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.
perspective
How will current theories of education look in the future?
What will people in the future think when they look back at what people now deem educational or not educational? People in the past also felt certain they were right in their views about what constitutes a proper education.
“If you do X, I will give you Y”
Offering a child a small treat (whatever it may be) might seem unobjectionable, because parent/carer and child both ‘win’. But what’s really happening here is that you’re implicitly teaching them that if they want something that seems appealing, to get it they will have to do things they don’t want to do. You’re essentially supporting a pattern of exchanging one’s happiness/dignity/ethical standards/morals for some prize.
“How do you handle the issue of other people coercing your child?”
Other people can behave badly, and we can view it as a problem to solve rather than being horribly distressed, wounded and irredeemably damaged.
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.
“How do you intervene non-coercively when one child is attacking another?”
Meet the aggressor where she is, without resistance, as opposed to disapproving from above; see it from her PoV; what was this about?; what led up to this? How can we proceed positively from here?
Coercively protecting children
Protecting children should be done non-coercively.
Risking coercion due to conflict-aversion
Sometimes it takes courage to risk confrontation with a coercionist adult to avoid risking coercing our beloved child. But seeing the wider perspective can help.
When my view changed, our lives changed
When your view suddenly shifts, like when viewing the Gestalt two-face image, it can feel as if Taking Children Seriously has suddenly come into focus—and this paradigm shift creates a virtuous circle of positive change.
Oh, how we delude ourselves—blindspots!
We all have blind spots. We all delude ourselves. This is especially common when it comes to parenting, because of all the antirational memes operating in this sphere.
Try reframing the problem
If you reframe the child not wanting to do what you want them to do, by imagining how you would react if the child were unwell, that can help us identify coercion.
How do our angry critical outbursts look from a different perspective?
Noticing the differences between tone of voice we find acceptable with our children vs with other people, or thinking about how our tone of voice might look to a third party, can be eye-opening.