Taking Children Seriously: children are entitled to the same freedom, rights, respect & control over their lives as we are. Non-coercion; fallibilism; freedom.
Oxford, UK
Joined July 2021
- Tweets2.4K
- Following15
- Followers2.3K
- Likes618
Irrespective of age, people have to do what they themselves think is right. Most people (especially children!) also want to hear others’ moral theories. Taking Children Seriously does not mean children must grow up without the guidance they want.
14
626
“[W]e are bound to fall ill if... we are unable to love.”
- Sigmund Freud, 1914, On Narcissism: An Introduction
Love and attachment are a necessary part of taking children seriously.
ALT Featured today on taking children seriously dot com: Love 💜 Love is: this person is amazing exactly the way they are, and they can change if they want to and they don’t have to. 💙 A commitment to figuring it out 🩵 The boy who would not be tamed 💚 The joy of special family dinners without coercion 💛 Generous-hearted solution-focused love vs “When a solution is not found, is it always the parents who must bear the brunt of the sacrifice?” 🧡 The joy of consensual parenting ❤️ The Simpsons—the ‘best teacher in the world’ vs the love of Lisa’s family ♥️ The can-do attitude versus the can’t-do attitude 🤍 A chat about Taking Children Seriously 🩷 Instead of Cry It Out, try bedtime anarchy
It might feel like a loving action to coercively stop a child doing something you find concerning, but actually you are disconnected from them, no longer creatively engaging with them. You are trying to make them into a person they don’t want to be.
Parents once openly demanded obedience. Now, we no longer raise our voice, we raise our empathy. We smile softly and tell ourselves we’re listening, we’re connecting, we’re helping. Yet behind our well-meaning soft smiles and empathy, the (coercive) control remains. The difference is that now we do not call it control; we call it love.
If you are carrying around life-blighting resentment against your parents, what is that costing you?
Whatever terrible things they did, what is the impact on YOU of holding on to that resentment?
Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
If the conversations of parents or teachers are anything to go by, it seems that many adults have elaborate plans for what children should turn into, and almost none for listening to what the children actually want.
Some parents try to force their children to behave morally. But when doing the right thing is an act of forced submission rather than volition, we shouldn’t be surprised if the children lose their joy in doing right, and drop the very idea that doing right is worthwhile.
If your family has a dynamic whose effect is that people get hurt, there is another way you 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. ⬇️
When it comes to chronic problems in families, there is only one thing worse than focusing on who should get hurt, and that’s focusing on whose fault it is.
takingchildrenseriously.com/…
1
4
349
Erm..... I am so glad no one makes me tidy up, or limits my ‘screen time’ (and thinks that despite that coercive micromanagement on their part, I am ‘free’). There is a lot of wisdom in that child’s statement that George Orwell’s 1984 is about the lives of children.
Felizmente as restrições do meu filho são ter de arrumar o quarto e arrumar o tsunami que deixa por todo o lado da casa por onde passa e claro, não poder ver televisão nem estar ao telemóvel o dia todo. Fora isso, é bastante livre
8
494
Learning is a creative process through which people come to understand what they themselves want to understand, growing in directions they themelves find interesting, resolving conflicts, creating better explanations, and otherwise solving problems they themselves have noticed. Learning happens explicitly and consciously, but it also happens unconsciously, or inexplicitly. When you are learning, by your own lights you are making progress—intellectually, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, in your personality, relationships, values, and aims—even if you can’t articulate what the progress is.
What was once an explicit overriding of children’s ideas is now an emotional one—the same coercion, veiled in virtue. Parents compel in the name of compassion, but that does not loosen the bouble bind.
Parenting, n. A process by which parents industriously mould children either to resemble everyone else or to outshine them, depending on parental prejudices. Either way, the parent treats the child as a means to the parent’s ends, believing it to be ‘for the child’s own good’.
When parents decide what children should become, they stop seeing the child in front of them. The child turns into their pet building project.
What we are trying to do instead, is to understand what matters to this particular child now, and to support the child in exploring that, in achieving their own aims, in solving their own problems.
Authority speaks, but understanding listens. The child’s question may be frozen but it remains unresolved; it is still asking beneath every “yes”, “no” or “because I said so.”
“Coercion is needed because children are not rational/reasonable, and they have less experience of life.”
Just imagine you have been brought onto a wild and windy mountain by a friend of yours. Your friend has mountaineering experience, and is in a good position to handle the situations which may arise. You, on the other hand, have no mountaineering experience, so you are just beginning the creative process of understanding how mountaineering is done. So you are very dependent on your friend’s guidance, and you take your friend’s greater knowledge into account when acting.
And that is exactly what children do with their parents and others—take their greater knowledge and guidance into account when acting.
In neither case does it follow from the individual’s lack of knowledge and experience that coercion is necessary to protect the inexperienced person.
3
16
679
Why does it sometimes seem as if children do NOT take parents’ greater knowledge into account when acting?
Because there is a coercive relationship, so how are the children to know whether the parents are saying x to thwart them as usual, or actually x is something in the children’s interests to take into account?
8
300
Parents who feel certain that they know best may not see that their certainty imprisons both their child and themselves.
“At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values. Adults communicate this awareness to other adults with phrases like ‘Pardon the interruption,’ but with kids, it’s often assumed that the interruption is rather a necessary redirection or correction.”
- Aaron Stupple and Logan Chipkin, 2025, The Sovereign Child, Chapter 3: Watching what they want (screens), p. 41
“When people ask me if my child is ‘allowed’ to eat this or ‘allowed’ do that a shudder goes through my body. Is he my slave? Is he a subject in my kingdom and I the king? Is he a dog?”
- Sincere tyrannies, by Roshan Ali
ALT child eating a cookie; grandmother asking if he is allowed to eat that; father looking rather aghast.
10
276