parent in charge
Equal relationships with our children?! How are parents and children are equals?!
Children are no less creative and rational than adults, whether or not they yet have the explicit language in which to express themselves.
Do children taken seriously ever ask permission?
Children being taken seriously are not subject to an authority from whom they need permission, so they no more ask permission than we do.
Which parenting style is Taking Children Seriously? Authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or uninvolved?
Taking Children Seriously is not permissive, uninvolved, authoritarian or authoritative. Those approaches coerce children instead of taking them seriously as full people whose lives are their own.
Coercion impairs children’s ability to reason
Coercion tends to cause a coerced state of mind, and can impair the child’s ability to reason about the thing in question.
Where is the choice for the child?
When children know that if their parents deem them to be watching too much TV, their parents will ban TV-watching, they self-coercively limit their watching out of fear of losing it altogether.
Requiring children to do chores
Parents often believe that their financial support and other services for their children morally obliges the children to provide certain services in return. But there is no justification for that belief. It is just a rationalisation of the traditional status quo between parent and child. The truth is that there is a moral asymmetry between parent and child: in the event of an intractable dispute between them, the parent chose to place the child in the situation that caused the dispute; the child did not choose to place the parent there.
Coercion punishes children for reasoning
The problem is that when coercion is used, it really doesn’t matter whether your reasons make sense, or whether the task is the right thing to do. They have to do it regardless. It precisely blocks their thinking in that area.