“Why not argue for Taking Children Seriously in terms of rights?”
The trouble with the idea of rights is that you can justify almost any postulate about children from the idea of ‘rights’ if you want to.
property
“What is Taking Children Seriously?”
Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: like other groups of human beings, children are people, not pets, prisoners or property. Full people whose lives are their own, not a different kind of person – full, equal humans who should no more be coerced and manipulated and moulded and shaped by others than we adults should be.
Wants are rightly conditioned by the rights and responsibilities
What a moral person would do, and want, depends, among other things, on what he believes the rights of the various people concerned are. And the consistency of this moral background, helps the parties to interact with each other non-coercively.
Which is the real ‘bad influence’? Video games or coercion?
Stealing from a child might influence the child to steal. And yet parents steal their children’s property in the name of preventing them from being under bad influences.
Respecting other people’s wishes
When I go to other people’s houses, I try to abide by their wishes in respect of their property and so on. I try to make my visit add to their lives rather than detract from them. I try to be sensitive and (to the extent that I think they will want this) helpful in a non-intrusive way. We all want to do the right thing, including our children.
Taking toys seriously (yes, really)
Taking children seriously involves not just solving obvious problems when they arise, but thinking about and experimenting with different ideas about how to make life even more delightful.
The dark side of John Holt
John Holt was so critical of school that sometimes he appeared to suggest that even children who want to go to school should not do so.
Punishment as a teaching tool
Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
What if a child wants to buy something the parent is boycotting for moral reasons?
When a child wants us to buy something we find morally objectionable, we have to remember that it is our child buying it, not us. You have no jurisdiction over your children. What they do can’t be morally wrong for you.
(Dis)respecting children
The casual disrespect shown to children by adults is really rather horrid.
Both coercion and “doing nothing” are mistakes
Children have to do what they themselves think is right, with no pressure whatsoever—that’s what non-coercion amounts to—but they also have a right to be told morality as best we see it.
It’s your house, your income, your everything; and if the kids don’t like it…
I and others believe that coercing children is harmful to them. We also believe that not coercing children is a desirable and possible lifestyle which also is nice for the parents. Please tell me how these views might be altered by correctly taking into account who my house belongs to.
How would you like it?
Imagine if your husband denied you dinner because you had not yet completed the chores he had decided you must do before dinner…
Punishing children using so-called natural consequences
The natural consequence of breaking something is that you have a broken thing. What happens after that is something someone or other decides. Describing making the child pay as a ‘natural consequence’ is at best misleading.
That something is legal does not make it right or best
An argument that the mere fact that something is legal does not make it right or best. Many different things are perfectly legal; not all of them are good.
Whose teeth are they anyway?
Parents sometimes forget whose teeth they are, and that parents have obligations to their children that their children do not have to them. These issues inform decision-making.