Help! My baby hates diaper changes! Ideas for baby-pleasing solutions
Solutions many babies have loved!
rational
Fallibilism as a way of being and acting
People sometimes say explicitly that they are fallibilists, but inexplicably they are ‘saying’ that they are infallibilists. They say people are fallible and not omniscient, but they act as if they think people see the truth yet are wickedly choosing evil.
Why no ‘common preferences’?
Most problems are solved without any explicit communication. To the extent that people think of ‘finding common preferences’ as requiring or implying the need for explicit discussions, that is an understandable but very unfortunate misunderstanding.
What about instilling values like freedom, fallibilism and the idea of taking children seriously?
We may subscribe to the values of rationality and taking children seriously, but when it comes to detail, we may well be mistaken about particular aspects of it. So instilling anything, including those ideas we most value, is a mistake. We want our ideas to be corrected. We want our children to be able to correct our errors, not be saddled with them.
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.
Who am I to criticise someone else?
Not all criticism of other people’s ideas is good. Indeed some of it actually interferes with the person’s own criticism in their own mind. Wanted criticism is valuable. Unwanted criticism can be coercive and destructive of knowledge-creating processes that are happening.
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.
What do you have against coercion?
Coercion impedes progress by impairing error-correcting processes. “The right of the parent over his child lies either in his superior strength or his superior reason. If in his strength, we have only to apply this right universally, in order to drive all morality out of the world. If in his reason, in that reason let him confide.”
How to read this site
Ultimately, we all (including our children!) have to do what we ourselves think best, what feels right to us ourselves, not what someone else says is right. We are all moral agents in our own right. When we self-coercively override our own wisdom and do what someone else thinks we should be doing, we are acting wrongly by our own lights. No good can come of that. Treat this site as a source of speculative guesses and interesting arguments, not as an authority you should obey.
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.
Against ego-centric epistemology
A discussion about Karl Popper’s epistemology, reason, the growth of knowledge, relativism and certainty.
(NOT) listening to children
Taking children seriously means taking a child’s wish/decision to go to school seriously too.
Is creativity even desirable?
Creativity is not caused by problems, otherwise anyone who had a problem would solve it straight away. The only way to solve problems is through a creative rational process.
Children’s welfare secondary to a dogmatic ideology?
What if our whole policy of maximising our children’s welfare is mistaken? We parents cannot maximise our children’s welfare without modifying our ideas and practices when they seem mistaken.
Solving problems takes creativity
Learning involves changing preferences. Resolving disagreements involves changing preferences. People’s preferences are not fixed: they naturally change all the time. Problems are soluble!
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.
Popper’s epistemology and the everyday lives of children
Traditional education can be looked at a massive, standardized operation aiming to stuff the allegedly passive bucket minds of children.
Young children, reason and creativity
Why it is a mistake to think that you are seeing evidence that reason only develops later in childhood.
Young children, non-coercion and the interplay of reason
Any rational system has virtually no knowledge compared with what is possible. The whole point of rationality is what to do in the face of ignorance. It is not what to do when one already knows everything.