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.
Protecting children should be done non-coercively.
A 2001 take on taking children seriously.
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.
Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.
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 has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
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.
Are children really such an alien species that the way they feel about being thwarted is so completely different from how adults feel?
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 children to ‘agree’ to TV limits is coercive, and pretending that it is non-coercive.
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.
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?
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?!
Using love as leverage to double-bind children to obey—threatening to withdraw the relationship—is wrong. Children have a right to our love.
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.
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.
We parents delude ourselves that we are doing the right thing, viewing our coercion as ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable’.