theory-sharing – Taking Children Seriously

Dynamic tradition and children

Determining which guidance to explore and which to reject is a very subtle skill, and it cannot be learned in an environment where guidance is compulsory.

“How do you tell pre-verbal children about dangers given that they do not understand explanations?”

With pre-verbal children we have to be creative and come up with concrete ways of conveying information about dangers, rather than just giving explicit explanations. (I suggest both.)

Don’t think for them

Our coercion of our children boils down to thinking for them, and expecting our children to follow our instructions. But children can think for themselves.

“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.

“Surely we should communicate our disapproval to our children?”

“Does taking children seriously mean not influencing them?”

The more (voluntary, wanted, enjoyable) engagement and influence in all directions, the better. And when people are voluntarily joining together and influencing one another, amazing things can happen. The whole may well be greater than the sum of the parts: they may create knowledge together that might not have happened were they each alone.

“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.

“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.

“How can we communicate urgent information to our pre-verbal toddlers?”

Often, we need to increase the bandwidth by communicating not just explicitly in words, but simultaneously also inexplicitly, through our facial expressions and body language, and we also need to find more concrete ways of expressing theories. Show them concrete effects. Help them understand.