The ‘who should get hurt?’ error

“When a family has a certain dynamic that has the effect that people get hurt, there is another way that they could live, that would not have that property. To find that way, it is vital to stop thinking about who should get hurt (or whose fault it is), and start thinking about how to solve it.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge

From the archives: The original post was posted on 31st July, 1998

A poster had written:

“We have to remember that if the child seems distressed, they are. We should give them what they want and figure out something better for the next time. For example, say a little girl screams for her mommy only. Her mommy should go help.”

skg had replied:

“Her care-givers should help her solve her problem. Her daddy may be able to help her (the child) solve the problem before her mommy gets there, or her daddy may be able to help her while her mommy helps as well.”

The poster clarified:

“Oh, sorry. I meant in the situations we have been talking about here where the child is already crying for only mommy and it is obvious (or has been expressed) that no one else will do. For the father to offer his help at that time, or to try and present alternatives often results in more distress, because the child understands that such efforts translate into a longer wait for the one they really want.”

Understandably, the poster is turning back to the question of what to do in the immediate situation here. But when there is a continuing serious problem happening, it is vital to drag one’s thinking away from what to do in the immediate situation, because that is not where the solution to the problem lies. If your attention remains focused on the immediate problem, the discussion becomes one of simply who should be the one to get hurt (like the ‘who should rule?’ error in politics, where, as Popper tells us, if we concentrate on that question we are bound to get tyrannical rule; and the solution involves dragging our attention away from that, to the real question of how we can get rid of bad policies and bad rulers—or in this case how we can arrange things so that bad ideas can be improved upon and all of us can thrive.)

When I keep insisting on broadening the focus of the discussion, to address the cause not the symptoms, and when I refuse to focus on the immediate crisis situation as parents often want me to, I am not being callous or perverse. I just think that focusing the discussion in that way would make it unlikely that the problem will ever be solved.

BTW, there’s only one thing worse than focusing on who should get hurt, and that’s focusing on whose fault it is: is it (a) the toddler’s, for clinging to the “only mummy will do” theory; or (b) the mother’s, for not being willing enough to self-sacrifice; or (c) the father’s, for not making himself attractive enough as a parent; or (d) Taking Children Seriously’s, for urging a noncoercive solution; or (e) society’s (for not providing round the clock nannies courtesy of the tax payer). Or all of the above, or some of the above. You could write a thesis analysing this, but even if you found the true, final answer to whose fault it is, you would have made no progress towards finding the solution, which—remember—does exist! In fact, you would probably have moved further away from a solution.

The trouble with saying that where there is no solution found, the parent should self-sacrifice, is that that idea is neither a solution nor a sufficient condition for a solution to be found. In cases in which no solution is found, maybe it makes sense for the parent to be the one self-sacrificing rather than the child, but if self-sacrifice is happening day in, day out, something has gone horribly wrong. Occasional failures to find solutions are probably inevitable, and maybe parental self-sacrifice in those very rare situations is the best way of making them less harmful and less frequent. But daily occurrences of self-sacrifice are actually incompatible with Taking Children Seriously, just as direct coercion of the children is.

Occasional parental self-sacrifice might be a stabilising, self-limiting thing, but if someone is sacrificing night after night, that situation is unstable. It tends to destroy the person’s ability to create genuine solutions, and it becomes increasingly hard to prevent it from having terribly bad effects on the children, teaching them (in terms of their inexplicit ideas at least) that in order for them to get what they want, someone else has to suffer. It will also inevitably build up resentment and guilt in the self-sacrificing person and make her wish she were dead or that her children were, or something. And then of course she will feel guilty about that too. All this is BAD.

When a family has a certain dynamic that has the effect that people get hurt, there is another way that they could live, that would not have that property. To find that way, it is vital to stop thinking about who should get hurt (or whose fault it is), and start thinking about how to solve it.

If there is a chronic failure to solve a problem, then the chances are that the parties involved with have narrowed their creative thinking to the issue of who should get hurt, as I said. This is natural, but since that is never the real problem, creativity should be devoted, as always, to the task of finding the real solution which will have the property that nobody gets hurt. So one needs to find out:

what is causing it?
why is the syndrome the way it is, in detail?
how does the syndrome operate, in detail?
what practical steps would make matters even slightly better?
what practical steps would make it easier to discover the above information?
… and so on.

If they fail to find a solution, they will be more tempted than ever to devote their creativity to finding a way of coping with the immediate situation each time it arises. But this is a mistake because there is almost certainly no such way. They have no option but to simply carry on looking, and to try even harder to solve the underlying problem.

Yes, the question of who should get hurt in the immediate situation will come up as a practical issue the very next night, and the family will have to make some choice or other about that, and to have that at the forefront of their minds, and that is why these things are distressing and horrible. But when somebody from the outside tries to address the underlying problem, then it would be a mistake for the outsider, who has the luxury of not having to endure all the anguish, to be drawn into answering the question as if it were about who should get hurt.

Self-sacrifice as a way of resolving occasional cases when people have been unable to find a real solution for whatever reason, is something I have suggested on occasion as the lesser of the two evils, but it simply is not possible to do this in one of these chronic, highly distressing situations, because even when you give in nominally, there are psychological processes that go along with the self-sacrifice that are coercive.

If someone is breastfeeding toddlers through the night and it involves self-sacrifice every night, then somewhere in the mother, there will be an impulse to have this stop, and the child will empathise with that impulse as well as having the impulse to breastfeed, and this will be a chronic conflict in the child’s mind as well as in the mother’s. And so the mother will have become a more coercive parent, will become resentful, and so on.

Parents who have a tendency to self-sacrifice also have a tendency to feel guilty, and there is almost inevitably resentment too. However much ‘weight’ you give the children’s wishes and no matter how little you give your own (when no consensual solution is found), there is still absolutely no justification for the chronic self-sacrificing pattern where you feel guilty for telling the children that something they have done or are doing is painful and upsetting to you.

What often happens is that parents feel guilty for even thinking that. Then they feel even more guilty for wanting to say that, or for saying it, and whether they say it or not, they try to make up for it by self-sacrifice. Whereas of course what they ought to have done is not just say it when it gets unbearably painful, but long before, when it was just slightly inconvenient. They ought to be saying it as early as possible, and they ought to be expecting that a solution will be found and that everyone will be happy about it. It should never get to a state where there is extreme self-sacrifice going on chronically.

And then, on occasion, when a solution is not found, then you grit your teeth and self-sacrifice, but then, you don’t feel guilty or resentful, you feel noble. You feel that here is something worthwhile you are doing for your children and although it hurts and you are in a state of mental conflict, you don’t resent the children for that; you even get a nice warm glow when you think about it later. And the children don’t get anything bad to empathise with, and they don’t have the experience of their needs being dependent on a loved one’s suffering.

Note added 2026: As in this post above, I used to concede that in the rare cases when a solution is not found, instead of sacrificing the child’s wish, we should sacrifice ours. What I had in mind was the kind of ‘self-sacrifice’ that I was talking about in the final paragraph of the above post—the kind that gives you a nice warm glow—not the kind that leaves you a haunted shell of a person. But unfortunately, quite a few parents understandably interpreted such statements of mine to mean: instead of creatively resolving conflicts with your children, have a default of self-sacrifice—as if that were a noncoercive solution. This was terrible for those families, because self-sacrifice is both self-coercive and coerces those sacrificed for too, and what it meant was that problems were not getting solved in the families. The parents were having to numb themselves and to try to hide their pain behind a mask, and the children of course could sense that something was very wrong, and it was a complete disaster for all. So these days I am more careful to stress just how destructive and coercive self-sacrifice is. Coercion anywhere in the family system, including within the parent’s mind, is a spanner in the works of creative problem-solving. Self-sacrifice is not a shortcut to noncoercion as some parents have unfortunately thought. See also Merely desisting from coercion is not enough.

See also:

Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1998, The ‘who should get hurt?’ error, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-who-should-get-hurt-error