sovereign individuals
My child refuses to wear a coat in the cold! Help!
There is a reason a child doesn’t want to wear a coat, and with a bit of creativity and effort it is possible to discover the reason and (dis)solve the problem.
What does education taking children seriously look like?
Children learn the same way everyone does when they are completely free of others’ expectations and other interfering impediments to learning. They learn by wondering about something, thinking about it, finding out about it, perhaps reading about it or discussing it or looking it up on the internet, all driven by their own curiosity.
How do you raise a child to believe in freedom?
This question is in effect asking “How do I mould and shape my child into a person who believes that individuals should be free from unwanted moulding and shaping by others?”
What do you do about vaccinating your children?
Children should not only not have any medical procedures performed on them without consent, they should be in control throughout. That applies to vaccinations and everything else.
If you are not coercing your child, what do you do instead of coercion?
This question is like a coercively controlling husband asking: “If you are not coercing your wife, what do you do instead of coercion?” A paternalistic husband who controls his wife out of the best of intentions because he honestly believes that it is for her own good, could ask the same question.
Do children taken seriously ever ask permission?
Children being taken seriously are not subject to an authority from whom they need permission, so they no more ask permission than we do.
How do you determine what food to give your children?
How do you yourself determine what to eat? It is the same with children. What we eat is determined by a number of things, including what we feel like eating, which may be affected by our ideas about health and other things.
Is Taking Children Seriously only for the rich?
Taking children seriously does not depend on being rich.Many parents taking their children seriously are currently very poor indeed. Indeed many parents taking their children seriously choose less-well-paying work that they can do from home so that they can be with their children more. They just have very different priorities from other people.
Our 15-year-old wants to hitchhike to Outer Mongolia by herself. We think she is not yet “street-wise” enough. What should we do?
Our children’s lives are their own. We can explain our concerns and make suggestions, and ultimately, help them do what they themselves want to do. Has she hitchhiked long distances before? If not, perhaps she would like to try the Outer Hebrides as a trial run before Outer Mongolia.
Surely it is not coercive to have a rule that whenever our child goes out, he must first tell us where he is going and for how long? What about being a responsible parent?!
If, to you, being a responsible parent requires coercing your children, unfortunately I think that very conviction may itself cause some of the very catastrophes you hope to avoid. Children no more react well to being coercively controlled than we do. Coercion has unintended consequences that most parents do not take into account.
If my five-year-old were allowed to open the garden gate, she would be off wandering all over the neighbourhood and might be run over or kidnapped or murdered etc.
Solving a problem is not an exercise in negotiating or finding a compromise or wearing the other person down, it is about coming up with a solution that all of us love.
At what age should children first leave the house on their own, visit their friend next door on their own, go to the cinema on their own, hitchhike from coast to coast on their own, etc.?
In a relationship characterised by consent, on those occasions when the other person is warning us that our proposed course of action may be unwise, and explaining why, we have every reason to trust that such warnings are not attempts to thwart us and ruin our fun, but are actually important—that it is actually in our best interests to heed the warnings.
Is the purpose of taking children seriously to avoid the harm coercion would do?
Even if childhood coercion has virtually no effect, it would not change what it is right or wrong to do to people. And it is not right to do things to people that will impair the growth of knowledge.
How do you solve problems where there is a conflict of interest?
We look at our respective reasons for wanting what we initially want, and we create a way to proceed that we all prefer—a new idea that did not exist at the outset.
What do you mean by ‘paternalism’?
Paternalism is the idea that certain people or groups need to be controlled (in a benevolent fatherly way) for their own good.
Children fending for themselves like adults?!
Children very much need our love and protection, our care and attention, fun and play, support and vast amounts of engagement with their ideas and interests. They are not born able to survive and thrive without us. Only in the case of children do people think that needing support, protection, assistance, information and other things implies not having the same freedom, rights, respect and control over their lives as others.
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.
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.
No way out—and loving it
What if the thing that the child wants to risk is specifically a matter of not being able to easily get out of the situation? What if Jane wants to go pack-packing in the wilderness without a phone or radio? What if she does not want an escape route?
The Keeping-One’s-Options-Open mentality
For any human being who is not actually facing death by starvation or the firing squad, the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want—far from it—it is finding out (or rather, creating) what you want. That is what we deprive children of when we channel them into ‘keeping their options open’. It looks as though they are keeping their options open, but at each stage they are actually presented with only one option—the option where you do the standardized thing: something you can do without being human, by sacrificing the human part of yourself, the individual part.
‘Protection’ against a child’s will is coercion not protection
How would you feel if your partner took it upon himself to ‘protect’ you from something you do not want to be protected from, or he rode roughshod over your wishes with respect to the protection he was offering? It is dishonest to call something ‘protection’ when it is against the will of the person being protected. It is a parent’s responsibility to protect children from harm as perceived by the child.
Respecting children’s privacy
Parents should not subject their children to public scrutiny (not just on the internet) that the children themselves have not eagerly sought.
The One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest school of parenting
Parenting books often advocate being calm and ‘empathetic’ in our coercive control of our children, instead of shouting at them. This makes the coercive control chillingly Nurse Ratched like in its double binding mixed messages.
Kids Are Worth it, by Barbara Coloroso: a book review
This author has some good criticisms of overt coercion but spends about 200 pages advocating more covert coercion. Not Taking Children Seriously.
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.
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.
Genuinely protecting children versus coercing them
Children’s lives are their own, and they are far more competent than many parents think they are.
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…
Bathtime and hairwashing
In their anxiety about dirty hair, parents often forcibly wash their children’s hair or try to get them to allow shampoo on their hair. Bathtime then becomes a battle instead of fun, the child feeling as frantic to maintain control over what happens to them as you or I might in a similar situation. Exerting more coercive control over the child is a recipe for disaster.
What if your child wants a dangerous substance?
Reason keeps a child safe because the child has the correct theory (that the stuff is dangerous); coercion is risky because the child’s theory is not based on the reality of the substance, but upon the possible punishment for an infringement of the parental rule.
Criticism of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
If you are using language decently you do not use the word ‘rights’ for things that are compulsory for the person. Rights are supposed to be something we want, not something we don’t want.
The education game
Unschooling or home educating parents often draw distinctions between what they are doing versus what a school teacher or homeschooling parent would do, but I often see little difference between schoolish educational coercion and what they themselves advocate. There is a pedagogical agenda in both cases.