Is your baby trying to tell you something?
Young babies’ language decoded! Your babies can get their needs met.
unintended consequences
“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.)
“Will a child not made to do chores ever develop a work ethic? And if not, how will they ever have a good life?”
Enslaving our children by forcing them to do household chores is highly likely to impair their happiness rather than promote it, and it does nothing to inspire them to work hard at things that matter to them.
Limiting your children’s screen time?
A list of some of the real life unintended consequences of limiting children’s screen time.
“Surely it is cruel to force people to live with the consequences of the ideas and preferences they had when they were children?”
If, when you were five, your parents had told you that you would thank them later for the coercive education to which they were subjecting you, would you have believed them or not? And what would have made you think that they were lying to you?
“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.
“Is hiding medicine in your child’s food wrong?”
What turns taking medicine from something neutral or mildly unpleasant that you are willing to do to help you get better, to something terrifying and traumatic that you would rather die than do, is not actually the horrible taste of the medicine, it is the lack of control, the fear of being forced, the violation of your bodily integrity—which is a violation of your mental integrity, your agency. Something can feel fine if it is voluntary, but extremely traumatic if it is involuntary.
Help! Child hates eyepatch!
Practical suggestions about a child not wanting to wear a prescribed eyepatch.
Choosing to go to school or Iraq
Lots of things ‘suck’ for most people, but very few things suck for everyone. People are very, very different, and there is a danger in just assuming that a child is acting out of desperation when in fact they are quite healthily pursuing their own ends. The danger is that one will then, in effect, be refusing to help them pursue these ends, and, in effect, start to undermine them by constantly seeking alternatives and constantly acting on the assumption that there must be something wrong with them, or with the alternatives that you are providing for them, if they persist in wanting this.
When my view changed, our lives changed
When your view suddenly shifts, like when viewing the Gestalt two-face image, it can feel as if Taking Children Seriously has suddenly come into focus—and this paradigm shift creates a virtuous circle of positive change.
Parental rules mess up children’s thinking
Life is not black and white, but rules are. Punishments try to make the world fit into the categories of black and white but kids judge that there are greys anyway.So we help our children learn about those greys instead of just ignoring them they way many parents do. Iit leads to safer children.
Punishment as a teaching tool
Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
Beware the homeschooling mentality
The homeschooling mentality turns education into performance—the semblance of education. This interferes with learning.
Objectifying education sabotages learning
Learning is different from looking at one’s learning. Objectifying education as a thing to look at and judge interferes with learning.
“There are some issues on which I am authoritarian”
Coercion is stressful because it conflicts with most people’s wider ideas about morality, human relationships, and how to run a society, etc. Unless one mentions children or parenting, everyone agrees that consent-based solutions are better that coercion every time. That theory is held on some level by most people. They just suppress it in their parenting.
Coercion as a ‘solution’ to behavioural problems
Sometimes it is really the parents causing the problem, so maybe the punishment is being misdirected?!
Common emotional blackmail
Using love as leverage to double-bind children to obey—threatening to withdraw the relationship—is wrong. Children have a right to our love.
“What do you think?”
You may think you are helping your child learn when you answer your child’s burning question pedagogically, with a question, such as ‘What do you think?’ or ‘How might we find the answer to that?’, but it is more likely to annoy them so much they avoid asking you questions in future.
The social, educational, economic and political oppression of children
Parents and teachers do far more to oppress children than the laws do, and could perfectly legally desist from most of this oppression if they so chose. There is no legal requirement upon parents to punish their children for a wide range of perfectly legal activities, yet they choose to anyway. There is no legal requirement upon parents to insist that their children live with them, and yet parents whose children seek other guardians usually invoke their legal right to force the children to return. There is no legal requirement to deny children freedom of association, and yet many parents do deny their children that. There is no legal requirement to assault children, yet, in the name of discipline, many parents do so. There is no legal requirement to deny children access to information in the home, yet many parents go to extreme lengths to do so. There is no legal requirement upon parents to subject unwilling children to extra-curricular activities such as piano lessons and Girl Guides. Indeed, there is no legal requirement for parents to force their children to go to school, yet most do.