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Taking Children Seriously

235 points by monort 9y ago

zxcmx 9y ago
I like this idea but let's take it to the limit. Very young children (<2 say) aren't reasoning or reasonable creatures in the usual way we might expect of adults. They are very scientific (aka will try all the things and are surprisingly astute and pragmatic about learning what works) but they do not have a broader perspective on the world. "Rules" like "time to go to sleep" and "I'll stop you running onto the road" are not negotiable in any meaningful sense. Other rules for older children can often be viewed as extensions of this. Mistakes are not free. Some rules are OK.
- SCAQTony 9y ago
  Very well said. Even at 9 and 10, or arguably up to 18-years-old many rules are non-negotiable.
  - tfha 9y ago
    My experience is that by 13 years old a person has enough cognitive ability to understand and negotiate any rule. They lack the experience to negotiate every rule, but any individual thing they pick, from sex to drugs to skipping school, can be understood deep enough for them to set their own terms safely if they aren't happy with the default.
- Latty 9y ago
  Clearly it is a process - the point the article is making isn't that rules shouldn't exist, rather that any rule should just be a conclusion being explained to the child. i.e: The answer to "why" should never be "because I said so". I get that many kids will just ask why infinitely, and lots of parents say that because they are fed up and know the child isn't taking on board the answer, but I'd recommend instead insisting on a specific question - when they ask "why", ask "what don't you understand?" or drill down. This has the advantage of potentially catching a real miscommunication where the child doesn't understand something but truly is trying to work it out, and tends to remove an easy annoyance of the "why" forever. If the child isn't old enough to understand that cooker == hot and hot + hand == pain, clearly you have to stop them touching the cooker, but that's not mutually exclusive with helping them understand why, if possible. I remember my parents teaching me not to put my fingers in the door frame when it was open by putting a carrot through and letting me close the door, slicing the carrot in half. I wasn't afraid of punishment or following a rule - I understood why I shouldn't do it, so I didn't.
  - matt_the_bass 9y ago
    The carrot example is a great example. I think I’ll try it. Thanks! My only fear is that I’ll just teach them a new way to chop carrots :)
    - Latty 9y ago
      Obviously some things are not easy to make so visceral and easy to understand, but that one is indeed a great one. It stuck with me well.
  - somethingsimple 9y ago
    Pretty much this. A personal anecdote: a few months ago we realized our daughter was waking up very tired in the morning, so we figured she wasn't getting enough sleep. When we told her that bedtime was moving earlier, her initial reaction was to get very upset and ask why. Instead of saying "because we've said so" (like I know a lot of parents do), we calmly explained how it's important for humans to get adequate amounts of sleep, and that at her age she should be getting X hours of sleep at night (and we showed her the math matching the new bed time with the time she has to wake up for school). The explanation made perfect sense to her, and she's so into the new routine that we don't even have to tell her it's time to go to bed most nights.
    - Latty 9y ago
      This is it. It's definitely hard because teaching is not easy. It takes time to explain things to kids and it can be hard to tell what they are taking on board and when they are just asking questions because they can and not really caring (although making it a dialogue by asking questions back about what they want to know can help a lot). It definitely pays off a lot though, and I remember being a child and the frustration I felt when I didn't understand and rules felt arbitrary. I wouldn't wish that on any child.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      May I ask how old your daughter was at the time?
- brutus1213 9y ago
  Parent of a two year old. Totally agreed. Nap time and safety issues are when we lose our cool :(
jhiska 9y ago
Seems exhausting for a parent, but beneficial for certain careers. Dunno if it would significantly improve their thinking a decade later.
geoffbrown2014 9y ago
I'm a fan of Popper, but I'm skeptical this person has spent a lot time parenting, especially with difficult children. There are emotionally fragile adults and it would be 'anti-rational' to assume that at least some of them didn't start out that way. I wish him good luck though.
trackofalljades 9y ago
"Obedience and rules are bad." Yeah, okay, um...I really really really don't want to have to be around these families in a public space then. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to raise my own munchkins to be well behaved while hipster spawn are being disrespectful, selfish, and loud as hell with their parents cheering them on (at the library, movie theater, grocery store, playground, etc).
- JeanMarcS 9y ago
  I don’t agree. TBH I haven’t read the whole article, but as a parent raising two kids with this approach, The trick is to explain. It’s not rules as in « it’s forbidden to do this or that » but rather to explain why you don’t do that. You don’t behave well because you must, you behave well because it’s the kindest way to do. As stated, children are not stupid, and if you treat them as person and not as inferior human, a lot of good things can come out of this :-)
  - musage 9y ago
    I also think that trust is better than obedience, and that insight is better than rules. Sometimes there can be a rule first and insight later, such as "don't run into the road until you're old enough to understand why", but when the trust is there, and parents generally "practice what they preach", when they themselves act out of trust and insight rather than out of obedience to arbitrary rules, it helps. It doesn't mean the child will magically understand everything on first attempt without hiccups, but when parents lack too much grounding and confidence, that makes it really hard on kids. IMO it's demanding too much of both parents and children to expect that in 100.0% of all situations, but at least as something to strive towards I find it very important. Parents can be stressed out or confused, they can be under pressure from other adults, life can throw all sorts of curve balls and often we have to make do with what we have at that time. And that's fine; parents thinking they're bad parents just because they're not "perfect", or because life isn't perfect even though they did nothing wrong per se, also erodes trust and makes the whole enterprise harder than it needs to be. So at the very least, one has to trust that one can get to a place where one can trust themselves, and be on the way to that. Kids notice that, and adults can save themselves a lot of trouble by not lying to them, which is only possible if they aren't lying to themselves. "Because I say so" should never be the final statement, at least make it something like "right now because I say so, but I'll explain when things are less hectic" etc. Kids smell weakness and dishonesty, as they should. It's okay to be weak sometimes, but dishonesty is not. When I was a kid, I didn't take shit from anyone, but I also respected the adults who didn't take shit from me. And I still remember plenty of such occasions fondly, mostly teachers; but one time I was arguing with a friend, you might say we had a fight, and some random stranger bought us two ice cream cones and said to play nice (our parents were present, he wasn't a creep, it was in a holiday resort). I told him "das kannst du dir in die Haare schmieren", which you could translate as "shove it up your ass", but literally means "you can smear that into your own hair". He proceeded to smear the ice cream cone into my hair. Slowly, in a friendly way, while smiling, but that's still what he did. I was awestruck. I wasn't even mad, I instantly respected the person. And our parents laughed, too; I guess these days, with the wrong parents, he would have the cops called on him. But he just took me seriously, he didn't treat me "like a child", that's how it felt to me. It's hard to explain, and the anecdote is really silly I know. But that actually happened, and I'll always cherish the memory ^^
fishnchips 9y ago
Yes and no. From my limited exposure to kids (father of two - 3.5 and 1.5), while in vast majority of cases explaining makes a difference, there are areas where there's perfect understanding but that doesn't lead to desired behavior. Like the older taking everything away from his little brother. He knows perfectly well he can't do it. He was also shown how it feels (I took everything from him for several minutes). He still does it. There's a certain emotional (on one side) and moral (on the other side) aspect that goes beyond mere explaining and understanding.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Children don't develop meaningful self control and decision making until age 3-5. He's still developing the capacity to make decisions about not doing something he wants to. I would argue that the moral/explaining/understanding part of the equation is never even invoked because the capability to invoke it hasn't physically developed yet.
  - fishnchips 9y ago
    It's never a binary thing, though. You can't just one day wake up and say 'son, now you're old enough to know better'. If you do so, a smart kid will simply ask 'so dad, what changed since yesterday?'.
    - Retra 9y ago
      That doesn't seem much of an obstacle. Something did change, and you can certainly explain that.
      - twic 9y ago
        The point is that nothing did change. Children don't go from animals to sentient beings overnight - they develop gradually. So how do you deal with that? You take them seriously, and you accept that it isn't going to work at first, and then will work imperfectly, but will work fully when they're ready for it.
JeanMarcS 9y ago
My brother, who have no kids, have a kind of doing things that makes the kids like him (he was a handball coach at the time). When I asked him what it was many years ago, he told me : « I treat them as adults, talk to them on an equal base » So when my children was born, I decided to do the same for them. Talking like an adult (with sometimes words they had no chance to understand), explain the why and how of stuff we ask them to do. Never raised the hand on them. Sometimes it’s a little hard to deal, but most of the time everything goes well. We’ll see when they will be teenagers, but for now, we all live in harmony, and we are often complimented by other parents for their behavior. Maybe we got lucky (we will never know) or may be this approach was good. But for us, it’s the way to do.
- emerged 9y ago
  It's always worked for me. Kids are used to being dominated and condescended. If you talk to them as respected individuals, you usually get respect back. It also gives more weight to the times you have to be more assertive. The other helpful thing is to let them be right. Make mistakes on purpose and let them correct you. They're so hungry to be right that it gives a real confident boost. It should go without saying that this strategy should be used only when it's reasonable, not in cases of safety or when keeping kids from wrecking havoc etc.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    > [Subordinates] are used to being dominated and condescended. If you talk to them as respected individuals, you usually get respect back. It also gives more weight to the times you have to be more assertive. This is actually pretty good advice for any time you're trying to manage people -- and kids are just little people.
    - wasterone 9y ago
      Yes and because children are people rather than intellectual abstractions they need authority (not domineering but authority backed up by force nonetheless). A developing mind is like a nation, with many strands. I live in a relatively peaceful and advanced country but I know that if the police had their weapons and handcuffs taken away tomorrow then evil strands would quickly rise up and destroy everything.
ChrisSD 9y ago
I'm skeptical. Their emphasis on "rational philosophy" and Popper* would be more convincing if they put the research front and centre. Everybody has advice on how to bring up someone else's kids. Most of it isn't nearly as helpful as they imagine. * Aside: seriously people, there have been rational philosophers since Popper
wasterone 9y ago
>Punishing doesn’t help with learning. The point of punishing isn't to help with learning, it's to restore the emotional connection between parent and child by stopping the parent from hating the child. As Jordan Peterson put it: 'Don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them'. (He said this because he knows that people who dislike others work against them whether they realise it or not.) The arguments against punishments tend to focus on severity, particularly if physical violence is involved. But the stronger the existing connection between parent and child, the milder the punishment need be. If it is strong even a frown might suffice.
- psyc 9y ago
  This is the best justification I’ve seen, though it still isn’t very good. As a child, I saw discipline as serving the convenience of the adults. Sometimes providing the adults with a sense of power over others that they couldn’t experience in their adult relationships. I have yet to see anything that would change my mind about this. The best parents I know strive to address their kids as something close to equals, as much as possible. The others are mean people who themselves lack self-control.
  - wasterone 9y ago
    My guess is that you saw punishment where it was excessive. This is a symptom of that lack of control at a deeper level. But control comes from self-awareness; removing authority would only make matters matters worse. Parents who try to be 'equals, as much as possible' will grow to dislike those they are responsible for and will periodically lash out in an uncontrolled manner. Literally so in some cases. Conversely, kids will willingly endure any punishment or chore in order to restore emotional connection to their parents.
- notduncansmith 9y ago
  > The point of punishing isn't to help with learning, it's to restore the emotional connection between parent and child by stopping the parent from hating the child. Maybe I'm misreading you, but any resentment a parent builds towards their child is a symptom of their own lack of emotional development; punishment is absolutely not an outlet for making parents feel more in control so they can avoid resenting their children. There is deliberate behavior modification, which creates an obvious consequence as a hack around the inability to comprehend more subtle ones, but doesn't involve any emotional exchange. Then there is emotional abuse that makes the abuser feel in control (guilting, shaming, yelling, etc). Anything you don't like that comes out of a person, went into that person, either genetically or environmentally. The only way to help them stop doing that is to help them build a better platform to work from.
jellicle 9y ago
Garbage like this is what happens when people reason from first principles without any reference to what they are actually trying to do. It's a parenting philosophy composed by someone who has never met a child (and has no interest in meeting one). Coming up next: "How to build houses", by someone who has never built one and has no interest in building one.
- deleted 9y ago
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paulcole 9y ago
My dad says the biggest mistake most people make when raising kids is treating them like people.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  What should they be treated like?
  - hashmal 9y ago
    Like kids, d'oh!
- hrktb 9y ago
  As with any oneliner, it’s of no value without context. Kids need a different treatment when they are 3 months old than when they are 2, yet different from a 7 year old, different from a teenager and different from a 20 year old. Otherwise you realize you will always be your dad’s kid, so by your oneliner he’ll never treat you like people.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
SmooL 9y ago
I can attest to this; as a child nothing irked me more than when I perceived adults to not taking me seriously. I always told myself that as I grew older I'd take children seriously and treat them as an adult
brokensyntax 9y ago
With my daughter, I avoided telling her something was wrong, or bad. If she was doing something that negatively impacted the people around her, I'd hold her attention. (This practice started around nine months, so quite literally held her attention. Both hands, and maintained eye contact.) In a calm voice I would ask her questions about what she is doing, and those around her. She's usually come to an understanding of her own, pre-veral she'd go give hugs and change her behaviour. Post-verbal she would apologize, and change her behaviour. I was always very proud of her ability to learn and look at out side perspectives. Even if she had to be prompted into viewing them. I recently thought about this, (earlier today actually). How it differs from sending to their room or corner to "think about what they did." They don't know at that age what they did. Heck up into young teen years. What do YOU do when sent to your room? If you're like me, you stomped, you sulked, you threw things, you thought about how much everyone hates you. That you're just a burden, that no one would even notice if you were gone... Then your think, no they'll notice, that they have less food to make, less expenses etc, all the ways your mere existence is a burden. Maybe, again, if you're like me, you drift into thought about your grandparents, they love you, they'll miss you. You're never a burden to them. You contemplate running away, maybe to their house. But at no point, do you think about apologizing, what did you do? They're just mean control freaks! So if you didn't come to think about your actions, you an intelligent, thought oriented, hacker type, what hope does your adolescent child have? Share your wisdom and insight. They'll learn better if you let them think and help them to it, than if you tell them to and leave it at that. They might even help you think about new perspectives, who knows.
- splittingTimes 9y ago
  > In a calm voice I would ask her questions about what she is doing, and those around her. Would you mind to elaborate and give concrete examples? In day care we have a 2y old child (younger brother to a 3.5y old) that bites (hard), scratches and hits other kids when it does not get its way. This goes on for over a year now. The parents dont seem to know how to cope and just shrug it off as "he is just wild, thats what kids do in this age". The other day i could witness myself how he was hitting an older kid with a sound wood full force on the head (because the other kid did not want to give away his toy). The other kid started crying and he had this evil grin, knowing full well he hurt the other kid. What to do with such a child?
flashman 9y ago
> Most approaches to parenting start with some beliefs about how to treat children first Like believing they respond to reason? Hell, even adults aren't rational beings. We're totally ruled by our emotions and beliefs, and it is incredibly hard to persuade someone using reason.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Why are you assuming reasonableness increases with age? Isn't it possible children start out reasonable and get unreason baked into them through their experiences?
partycoder 9y ago
Some people complain about kids making nonsense. But kids get exposed to a LOT of nonsense. Think about it: You are trying to make sense out of the world and people keep making gibberish sounds, hiding for no reason, showing you anthropomorphized animals and objects, telling you stories that have absolutely no point, having you play with stupid pianos that make random sounds... Then, after they have built a model of the world containing all these nonsense, a lot of time then has to be spent having them unlearning that nonsense through discipline. However, what if they don't get exposed to the nonsense in the first place? Or get exposed to it in a more structured way? I mean entertainment doesn't have to be nonsensical. You can learn about animals, architecture, vehicles, even simple math... instead of dumb trains with faces and teletubbies making gibberish sounds. Btw, I am not trying to say the production of that material has no merit. I can have a lot of merit, and can be incredibly creative, it's just it could be better focused.
- comstock 9y ago
  Kids are not entertained by cartoons because they are forced upon them. Kids are often attracted to, and entertained by cartoons and other stories. Why exactly I don’t know, but they also make up their own imaginary characters sometimes. In any case, they don’t simply have this stuff forced upon them (in general).
JepZ 9y ago
I think an important part of 'rules' is that the child learns that a rule is reasonable and fair. So for every rule the parent should be able to explain the 'why'. That said, rules are very important, not only to give the child an orientation at which it can measure its own actions but also because they can introduce some kind of objectivity into parenting (from the perspective of the child). So rules should always be communicated to the child before they are enforced. Punishing a child for breaking a rule it never heard of before is not fair. Btw. sometimes it can be a good idea to let the child define rules to let it find out how well it can follow its own rules ;-)
spiderfarmer 9y ago
I fully agree that you have to take children seriously, respectfully and make sure they are able to live life to the fullest. But the "rules are bad" trope is, unfortunately, a trend in The Netherlands. Parents that live by this rule are sacrificing themselves. It's bad parenting. I see a lot of parents (mothers mostly) in public places desperately trying to explain their dissatisfaction to their misbehaving children. The children meanwhile are completely disregarding them and will continue doing whatever they were doing untill the parents give up. The parents will end up awkwardly trying to ignore their children, visibly ashamed but still unable to use their authority for fear of breaking their chosen path to happy parenting. They won't even raise their voice. As a parent, I see this all the time. In school, on the street, in stores, it's everywhere. Reasoning with kids that are completely unwilling to listen to your "adult talk" is completely hopeless. Rules aren't fun but they aren't bad either. You don't have to explain your rules everytime, just make sure you enforce them consistently.
- davedx 9y ago
  I live in the Netherlands, have 4 kids. I don't see what you see. Anecdotal evidence is a really terrible way to inform your parenting.
  - spiderfarmer 9y ago
    Sometimes what you experience firsthand is ten times more valuable then what you read on the internet. And maybe the struggling parents I saw are a local problem. But judging by the upvotes, there are more people who have similar experiences.
    - Trombone12 9y ago
      Or maybe its just the childless Americans (raised in a culture where spanking is widely accepted) that upvote the tough line on child discipline. I mean, your original post was really about how to enforce rules, though you spent most of it conjuring up the image of publicly annoying children and then assuming their parents don't set any rules. Somewhat surprisingly you also describe how the same parents that supposedly don't set rules clearly trying (but failing) to enforce said non-existing rules... Just say what you mean: you make your children obey you by physical means.
blakesterz 9y ago
> Parenting generally goes pretty smoothly when you and your child agree. CHILD. Singular. If you have more than a couple children you know how different it is. Someplace there's a comedian that has a bit about how having one or two kids is like comparing the Coast Guard to the Navy Seals. It's VERY different having a CHILD than having several CHILDREN.
- ashark 9y ago
  We have three. If for any reason we have to care for only one for a stretch of time, it's like having no kids. Man, it's so much easier. Three kids is, no joke, like 10x as hard as one. Each one also makes housing way harder (=more expensive, fewer options), especially after the first one. And transportation. And, and, and.
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  Absolutely. Especially when you have multiple children close in age you might bring the voice of reason to your family, but your kids will learn a lot about jealousy, agression and defiance from their counterparts.
newfoundglory 9y ago
The nonsensical overestimation of children shown in this thread leads directly to travesties like this judge arguing that toddlers are capable of representing themselves in immigration court. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-a-3-year-old-represent-herself-in-immigration-court-this-judge-thinks-so/2016/03/03/5be59a32-db25-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html?utm_term=.5aca5438c0da https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-a...
- slavik81 9y ago
  > But the questions can easily trip up children with no lawyers, the attorneys said. A judge may ask, for example, if the child wants to leave the country voluntarily or would rather be ordered deported. If the child chooses either option, he or she cannot apply for other forms of immigration relief such as asylum in the United States. I'm an adult and I would need a lawyer to be able to understand and answer questions like that.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  There's a huge difference between parenting and an adversarial courtroom. I think it's possible to agree with the article and also disagree with this judge.
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    Definitely - I was very much responding to the hn comments here, not the article.
- b4lancesh33t 9y ago
  I would tend to agree. Somewhere else in the thread someone recounted a conversation with a 24 month old far more advanced than any two year old I've met could manage. I think it would be pretty lucid even for my 3yo. That's not to say the conversation couldn't have happened, but the advice seems somewhat miscalibrated if that is taken to be typical. My question: for all this talk of rationalism, where is the research to show this approach yields better outcomes than any other?
avip 9y ago
I dedicate this comment to future parents. You'll come across many a BS, and it'll hit you in a very sensitive period of life - when many of your established defence mechanisms would enter a general CCD state. And some of it is actually true! But how can we tell the difference? Surely there's a simple bluestick test for that? Yes, there is! 1. Does it offer something concrete? Does it give examples? Does it include recipes how to handle situations? Can you tell if your own parents followed that "way" or not? Parenting BS/fluff tend to appear in the form of a "philosophy". If you say something very specific, people may actually try it, and find out it does not work for them. 2. Ask your parents. They are 20++ yoe ahead of you on this one.
- twic 9y ago
  > 2. Ask your parents. They are 20++ yoe ahead of you on this one. And they might still not be very good at it. There's a catch-22 here, in that if your parents were good at parenting, you've probably grown up into a well-adjusted adult whose natural instincts are to be a good parent yourself. Whereas if your parents were bad at parenting, you've probably grown up to be a normal messed-up member of society whose instincts can't be relied on. Parenting advice is most useful for those people, and they can't rely on their parent's evaluation of it.
analog31 9y ago
Here's a puzzle that I've struggled with: I love critical rationalism, but I'm a terrible debater and negotiator. Put in the context of raising kids, if they ask "why" and end up winning the debate despite being wrong, do they get their way? Should my own actions be dictated by anybody who happens to be a better debater than me? I hope the hell not. What if the options at hand aren't as crystal clear as the textbook cases that tend to be cited in discussions and books, and the illusion of rationality is just that? What if debate skill is not strictly rational, or even informational, but includes an emotional component plus time pressure? I suspect that what we consider to be "irrational" approaches, such as asserting our own authority, are in fact survival skills that reflect the limitations of rational debate.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > but includes an emotional component plus time pressure? You don't even need those things. Intelligence and practice will suffice, even for "purely rational arguments". Defending Truth makes debates easier to win, but isn't a necessary or sufficient condition.
  - analog31 9y ago
    Maybe motivation is a factor too. Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying, whereas spending intelligence and practice on becoming a better musician motivates me. ;-) Also, I suspect that Truth isn't always easy to discern, especially in a world where we're immersed in tradeoffs and complex systems.
    - erasemus 9y ago
      >Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying Yes and I think that's because they entail criticism, which is used to attack ideas and people we don't like. Whereas creating something worthwhile is about discovering or perceiving something already inside the mind that we do like (and therefore cannot seriously attempt to criticize). Building a family is an attempt to create something worthwhile.
adrusi 9y ago
This page credits David Deutsch with first writing about this philosophy of parenting. It's more-or-less the style of parenting I was subjected to. I didn't know until now that he had written about parenting, but he's the author of one of my favorite works of nonfiction, The Beginning of Infinity. I plan to take this approach to parenting with my own children. That is to say, I'm very supportive of it. HOWEVER: there's a major philosophical failing of TCS, which is that you can't objectively justify claims about what you should and shouldn't do (aka normative claims). If you tell your child "don't hit other kids," they can disagree, which will force you to justify your original statement with a more general normative principle. Eventually you'll be forced to appeal to the foundational principles of morality, something like "it's bad to be in certain mental states like pain, good to be in other states, like joy" and "what matters is which of those mental states the average person on earth is, not which state you, personally, are in." These are one possible version of the sacred principles of morality, and they are probably not justifiable. There are attempts to justify them, such as Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, but Harris relies (implicitly) on hard to grasp claims like the nonexistence of self, which you're not going to be able to explain to a seven year old unless they're exceptionally introspectively mature. Sacred principles can just as well be called unquestionable principles. They don't have a justification, but our way of life relies on their acceptance. Society will not tolerate threats to their sanctity, so if you let your child question them, society will punish your child. If you say "don't hit other kids" and your child says (after a chain of justifications) "it doesn't matter if other kids feel pain, what matters is that I feel good when I hurt them," you're not going to be able to rationally argue against that. The most honest response is the ad baculum "if you say things like that when you're an adult, someone might just murder you, so you ought never to do things that you can only justify in that kind of way unless you want to be murdered." But that's not really teaching your child morality; they might someday find themselves in a situation where they don't need to worry about violent reprisal for questioning sacred values, say if they become a powerful dictator. Are you committed enough to morality to want them to be moral even if they don't have to be? Should you be? If yes, then you can't take your children seriously when they question sacred principles. How, then, do you respond when they say "all that matters is that I feel good when I hurt other kids?" You could say "You're wrong. Why? Because I said so." Or you could just punish them. But if they're used to always being taken seriously, they're going to notice that something's fishy. Fortunately, there's a good chance your child won't ever question sacred principles. I was taken quite seriously as a child, but I justified the sacred principles to myself in ways that only began to crumble when I was 17, so my parents never encountered the dilemma I just described. By the time my old justifications ceased to work I was already adept at being a moral person, and I was ready to understand the lessons of Crime and Punishment, which warns against violating the sacred principles of your society despite acknowledging them to be unfounded, and I was ready to understand the more sophisticated justifications of the sacred principles. But other children could be more likely to question sacred principles. I wasn't naturally inclined to cruelty. I didn't want to hurt other kids. When I did hurt others, I didn't need to learn why not to, I just needed to learn how not to. Not all kids are like that (not a moral judgment) some will need to by told why they shouldn't be cruel, and you can't do that while taking them entirely seriously.
sandov 9y ago
As a kid, I had so many questions about physics and when I asked my mother about it she gave some dumbed down reply and when I inquired further she said that I would learn that later, it was really frustrating. If I ever have kids, the one thing that I want to do right is answering their questions appropriately, I would have loved my mom to say something like "because electrons attract protons, no one really knows why, there are people who dedicate their lives to trying to know why that attraction exists, they are called physicists. That attraction is one of four fundamental forces that we know of, the other three are gravity, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force". Even if I understood less than half of what she said, I would have known that there are people who also wanted to know what I wanted know, and would feel fascinated by that.
sossles 9y ago
The article makes many good points but (as many others have noted) it really misses the mark on rules and obedience. Rules and obedience are an essential abstraction to allow larger organisations of people to function and interoperate. The rules aren't always the best for each individual at every time, but overall they help things run smoothly. There is always some kind of consequence for not following them. To understand (and eventually change) a system you always starts with a high level acceptance of the 'rules' and drill down from there. Why shouldn't children also be taught to operate on that basis? Say they want to question the 'rule' about having 3 meals a day. That's fine, drill down into why and maybe change it. Maybe bed-time is unfair, perhaps the 8yo doesn't want to go to bed at the same time as the 5yo. It should be ok to challenge these things to an extent, but at the end of the day someone needs to make things run smoothly for everyone, and that's the parents' job. Rules (with an expectation of obedience) are how they do that.
- veidr 9y ago
  I agree with you. My grandma used to say, "children are as complicated as people, only more so." But rules and obedience are an essential abstraction. With my own young kids, I try to let them challenge the rules and chart their own course as much as I can, but if you go with no rules at all I think you are almost as likely to end up with a bad result as if you parented through only rules and obedience. When confronted (as all parents inevitably are from time to time) with blanket ideas for "how to raise children" I find it helpful to swap out "children" for "employees" and then "farm animals" and see how the advice sounds from those two additional perspectives. Children are kind of a middle ground between those (as well as being many other things). There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic.
  - tonteldoos 9y ago
    > There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic. This made my day, and I'll be repeating it to others - thanks :)
ropable 9y ago
There are some useful, attractive parenting principles here, but it's worth remembering that raising a child is like a large, complex, multi-year software dev project with a vague spec and constant scope creep. There are some methods that can help, but every one is a unique snowflake. I love the concept of critical rationalism, but it isn't going to work always, or work for all kids. Sometimes, someone in charge just needs to make a decision for things to work. Set the example, be consistent, give them your attention, help them to own their decisions, and teach them to follow Wheaton's Law. After that, you've just got to hope that things work out. Source: father of two (quite different) children, with approximately 10,000 parenting failures under my belt.
- b4lancesh33t 9y ago
  I love your humility. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
- abvdasker 9y ago
  That's such a wonderful description of parenting!
perryprog 9y ago
Child here! 14 years old, in middle school. If anyone has questions, I'd be happy to answer.
baldfat 9y ago
Why do we rationalize with Children and punish teenagers? We must build trust with our children. Research has shown that this is the key, especially for children of abuse. To me (Father of Five, two biological and three foster) this is 100% flipped upside down and isn't well researched nor universal. My foster kids had horrible environment growing up and every kind of abuse. Their mother murdered 8 blocks from our house by a baseball bat to her head while the children were in my home. Children raised from abuse would actually be harmed by this. Children need to learn 100% but not through non-developmentally appropriate techniques. Kids learn through play doing in a safe and purposeful manner. This is neither purposeful nor safe. They need to know that they must use gentle hands and bodies, be respectful to each other and pick up after themselves. If it doesn't work for abused or special needs children it isn't universal. This is what good research looks like for parenting. https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/research/#sthash.6ctKjxoi.dpbs https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/research/#sthash.6ctKjxoi.dpb... 1) We have children ask and not tell what they want 2) Parenting is hard and demanding and we invest in it 3) Kids will look at you when you are speaking with them (FOr building up relationship) 4) Redirect bad behavior by having the child redo in the correct behavior. Not yelling or demanding. Scripting 5) Socialize interaction with competent adult and ability to play properly with other children. https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s
- comstock 9y ago
  I agree, but parenting is a hard job which society often doesn’t seem to value very highly. In this community I’ve literary heard someone say “Machine learning is very important for the future of humanity, so I can’t spend time looking after my child”. For me it’s all about investing time, and the long game. Looking after, being patent and educating a child for a couple of hours isn’t too hard. Doing that for 10s of hours every day, particularly with young children, is much harder. It’s even harder when that work is systematically devalued.
- DanBC 9y ago
  You speak about universality, but then say this: > 3) Kids will look at you when you are speaking with them (FOr building up relationship) Autistic people sometimes have trouble making eye contact when you're speaking. Some black people are taught that direct eye contact in some situations is a display of defiance, and is to be avoided.
pcblues 9y ago
I have not found enough evidence to change from being a strong wall of no to my children. They know I’ll keep talking with them through their big emotions and that I love them but I don’t negotiate with terrorists. 5 and 8, they are thriving.
Clanan 9y ago
If you are a parent and are interested in this article, I highly recommend you go find another parenting method that actually provides any semblance of research, investigation, etc. This is nothing more than an anecdotal blog post about parenting, filled with agreeable-sounding ideas. Many of which seem to only pertain to handling children's learning, rather than overall parenting, but the author suggests them generally. My two cents: children are not little adults and should not be treated as such. Adults have >20 years of life experience, children do not. Children do not know how to control emotions and are not reasonable (duh). There is substantial research into how children develop, including their brains and thought processes. For example, young children are not capable of abstract thought like adults are. This recent fad of treating children as equals is, to me, bizarre and damaging. Don't learn from a random blog post - go read the science (or a parenting book by someone who has). Anecdotally, children I encounter who are raised by this sort of method are rude, brittle know-it-alls who cannot accept being told 'no'. My favorite parenting rule of thumb: teach your children now with rules and tough love because if you don't, the world will teach them later - and the world doesn't love your children.
- abvdasker 9y ago
  Another thing that seems pretty suspect is that this article makes no mention of ideas of empathy, emotion, or love. I don't have kids, but it seems a little cold to raise a child without an emphasis on understanding their emotions and the emotions of others. Teaching rationality is all well and good but it's no substitute for helping kids learn softer skills -- since the human interactions they facilitate in later life are probably more important than being able to solve a hard math problem. Also the section that "Children Aren't Fragile" is a gross oversimplification. Kids are extremely fragile when it comes to things like neglect, abuse and instability in their environment.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    I would not go as far as "extremely" there, kids are resilient too but anything with big enough impact will have far reaching results.
foxfired 9y ago
Everything is wonderful when the kids are not in chaos mode. When you are with children and they are behaving it is easy to take them seriously. But find yourself in a situation that you don't even know how everything started and kids are just going nuts, then all the rules change. At the end of the day you want to get them to go to non-chaos mode before you can apply any technique. What worked for me is creating a pattern very early on: "I'm gonna count to 3 and we will do X" I've said that a thousand times since very early childhood. Now, before I even finish the sentence, the kids get in position and wait for "three!" After that we have a normal adult conversation, sometimes I even use words (like someone mentioned in the comments) that they have no hope of understanding. But they know that whatever they say they will be taken seriously. So far it has worked for me with both my niece and nephew and I hope that they never find out that I have no backup plan if they don't stop on three. In other words, you need create a pattern that leads to quiet mode before you can take the kids seriously.
ianamartin 9y ago
Kids acting like kids is basically why we invented religion. You can't actually always take a kid seriously. But you can always threaten them with god. It works, apparently.
orasis 9y ago
Beginners follow the rules. Intermediates bend the rules. Masters create the rules.
Manglano 9y ago
I hear a lot about kids being kids, and adults being "childish." By the time I was ten, I could read Michael Crichton and Frank Herbert, and although I wasn't a mathematical wiz, I did have an innate understanding of the scientific method. I'm of the mind that children have a precocial learning intelligence similar in rank and power to the adult mind--that is, the moment a child is born, they begin to absorb and construct knowledge about the world, with the only difference to the adult mind being that adults have more context for their "world theory"--and that it's the duty of the public to acknowledge and foster this. When I consider that some people talk to children with "baby talk," I wonder how many people have been hurt by `keeping parrots with chickens` (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot#Intelligence_and_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot#Intelligence_and_learni...) so to speak. It's a controversial theory that might garner criticism, but that may be a failing--children can hear voices in the womb before they're born, talking to them in infancy as if they can't understand their mother's language is, at first, disrespectful, and later, possibly inhibits their development.
kingkawn 9y ago
a lotta you are really convinced that being nasty is akin to being reasonable and practically minded.
RebeccaBV 9y ago
I do have children. And I did raise them following Taking Children Seriously to the best of my ability. If I had it to do over I'd only learn TCS better and follow it better, not in the other direction. It was liberating to me to find that it was possible to raise children without using rules or punishment/reward. My children are grown now and are wonderful people. So if anyone here is thinking TCS can't work out well with real children, I'm here to tell you it can. This is a small sample size but it's more than zero.
- JustinCEO 9y ago
  hey RebeccaBV, glad to hear about your positive experience with TCS! there is an active online community which discusses TCS and other related ideas at the Fallible Ideas discussion group. you can learn more about important philosophical ideas like TCS and get help applying them to your life! http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info
ludddite 9y ago
Anon makes a judgement about TCS. He does not use reason to interact with his child. TCS is about using reason. He does not take his child seriously.

235 points by monort 9y ago

I like this idea but let's take it to the limit. Very young children (<2 say) aren't reasoning or reasonable creatures in the usual way we might expect of adults. They are very scientific (aka will try all the things and are surprisingly astute and pragmatic about learning what works) but they do not have a broader perspective on the world. "Rules" like "time to go to sleep" and "I'll stop you running onto the road" are not negotiable in any meaningful sense. Other rules for older children can often be viewed as extensions of this. Mistakes are not free. Some rules are OK.

SCAQTony 9y ago
Very well said. Even at 9 and 10, or arguably up to 18-years-old many rules are non-negotiable.
- tfha 9y ago
  My experience is that by 13 years old a person has enough cognitive ability to understand and negotiate any rule. They lack the experience to negotiate every rule, but any individual thing they pick, from sex to drugs to skipping school, can be understood deep enough for them to set their own terms safely if they aren't happy with the default.
Latty 9y ago
Clearly it is a process - the point the article is making isn't that rules shouldn't exist, rather that any rule should just be a conclusion being explained to the child. i.e: The answer to "why" should never be "because I said so". I get that many kids will just ask why infinitely, and lots of parents say that because they are fed up and know the child isn't taking on board the answer, but I'd recommend instead insisting on a specific question - when they ask "why", ask "what don't you understand?" or drill down. This has the advantage of potentially catching a real miscommunication where the child doesn't understand something but truly is trying to work it out, and tends to remove an easy annoyance of the "why" forever. If the child isn't old enough to understand that cooker == hot and hot + hand == pain, clearly you have to stop them touching the cooker, but that's not mutually exclusive with helping them understand why, if possible. I remember my parents teaching me not to put my fingers in the door frame when it was open by putting a carrot through and letting me close the door, slicing the carrot in half. I wasn't afraid of punishment or following a rule - I understood why I shouldn't do it, so I didn't.
- matt_the_bass 9y ago
  The carrot example is a great example. I think I’ll try it. Thanks! My only fear is that I’ll just teach them a new way to chop carrots :)
  - Latty 9y ago
    Obviously some things are not easy to make so visceral and easy to understand, but that one is indeed a great one. It stuck with me well.
- somethingsimple 9y ago
  Pretty much this. A personal anecdote: a few months ago we realized our daughter was waking up very tired in the morning, so we figured she wasn't getting enough sleep. When we told her that bedtime was moving earlier, her initial reaction was to get very upset and ask why. Instead of saying "because we've said so" (like I know a lot of parents do), we calmly explained how it's important for humans to get adequate amounts of sleep, and that at her age she should be getting X hours of sleep at night (and we showed her the math matching the new bed time with the time she has to wake up for school). The explanation made perfect sense to her, and she's so into the new routine that we don't even have to tell her it's time to go to bed most nights.
  - Latty 9y ago
    This is it. It's definitely hard because teaching is not easy. It takes time to explain things to kids and it can be hard to tell what they are taking on board and when they are just asking questions because they can and not really caring (although making it a dialogue by asking questions back about what they want to know can help a lot). It definitely pays off a lot though, and I remember being a child and the frustration I felt when I didn't understand and rules felt arbitrary. I wouldn't wish that on any child.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    May I ask how old your daughter was at the time?
brutus1213 9y ago
Parent of a two year old. Totally agreed. Nap time and safety issues are when we lose our cool :(

jhiska 9y ago

Seems exhausting for a parent, but beneficial for certain careers. Dunno if it would significantly improve their thinking a decade later.

geoffbrown2014 9y ago

I'm a fan of Popper, but I'm skeptical this person has spent a lot time parenting, especially with difficult children. There are emotionally fragile adults and it would be 'anti-rational' to assume that at least some of them didn't start out that way. I wish him good luck though.

trackofalljades 9y ago

"Obedience and rules are bad." Yeah, okay, um...I really really really don't want to have to be around these families in a public space then. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to raise my own munchkins to be well behaved while hipster spawn are being disrespectful, selfish, and loud as hell with their parents cheering them on (at the library, movie theater, grocery store, playground, etc).

JeanMarcS 9y ago
I don’t agree. TBH I haven’t read the whole article, but as a parent raising two kids with this approach, The trick is to explain. It’s not rules as in « it’s forbidden to do this or that » but rather to explain why you don’t do that. You don’t behave well because you must, you behave well because it’s the kindest way to do. As stated, children are not stupid, and if you treat them as person and not as inferior human, a lot of good things can come out of this :-)
- musage 9y ago
  I also think that trust is better than obedience, and that insight is better than rules. Sometimes there can be a rule first and insight later, such as "don't run into the road until you're old enough to understand why", but when the trust is there, and parents generally "practice what they preach", when they themselves act out of trust and insight rather than out of obedience to arbitrary rules, it helps. It doesn't mean the child will magically understand everything on first attempt without hiccups, but when parents lack too much grounding and confidence, that makes it really hard on kids. IMO it's demanding too much of both parents and children to expect that in 100.0% of all situations, but at least as something to strive towards I find it very important. Parents can be stressed out or confused, they can be under pressure from other adults, life can throw all sorts of curve balls and often we have to make do with what we have at that time. And that's fine; parents thinking they're bad parents just because they're not "perfect", or because life isn't perfect even though they did nothing wrong per se, also erodes trust and makes the whole enterprise harder than it needs to be. So at the very least, one has to trust that one can get to a place where one can trust themselves, and be on the way to that. Kids notice that, and adults can save themselves a lot of trouble by not lying to them, which is only possible if they aren't lying to themselves. "Because I say so" should never be the final statement, at least make it something like "right now because I say so, but I'll explain when things are less hectic" etc. Kids smell weakness and dishonesty, as they should. It's okay to be weak sometimes, but dishonesty is not. When I was a kid, I didn't take shit from anyone, but I also respected the adults who didn't take shit from me. And I still remember plenty of such occasions fondly, mostly teachers; but one time I was arguing with a friend, you might say we had a fight, and some random stranger bought us two ice cream cones and said to play nice (our parents were present, he wasn't a creep, it was in a holiday resort). I told him "das kannst du dir in die Haare schmieren", which you could translate as "shove it up your ass", but literally means "you can smear that into your own hair". He proceeded to smear the ice cream cone into my hair. Slowly, in a friendly way, while smiling, but that's still what he did. I was awestruck. I wasn't even mad, I instantly respected the person. And our parents laughed, too; I guess these days, with the wrong parents, he would have the cops called on him. But he just took me seriously, he didn't treat me "like a child", that's how it felt to me. It's hard to explain, and the anecdote is really silly I know. But that actually happened, and I'll always cherish the memory ^^

fishnchips 9y ago

Yes and no. From my limited exposure to kids (father of two - 3.5 and 1.5), while in vast majority of cases explaining makes a difference, there are areas where there's perfect understanding but that doesn't lead to desired behavior. Like the older taking everything away from his little brother. He knows perfectly well he can't do it. He was also shown how it feels (I took everything from him for several minutes). He still does it. There's a certain emotional (on one side) and moral (on the other side) aspect that goes beyond mere explaining and understanding.

SolarNet 9y ago
Children don't develop meaningful self control and decision making until age 3-5. He's still developing the capacity to make decisions about not doing something he wants to. I would argue that the moral/explaining/understanding part of the equation is never even invoked because the capability to invoke it hasn't physically developed yet.
- fishnchips 9y ago
  It's never a binary thing, though. You can't just one day wake up and say 'son, now you're old enough to know better'. If you do so, a smart kid will simply ask 'so dad, what changed since yesterday?'.
  - Retra 9y ago
    That doesn't seem much of an obstacle. Something did change, and you can certainly explain that.
    - twic 9y ago
      The point is that nothing did change. Children don't go from animals to sentient beings overnight - they develop gradually. So how do you deal with that? You take them seriously, and you accept that it isn't going to work at first, and then will work imperfectly, but will work fully when they're ready for it.

JeanMarcS 9y ago

My brother, who have no kids, have a kind of doing things that makes the kids like him (he was a handball coach at the time). When I asked him what it was many years ago, he told me : « I treat them as adults, talk to them on an equal base » So when my children was born, I decided to do the same for them. Talking like an adult (with sometimes words they had no chance to understand), explain the why and how of stuff we ask them to do. Never raised the hand on them. Sometimes it’s a little hard to deal, but most of the time everything goes well. We’ll see when they will be teenagers, but for now, we all live in harmony, and we are often complimented by other parents for their behavior. Maybe we got lucky (we will never know) or may be this approach was good. But for us, it’s the way to do.

emerged 9y ago
It's always worked for me. Kids are used to being dominated and condescended. If you talk to them as respected individuals, you usually get respect back. It also gives more weight to the times you have to be more assertive. The other helpful thing is to let them be right. Make mistakes on purpose and let them correct you. They're so hungry to be right that it gives a real confident boost. It should go without saying that this strategy should be used only when it's reasonable, not in cases of safety or when keeping kids from wrecking havoc etc.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  > [Subordinates] are used to being dominated and condescended. If you talk to them as respected individuals, you usually get respect back. It also gives more weight to the times you have to be more assertive. This is actually pretty good advice for any time you're trying to manage people -- and kids are just little people.
  - wasterone 9y ago
    Yes and because children are people rather than intellectual abstractions they need authority (not domineering but authority backed up by force nonetheless). A developing mind is like a nation, with many strands. I live in a relatively peaceful and advanced country but I know that if the police had their weapons and handcuffs taken away tomorrow then evil strands would quickly rise up and destroy everything.

ChrisSD 9y ago

I'm skeptical. Their emphasis on "rational philosophy" and Popper* would be more convincing if they put the research front and centre. Everybody has advice on how to bring up someone else's kids. Most of it isn't nearly as helpful as they imagine. * Aside: seriously people, there have been rational philosophers since Popper

wasterone 9y ago

>Punishing doesn’t help with learning. The point of punishing isn't to help with learning, it's to restore the emotional connection between parent and child by stopping the parent from hating the child. As Jordan Peterson put it: 'Don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them'. (He said this because he knows that people who dislike others work against them whether they realise it or not.) The arguments against punishments tend to focus on severity, particularly if physical violence is involved. But the stronger the existing connection between parent and child, the milder the punishment need be. If it is strong even a frown might suffice.

psyc 9y ago
This is the best justification I’ve seen, though it still isn’t very good. As a child, I saw discipline as serving the convenience of the adults. Sometimes providing the adults with a sense of power over others that they couldn’t experience in their adult relationships. I have yet to see anything that would change my mind about this. The best parents I know strive to address their kids as something close to equals, as much as possible. The others are mean people who themselves lack self-control.
- wasterone 9y ago
  My guess is that you saw punishment where it was excessive. This is a symptom of that lack of control at a deeper level. But control comes from self-awareness; removing authority would only make matters matters worse. Parents who try to be 'equals, as much as possible' will grow to dislike those they are responsible for and will periodically lash out in an uncontrolled manner. Literally so in some cases. Conversely, kids will willingly endure any punishment or chore in order to restore emotional connection to their parents.
notduncansmith 9y ago
> The point of punishing isn't to help with learning, it's to restore the emotional connection between parent and child by stopping the parent from hating the child. Maybe I'm misreading you, but any resentment a parent builds towards their child is a symptom of their own lack of emotional development; punishment is absolutely not an outlet for making parents feel more in control so they can avoid resenting their children. There is deliberate behavior modification, which creates an obvious consequence as a hack around the inability to comprehend more subtle ones, but doesn't involve any emotional exchange. Then there is emotional abuse that makes the abuser feel in control (guilting, shaming, yelling, etc). Anything you don't like that comes out of a person, went into that person, either genetically or environmentally. The only way to help them stop doing that is to help them build a better platform to work from.

jellicle 9y ago

Garbage like this is what happens when people reason from first principles without any reference to what they are actually trying to do. It's a parenting philosophy composed by someone who has never met a child (and has no interest in meeting one). Coming up next: "How to build houses", by someone who has never built one and has no interest in building one.

deleted 9y ago
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paulcole 9y ago

My dad says the biggest mistake most people make when raising kids is treating them like people.

ricardobeat 9y ago
What should they be treated like?
- hashmal 9y ago
  Like kids, d'oh!
hrktb 9y ago
As with any oneliner, it’s of no value without context. Kids need a different treatment when they are 3 months old than when they are 2, yet different from a 7 year old, different from a teenager and different from a 20 year old. Otherwise you realize you will always be your dad’s kid, so by your oneliner he’ll never treat you like people.
deleted 9y ago
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SmooL 9y ago

I can attest to this; as a child nothing irked me more than when I perceived adults to not taking me seriously. I always told myself that as I grew older I'd take children seriously and treat them as an adult

brokensyntax 9y ago

With my daughter, I avoided telling her something was wrong, or bad. If she was doing something that negatively impacted the people around her, I'd hold her attention. (This practice started around nine months, so quite literally held her attention. Both hands, and maintained eye contact.) In a calm voice I would ask her questions about what she is doing, and those around her. She's usually come to an understanding of her own, pre-veral she'd go give hugs and change her behaviour. Post-verbal she would apologize, and change her behaviour. I was always very proud of her ability to learn and look at out side perspectives. Even if she had to be prompted into viewing them. I recently thought about this, (earlier today actually). How it differs from sending to their room or corner to "think about what they did." They don't know at that age what they did. Heck up into young teen years. What do YOU do when sent to your room? If you're like me, you stomped, you sulked, you threw things, you thought about how much everyone hates you. That you're just a burden, that no one would even notice if you were gone... Then your think, no they'll notice, that they have less food to make, less expenses etc, all the ways your mere existence is a burden. Maybe, again, if you're like me, you drift into thought about your grandparents, they love you, they'll miss you. You're never a burden to them. You contemplate running away, maybe to their house. But at no point, do you think about apologizing, what did you do? They're just mean control freaks! So if you didn't come to think about your actions, you an intelligent, thought oriented, hacker type, what hope does your adolescent child have? Share your wisdom and insight. They'll learn better if you let them think and help them to it, than if you tell them to and leave it at that. They might even help you think about new perspectives, who knows.

splittingTimes 9y ago
> In a calm voice I would ask her questions about what she is doing, and those around her. Would you mind to elaborate and give concrete examples? In day care we have a 2y old child (younger brother to a 3.5y old) that bites (hard), scratches and hits other kids when it does not get its way. This goes on for over a year now. The parents dont seem to know how to cope and just shrug it off as "he is just wild, thats what kids do in this age". The other day i could witness myself how he was hitting an older kid with a sound wood full force on the head (because the other kid did not want to give away his toy). The other kid started crying and he had this evil grin, knowing full well he hurt the other kid. What to do with such a child?

flashman 9y ago

> Most approaches to parenting start with some beliefs about how to treat children first Like believing they respond to reason? Hell, even adults aren't rational beings. We're totally ruled by our emotions and beliefs, and it is incredibly hard to persuade someone using reason.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Why are you assuming reasonableness increases with age? Isn't it possible children start out reasonable and get unreason baked into them through their experiences?

partycoder 9y ago

Some people complain about kids making nonsense. But kids get exposed to a LOT of nonsense. Think about it: You are trying to make sense out of the world and people keep making gibberish sounds, hiding for no reason, showing you anthropomorphized animals and objects, telling you stories that have absolutely no point, having you play with stupid pianos that make random sounds... Then, after they have built a model of the world containing all these nonsense, a lot of time then has to be spent having them unlearning that nonsense through discipline. However, what if they don't get exposed to the nonsense in the first place? Or get exposed to it in a more structured way? I mean entertainment doesn't have to be nonsensical. You can learn about animals, architecture, vehicles, even simple math... instead of dumb trains with faces and teletubbies making gibberish sounds. Btw, I am not trying to say the production of that material has no merit. I can have a lot of merit, and can be incredibly creative, it's just it could be better focused.

comstock 9y ago
Kids are not entertained by cartoons because they are forced upon them. Kids are often attracted to, and entertained by cartoons and other stories. Why exactly I don’t know, but they also make up their own imaginary characters sometimes. In any case, they don’t simply have this stuff forced upon them (in general).

JepZ 9y ago

I think an important part of 'rules' is that the child learns that a rule is reasonable and fair. So for every rule the parent should be able to explain the 'why'. That said, rules are very important, not only to give the child an orientation at which it can measure its own actions but also because they can introduce some kind of objectivity into parenting (from the perspective of the child). So rules should always be communicated to the child before they are enforced. Punishing a child for breaking a rule it never heard of before is not fair. Btw. sometimes it can be a good idea to let the child define rules to let it find out how well it can follow its own rules ;-)

spiderfarmer 9y ago

I fully agree that you have to take children seriously, respectfully and make sure they are able to live life to the fullest. But the "rules are bad" trope is, unfortunately, a trend in The Netherlands. Parents that live by this rule are sacrificing themselves. It's bad parenting. I see a lot of parents (mothers mostly) in public places desperately trying to explain their dissatisfaction to their misbehaving children. The children meanwhile are completely disregarding them and will continue doing whatever they were doing untill the parents give up. The parents will end up awkwardly trying to ignore their children, visibly ashamed but still unable to use their authority for fear of breaking their chosen path to happy parenting. They won't even raise their voice. As a parent, I see this all the time. In school, on the street, in stores, it's everywhere. Reasoning with kids that are completely unwilling to listen to your "adult talk" is completely hopeless. Rules aren't fun but they aren't bad either. You don't have to explain your rules everytime, just make sure you enforce them consistently.

davedx 9y ago
I live in the Netherlands, have 4 kids. I don't see what you see. Anecdotal evidence is a really terrible way to inform your parenting.
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  Sometimes what you experience firsthand is ten times more valuable then what you read on the internet. And maybe the struggling parents I saw are a local problem. But judging by the upvotes, there are more people who have similar experiences.
  - Trombone12 9y ago
    Or maybe its just the childless Americans (raised in a culture where spanking is widely accepted) that upvote the tough line on child discipline. I mean, your original post was really about how to enforce rules, though you spent most of it conjuring up the image of publicly annoying children and then assuming their parents don't set any rules. Somewhat surprisingly you also describe how the same parents that supposedly don't set rules clearly trying (but failing) to enforce said non-existing rules... Just say what you mean: you make your children obey you by physical means.

blakesterz 9y ago

> Parenting generally goes pretty smoothly when you and your child agree. CHILD. Singular. If you have more than a couple children you know how different it is. Someplace there's a comedian that has a bit about how having one or two kids is like comparing the Coast Guard to the Navy Seals. It's VERY different having a CHILD than having several CHILDREN.

ashark 9y ago
We have three. If for any reason we have to care for only one for a stretch of time, it's like having no kids. Man, it's so much easier. Three kids is, no joke, like 10x as hard as one. Each one also makes housing way harder (=more expensive, fewer options), especially after the first one. And transportation. And, and, and.
spiderfarmer 9y ago
Absolutely. Especially when you have multiple children close in age you might bring the voice of reason to your family, but your kids will learn a lot about jealousy, agression and defiance from their counterparts.

newfoundglory 9y ago

The nonsensical overestimation of children shown in this thread leads directly to travesties like this judge arguing that toddlers are capable of representing themselves in immigration court. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-a-3-year-old-represent-herself-in-immigration-court-this-judge-thinks-so/2016/03/03/5be59a32-db25-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html?utm_term=.5aca5438c0da https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-a...

slavik81 9y ago
> But the questions can easily trip up children with no lawyers, the attorneys said. A judge may ask, for example, if the child wants to leave the country voluntarily or would rather be ordered deported. If the child chooses either option, he or she cannot apply for other forms of immigration relief such as asylum in the United States. I'm an adult and I would need a lawyer to be able to understand and answer questions like that.
throwawayjava 9y ago
There's a huge difference between parenting and an adversarial courtroom. I think it's possible to agree with the article and also disagree with this judge.
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  Definitely - I was very much responding to the hn comments here, not the article.
b4lancesh33t 9y ago
I would tend to agree. Somewhere else in the thread someone recounted a conversation with a 24 month old far more advanced than any two year old I've met could manage. I think it would be pretty lucid even for my 3yo. That's not to say the conversation couldn't have happened, but the advice seems somewhat miscalibrated if that is taken to be typical. My question: for all this talk of rationalism, where is the research to show this approach yields better outcomes than any other?

avip 9y ago

I dedicate this comment to future parents. You'll come across many a BS, and it'll hit you in a very sensitive period of life - when many of your established defence mechanisms would enter a general CCD state. And some of it is actually true! But how can we tell the difference? Surely there's a simple bluestick test for that? Yes, there is! 1. Does it offer something concrete? Does it give examples? Does it include recipes how to handle situations? Can you tell if your own parents followed that "way" or not? Parenting BS/fluff tend to appear in the form of a "philosophy". If you say something very specific, people may actually try it, and find out it does not work for them. 2. Ask your parents. They are 20++ yoe ahead of you on this one.

twic 9y ago
> 2. Ask your parents. They are 20++ yoe ahead of you on this one. And they might still not be very good at it. There's a catch-22 here, in that if your parents were good at parenting, you've probably grown up into a well-adjusted adult whose natural instincts are to be a good parent yourself. Whereas if your parents were bad at parenting, you've probably grown up to be a normal messed-up member of society whose instincts can't be relied on. Parenting advice is most useful for those people, and they can't rely on their parent's evaluation of it.

analog31 9y ago

Here's a puzzle that I've struggled with: I love critical rationalism, but I'm a terrible debater and negotiator. Put in the context of raising kids, if they ask "why" and end up winning the debate despite being wrong, do they get their way? Should my own actions be dictated by anybody who happens to be a better debater than me? I hope the hell not. What if the options at hand aren't as crystal clear as the textbook cases that tend to be cited in discussions and books, and the illusion of rationality is just that? What if debate skill is not strictly rational, or even informational, but includes an emotional component plus time pressure? I suspect that what we consider to be "irrational" approaches, such as asserting our own authority, are in fact survival skills that reflect the limitations of rational debate.

throwawayjava 9y ago
> but includes an emotional component plus time pressure? You don't even need those things. Intelligence and practice will suffice, even for "purely rational arguments". Defending Truth makes debates easier to win, but isn't a necessary or sufficient condition.
- analog31 9y ago
  Maybe motivation is a factor too. Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying, whereas spending intelligence and practice on becoming a better musician motivates me. ;-) Also, I suspect that Truth isn't always easy to discern, especially in a world where we're immersed in tradeoffs and complex systems.
  - erasemus 9y ago
    >Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying Yes and I think that's because they entail criticism, which is used to attack ideas and people we don't like. Whereas creating something worthwhile is about discovering or perceiving something already inside the mind that we do like (and therefore cannot seriously attempt to criticize). Building a family is an attempt to create something worthwhile.

adrusi 9y ago

This page credits David Deutsch with first writing about this philosophy of parenting. It's more-or-less the style of parenting I was subjected to. I didn't know until now that he had written about parenting, but he's the author of one of my favorite works of nonfiction, The Beginning of Infinity. I plan to take this approach to parenting with my own children. That is to say, I'm very supportive of it. HOWEVER: there's a major philosophical failing of TCS, which is that you can't objectively justify claims about what you should and shouldn't do (aka normative claims). If you tell your child "don't hit other kids," they can disagree, which will force you to justify your original statement with a more general normative principle. Eventually you'll be forced to appeal to the foundational principles of morality, something like "it's bad to be in certain mental states like pain, good to be in other states, like joy" and "what matters is which of those mental states the average person on earth is, not which state you, personally, are in." These are one possible version of the sacred principles of morality, and they are probably not justifiable. There are attempts to justify them, such as Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, but Harris relies (implicitly) on hard to grasp claims like the nonexistence of self, which you're not going to be able to explain to a seven year old unless they're exceptionally introspectively mature. Sacred principles can just as well be called unquestionable principles. They don't have a justification, but our way of life relies on their acceptance. Society will not tolerate threats to their sanctity, so if you let your child question them, society will punish your child. If you say "don't hit other kids" and your child says (after a chain of justifications) "it doesn't matter if other kids feel pain, what matters is that I feel good when I hurt them," you're not going to be able to rationally argue against that. The most honest response is the ad baculum "if you say things like that when you're an adult, someone might just murder you, so you ought never to do things that you can only justify in that kind of way unless you want to be murdered." But that's not really teaching your child morality; they might someday find themselves in a situation where they don't need to worry about violent reprisal for questioning sacred values, say if they become a powerful dictator. Are you committed enough to morality to want them to be moral even if they don't have to be? Should you be? If yes, then you can't take your children seriously when they question sacred principles. How, then, do you respond when they say "all that matters is that I feel good when I hurt other kids?" You could say "You're wrong. Why? Because I said so." Or you could just punish them. But if they're used to always being taken seriously, they're going to notice that something's fishy. Fortunately, there's a good chance your child won't ever question sacred principles. I was taken quite seriously as a child, but I justified the sacred principles to myself in ways that only began to crumble when I was 17, so my parents never encountered the dilemma I just described. By the time my old justifications ceased to work I was already adept at being a moral person, and I was ready to understand the lessons of Crime and Punishment, which warns against violating the sacred principles of your society despite acknowledging them to be unfounded, and I was ready to understand the more sophisticated justifications of the sacred principles. But other children could be more likely to question sacred principles. I wasn't naturally inclined to cruelty. I didn't want to hurt other kids. When I did hurt others, I didn't need to learn why not to, I just needed to learn how not to. Not all kids are like that (not a moral judgment) some will need to by told why they shouldn't be cruel, and you can't do that while taking them entirely seriously.

sandov 9y ago

As a kid, I had so many questions about physics and when I asked my mother about it she gave some dumbed down reply and when I inquired further she said that I would learn that later, it was really frustrating. If I ever have kids, the one thing that I want to do right is answering their questions appropriately, I would have loved my mom to say something like "because electrons attract protons, no one really knows why, there are people who dedicate their lives to trying to know why that attraction exists, they are called physicists. That attraction is one of four fundamental forces that we know of, the other three are gravity, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force". Even if I understood less than half of what she said, I would have known that there are people who also wanted to know what I wanted know, and would feel fascinated by that.

sossles 9y ago

The article makes many good points but (as many others have noted) it really misses the mark on rules and obedience. Rules and obedience are an essential abstraction to allow larger organisations of people to function and interoperate. The rules aren't always the best for each individual at every time, but overall they help things run smoothly. There is always some kind of consequence for not following them. To understand (and eventually change) a system you always starts with a high level acceptance of the 'rules' and drill down from there. Why shouldn't children also be taught to operate on that basis? Say they want to question the 'rule' about having 3 meals a day. That's fine, drill down into why and maybe change it. Maybe bed-time is unfair, perhaps the 8yo doesn't want to go to bed at the same time as the 5yo. It should be ok to challenge these things to an extent, but at the end of the day someone needs to make things run smoothly for everyone, and that's the parents' job. Rules (with an expectation of obedience) are how they do that.

veidr 9y ago
I agree with you. My grandma used to say, "children are as complicated as people, only more so." But rules and obedience are an essential abstraction. With my own young kids, I try to let them challenge the rules and chart their own course as much as I can, but if you go with no rules at all I think you are almost as likely to end up with a bad result as if you parented through only rules and obedience. When confronted (as all parents inevitably are from time to time) with blanket ideas for "how to raise children" I find it helpful to swap out "children" for "employees" and then "farm animals" and see how the advice sounds from those two additional perspectives. Children are kind of a middle ground between those (as well as being many other things). There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic.
- tonteldoos 9y ago
  > There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic. This made my day, and I'll be repeating it to others - thanks :)

ropable 9y ago

There are some useful, attractive parenting principles here, but it's worth remembering that raising a child is like a large, complex, multi-year software dev project with a vague spec and constant scope creep. There are some methods that can help, but every one is a unique snowflake. I love the concept of critical rationalism, but it isn't going to work always, or work for all kids. Sometimes, someone in charge just needs to make a decision for things to work. Set the example, be consistent, give them your attention, help them to own their decisions, and teach them to follow Wheaton's Law. After that, you've just got to hope that things work out. Source: father of two (quite different) children, with approximately 10,000 parenting failures under my belt.

b4lancesh33t 9y ago
I love your humility. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
abvdasker 9y ago
That's such a wonderful description of parenting!

perryprog 9y ago

Child here! 14 years old, in middle school. If anyone has questions, I'd be happy to answer.

baldfat 9y ago

Why do we rationalize with Children and punish teenagers? We must build trust with our children. Research has shown that this is the key, especially for children of abuse. To me (Father of Five, two biological and three foster) this is 100% flipped upside down and isn't well researched nor universal. My foster kids had horrible environment growing up and every kind of abuse. Their mother murdered 8 blocks from our house by a baseball bat to her head while the children were in my home. Children raised from abuse would actually be harmed by this. Children need to learn 100% but not through non-developmentally appropriate techniques. Kids learn through play doing in a safe and purposeful manner. This is neither purposeful nor safe. They need to know that they must use gentle hands and bodies, be respectful to each other and pick up after themselves. If it doesn't work for abused or special needs children it isn't universal. This is what good research looks like for parenting. https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/research/#sthash.6ctKjxoi.dpbs https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/research/#sthash.6ctKjxoi.dpb... 1) We have children ask and not tell what they want 2) Parenting is hard and demanding and we invest in it 3) Kids will look at you when you are speaking with them (FOr building up relationship) 4) Redirect bad behavior by having the child redo in the correct behavior. Not yelling or demanding. Scripting 5) Socialize interaction with competent adult and ability to play properly with other children. https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s https://youtu.be/XGqwz8L6JBo?t=8m6s

comstock 9y ago
I agree, but parenting is a hard job which society often doesn’t seem to value very highly. In this community I’ve literary heard someone say “Machine learning is very important for the future of humanity, so I can’t spend time looking after my child”. For me it’s all about investing time, and the long game. Looking after, being patent and educating a child for a couple of hours isn’t too hard. Doing that for 10s of hours every day, particularly with young children, is much harder. It’s even harder when that work is systematically devalued.
DanBC 9y ago
You speak about universality, but then say this: > 3) Kids will look at you when you are speaking with them (FOr building up relationship) Autistic people sometimes have trouble making eye contact when you're speaking. Some black people are taught that direct eye contact in some situations is a display of defiance, and is to be avoided.

pcblues 9y ago

I have not found enough evidence to change from being a strong wall of no to my children. They know I’ll keep talking with them through their big emotions and that I love them but I don’t negotiate with terrorists. 5 and 8, they are thriving.

Clanan 9y ago

If you are a parent and are interested in this article, I highly recommend you go find another parenting method that actually provides any semblance of research, investigation, etc. This is nothing more than an anecdotal blog post about parenting, filled with agreeable-sounding ideas. Many of which seem to only pertain to handling children's learning, rather than overall parenting, but the author suggests them generally. My two cents: children are not little adults and should not be treated as such. Adults have >20 years of life experience, children do not. Children do not know how to control emotions and are not reasonable (duh). There is substantial research into how children develop, including their brains and thought processes. For example, young children are not capable of abstract thought like adults are. This recent fad of treating children as equals is, to me, bizarre and damaging. Don't learn from a random blog post - go read the science (or a parenting book by someone who has). Anecdotally, children I encounter who are raised by this sort of method are rude, brittle know-it-alls who cannot accept being told 'no'. My favorite parenting rule of thumb: teach your children now with rules and tough love because if you don't, the world will teach them later - and the world doesn't love your children.

abvdasker 9y ago
Another thing that seems pretty suspect is that this article makes no mention of ideas of empathy, emotion, or love. I don't have kids, but it seems a little cold to raise a child without an emphasis on understanding their emotions and the emotions of others. Teaching rationality is all well and good but it's no substitute for helping kids learn softer skills -- since the human interactions they facilitate in later life are probably more important than being able to solve a hard math problem. Also the section that "Children Aren't Fragile" is a gross oversimplification. Kids are extremely fragile when it comes to things like neglect, abuse and instability in their environment.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  I would not go as far as "extremely" there, kids are resilient too but anything with big enough impact will have far reaching results.

foxfired 9y ago

Everything is wonderful when the kids are not in chaos mode. When you are with children and they are behaving it is easy to take them seriously. But find yourself in a situation that you don't even know how everything started and kids are just going nuts, then all the rules change. At the end of the day you want to get them to go to non-chaos mode before you can apply any technique. What worked for me is creating a pattern very early on: "I'm gonna count to 3 and we will do X" I've said that a thousand times since very early childhood. Now, before I even finish the sentence, the kids get in position and wait for "three!" After that we have a normal adult conversation, sometimes I even use words (like someone mentioned in the comments) that they have no hope of understanding. But they know that whatever they say they will be taken seriously. So far it has worked for me with both my niece and nephew and I hope that they never find out that I have no backup plan if they don't stop on three. In other words, you need create a pattern that leads to quiet mode before you can take the kids seriously.

ianamartin 9y ago

Kids acting like kids is basically why we invented religion. You can't actually always take a kid seriously. But you can always threaten them with god. It works, apparently.

orasis 9y ago

Beginners follow the rules. Intermediates bend the rules. Masters create the rules.

Manglano 9y ago

I hear a lot about kids being kids, and adults being "childish." By the time I was ten, I could read Michael Crichton and Frank Herbert, and although I wasn't a mathematical wiz, I did have an innate understanding of the scientific method. I'm of the mind that children have a precocial learning intelligence similar in rank and power to the adult mind--that is, the moment a child is born, they begin to absorb and construct knowledge about the world, with the only difference to the adult mind being that adults have more context for their "world theory"--and that it's the duty of the public to acknowledge and foster this. When I consider that some people talk to children with "baby talk," I wonder how many people have been hurt by `keeping parrots with chickens` (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot#Intelligence_and_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot#Intelligence_and_learni...) so to speak. It's a controversial theory that might garner criticism, but that may be a failing--children can hear voices in the womb before they're born, talking to them in infancy as if they can't understand their mother's language is, at first, disrespectful, and later, possibly inhibits their development.

kingkawn 9y ago

a lotta you are really convinced that being nasty is akin to being reasonable and practically minded.

RebeccaBV 9y ago

I do have children. And I did raise them following Taking Children Seriously to the best of my ability. If I had it to do over I'd only learn TCS better and follow it better, not in the other direction. It was liberating to me to find that it was possible to raise children without using rules or punishment/reward. My children are grown now and are wonderful people. So if anyone here is thinking TCS can't work out well with real children, I'm here to tell you it can. This is a small sample size but it's more than zero.

JustinCEO 9y ago
hey RebeccaBV, glad to hear about your positive experience with TCS! there is an active online community which discusses TCS and other related ideas at the Fallible Ideas discussion group. you can learn more about important philosophical ideas like TCS and get help applying them to your life! http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info

ludddite 9y ago

Anon makes a judgement about TCS. He does not use reason to interact with his child. TCS is about using reason. He does not take his child seriously.