Listen, by Patty Wipfler: the missing connection
On Patty Wipfler’s book, Listen: Five simple tools to meet your everyday parenting challenges, and on taking connection seriously
Sarah Fitz-Claridge
What Taking Children Seriously means to me—the freedom to make mistakes
Having the freedom to learn from our mistakes is important for children too, not just us. Recalling coercive interference from our own childhood can spur us on to keep taking our children seriously as best we can.
“How did Taking Children Seriously start?”
Wikipedia is mistaken about how Taking Children Seriously started. This is how it actually started.
Help! Child hates eyepatch!
Practical suggestions about a child not wanting to wear a prescribed eyepatch.
How I came to Taking Children Seriously
How the word ‘respect’ led this parent to Taking Children Seriously
There but for an internet post go I…
The experience of someone new to Taking Children Seriously, from first scepticism to later taking their children seriously.
Unhappy with natural consequences
Parents call punishments ‘natural consequences’ when they are unwilling to accept responsibility for the unhappiness that is being caused, but accepting responsibility may be a necessary step to solving such problems.
“He would say that, wouldn’t he?”
Adults often discount children’s ideas with ad hominem psychologising, dehumanising them as though they do not exist as people.
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.
To be taken seriously
How a post on misc.kids (a newsgroup) led to this parent exploring Taking Children Seriously.
What sort of conflict is coercion?
All about coercion as a conflict within the mind
Answering questions about Karl Popper’s epistemology
Once one begins to see how extremely general this notion of conjecture and refutation is, then it begins to seem much more likely that learning always follows that pattern.
A big killer of creativity is having your creativity coercively diverted for someone else’s purposes
Creativity, knowledge, happiness, unhappiness and coercion: how we parents inadvertently kill our children’s creativity.
Expressing approval vs expressing appreciation
Expressions of approval are inherently manipulative the approval is designed to manipulate the child into meeting your own standard.
Why discussions take a philosophical turn
When people ask about a child staying at a friend’s house with no parents, do they want not only to know how they might handle it, but why that way, and why not the conventional way. Those whys are philosophy—ideas. That is why we get philosophical.
The heavy societal pressure to coerce children
The societal pressure on parents to control and coerce their children can be immense.
A lack of forcefulness is good not bad
A lack of forcefulness is not a negative characteristic unless you find yourself sacrificing your own desires. You respect your children and take their desires seriously. You need to be sure to respect yourself and your own desires as well.
The joy of consensual parenting
Taking children seriously is such a joy compared to the constant battle or successfully suppressed children of conventional parenting.
Avoid coercing other rational beings
A discussion about the rightness of coercing other creative rational beings.
There is no safety in ignorance
American children should be prepared for the playmate who reaches into his parents’ drawer and comes out with a loaded gun
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.
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.
Why allow minors to disregard the guidance of their elders?
Does financial supporting our children mean they must obey us? Is it right to expect quid pro quo for our support?
‘Influence’ versus ‘coercion’
If I disagree with the substantive theory assumed by your word choice, you can’t expect me to build that substantive theory into my language, because if I were to, I would be being forced to lie or contradict myself every time I use your term.
Induction and criticism
Your past experiences give you no basis to predict the future. And everyone criticises their ideas all the time, eg when they notice an anomaly or an unmet expectation.
Coercion warps knowledge structures
Knowledge acquired rationally are evolvable. Ideas in your mind not because they solved a problem in your mind but because of coercion are stuck.
Disagreeing about children’s rationality
Parents discuss children’s rationality.
Autonomous learning, autonomous life
This 1989 workshop advocated taking children seriously, not just ‘autonomous learning’.