational. It is scientism.
Bathtime and hairwashing
In their anxiety about dirty hair, parents often forcibly wash their children’s hair or try to get them to allow shampoo on their hair. Bathtime then becomes a battle instead of fun, the child feeling as frantic to maintain control over what happens to them as you or I might in a similar situation. Exerting more coercive control over the child is a recipe for disaster.
Young children, noncoercion and the interplay of reason
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.