“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.
pseudo-justifications for coercion
“If criticism is valuable why not be more critical?”
Subjecting anyone of any age to coercive education (unwanted criticism) is not taking them seriously. Nor is it even taking the valuableness of criticism seriously! Let alone taking the growth of knowledge seriously.
“Surely it is natural for parents to control their children?”
The feeling that ‘how it’s always been’ is right and natural does not mean it is. Many barbaric, highly immoral things felt ‘natural’ and right for centuries before progress was made.
The scar theory of parenting
People surprisingly often say they were taken seriously as children, and that they wish their parents had been conventional coercionist parents instead. But as soon as we get into the details, it is very obvious that their idea of taking children seriously is not taking children seriously.
Coercively protecting children
Protecting children should be done non-coercively.
What Taking Children Seriously is, and what it is not
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
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.
Whose ends?
Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.
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.
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.
Children as subhuman aliens
Are children really such an alien species that the way they feel about being thwarted is so completely different from how adults feel?
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.
Getting kids to ‘agree’ to TV limits
Getting children to ‘agree’ to TV limits is coercive, and pretending that it is non-coercive.
It is impossible to control for all the variables in any experiment involving human psychology
No sample can be large enough to control for all the variables in any experiment involving human psychology, because the variables include the ideas in people’s minds, and he number of possible ideas that a single mind could hold is far greater than the number of people on Earth.
Time out is not taking time out
There is a difference between sitting on a chair to relax, and enforced sitting on a chair. Or is being strapped in the electric chair also not a punishment?
“You gotta be kidding. That would never work with my kid.”
Parents demand practical examples, and then indignantly reject them saying “every child is different!” and “that would never work with MY child!” So why demand them in the first place?!
Common emotional blackmail
Using love as leverage to double-bind children to obey—threatening to withdraw the relationship—is wrong. Children have a right to our love.
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.
Dental coercion disaster
Brushing and flossing coercion can have disastrous unintended consequences. Those best able to take responsibility for their own dental health are those who have not been subjected to dental health coercion in childhood.
Running into the street
About the worry that a very young child’s brain and cognitive function and reason might be insufficient to prevent them inadvertently killing themselves by running into the road.
Parents know that punishment is damaging
We parents delude ourselves that we are doing the right thing, viewing our coercion as ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable’.