parents – Taking Children Seriously

Think flow.

One common misconception is that Taking Children Seriously simply replaces coercion with win-win problem-solving when there is an obvious problem like a clash between parent and child.

The courage to dance

Taking children seriously under scrutiny takes courage and can feel lonely, but someone has to start.

“How is the parent-child situation more complicated than the adult-adult one?”

Why parenthood can seem unexpectedly challenging even if you have thought about it beforehand.

New parent? Planning to have a baby and questioning the standard parenting ideas? Don’t miss this critical discussion!

A conversation between prospective parents, about taking children seriously.

Free to learn: the immorality of compulsory schools

The school system isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s further from the truth than Karl Popper. It’s wrong like the Catholic Church was wrong in refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentrism and in locking him up so as to protect their worldview.

Don’t tell me I can’t: An ambitious homeschooler’s journey, by Cole Summers: a book review

Children should do what they want just as adults do what they want. We can be there alongside our kids as they explore their interests the way they themselves choose, in an unstructured manner. Cole… says most of everything he achieved was because of his parents’ support and help.

“Surely it is cruel to force people to live with the consequences of the ideas and preferences they had when they were children?”

If, when you were five, your parents had told you that you would thank them later for the coercive education to which they were subjecting you, would you have believed them or not? And what would have made you think that they were lying to you?

“Isn’t taking children seriously a risky experiment with children? Is there any evidence that it works? Has it been studied?”

If you were in the American slave-holding South in the days of slavery, and a supporter of slavery was demanding studies and ‘evidence’ to justify your argument for ending slavery, would that not strike you as a highly immoral stance?

Unnatural consequences revisited

How viewing other people as wilful perpetrators embodies the mistaken theory that problems are not soluble, and thus can interfere with problem-solving and result in our beloved children being distressed.

“When a solution is not found, is it always the parents who must bear the brunt of the sacrifice?”

If you think there is a brunt to be borne that is intolerable, what makes you think that it is OK to have a defenceless child bear the brunt of it?!

“Are you advocating that the children should rule the parents?!”

Life does not have to involve either ruling or being ruled. Instead, we can stand side by side with no one ruling, all of us free to be in control of our own life, solving problems individually and jointly, and having fun doing so.

“Why do parents coerce their children despite having been through it themselves?”

If parents knew that they could reject the conventional approach and it would not ruin their precious child’s life, many more would do so. If you cannot see that rejecting the status quo is not only right, but also will not have any disastrous unintended consequences, it feels safer to stick with the tradition of paternalistic coercion.

“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.

“What is wrong with loving limits for children?”

Adding “loving” to “limits” does not make the limits noncoercive, it just adds confusing mixed messages to the coercion. The parents are coercing the child while acting as though that is not what they are doing. They are pretending that they are not responsible for the distress they are in fact causing.

“How do you teach table manners?”

What does taking courteous manners seriously look like? How children taken seriously learn table manners.

“If children are people just like adults, why should we treat our children any differently from how we treat adults?”

The slight asymmetry is because the parent has chosen to put the child in the situation in which the child finds herself, whereas the child has not chosen to be in that situation or to put the parent in the situation.

Taking Children Seriously: a new view of children

Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: children do not actually need to be controlled for their own good. An Oxford Karl Popper Society talk.

Rank pessimism

Wherever we are on the scale of moral evolution today, we can always go up a rung tomorrow. Unless we prefer to turn away from growth and start claiming there are no more rungs, of course.

Identifying coercion is itself a creative task

Overt coercion is less likely to corrupt children’s interpretation of what is happening to them. But given that part of our self respect as parents taking our children seriously comes from being non-coercive, it might well be that the coercion we inadvertently engage in is interpretation-corrupting double binds. So we need to be particularly aware of the subtle mind-messing forms of coercion.

Advice to parents

Parents do not “need to be advised to manipulate their children with guilt, implied threats, and bribes”—they do this anyway. But they do need to be reassured that it is OK, and therefore that it is OK for them progressively to expunge the opposite impulses from their minds.

Punishment as a teaching tool

Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.

The Taking Children Seriously survey

The survey showed that favouring coercion over any one issue is not a good predictor of favouring coercion over any other issue, even an issue that the majority considers more important. The fact that so many parents believe that so many others have got their priorities the wrong way round is very hard to explain in the conventional terms of ‘strict’ vs. ‘lenient’ enforcement of a larger or smaller core of objectively important things. Most of us can see quite easily the irrationality of many other people’s justifications for coercing children. But it is in the nature of irrationality that we cannot see our own.

Why giving children rules and boundaries is a mistake

Children are not born knowing the truth, so we should tell children our best theories, explain why we advocate certain forms of behaviour and not others, and try to persuade them through reason of the truth of our own ideas, but not coerce, manipulate or in any way pressurise them into enacting our theories. For our theories may be false: even becoming a parent does not confer infallibility upon us!

In defence of television soap operas

What children learn from soap operas is how to live in our culture. Parents naturally want their children to rise above the culture—to reject its false ideas, if you like—but to do that, one has to start from the culture one is in, and improve it. There is no way of jumping to a better set of ideas without first criticising the existing ideas. The growth of knowledge begins with existing theories.

There is no safety in ignorance

American children should be prepared for the playmate who reaches into his parents’ drawer and comes out with a loaded gun

Ideas colour experience

People’s notion that young children are irrational or that teenagers are obnoxious colours their view of what is happening in reality. They see irrationality/awfulness where none exists.

Why allow minors to disregard the guidance of their elders?

Does financial supporting our children mean they must obey us? Is it right to expect quid pro quo for our support?

Coercion, manipulation, reason, persuasion

Many have suggested that my use of the word ‘coercion’ is non-standard and that I should find another word, but I think that is the quest for a euphemism. People don’t like using a harsh word for something they think is morally right. But if you prefer, use the word ‘manipulation’ instead—as long as it is clear that manipulating children is not taking them seriously either.