How much to coerce children?

In the way that philosophers might debate realism or nonrealism, and each viewpoint seems pretty crazy if you hold the other view, there are different schools of parenting.

A favorite piece on this is Jessica Winters’ “The Harsh Realm of Gentle Parenting.” “I knew, reading [a book on some parenting method], that I had entered a reality-distortion field, but I wasn’t sure which one of us was the agent of distortion.” I often feel like this when encountering a method that’s internally consistent but really different from what feels common-sense to me.

…….

Last week after a conversation about Taking Children Seriously, I dug into this particular parenting school of thought. It’s an anti-authoritarian method that aims to avoid coercing children. It defines coercion broadly, including anything where adults try to get the kid to do something rather than coming to a mutual solution to problems. (I’m basing this mostly one one website, and I’m probably misunderstanding some parts.)

Stuff I like about this approach

A reminder that the amount of authority parents have over children is weird. Many things adults do to children would be totally not ok to do to your adult partner or friend. This is so different from mainstream parenting that I do get a bit of the feeling “one of these is a reality-distortion field”, and I never feel totally sure which. The question “would you treat your partner this way?” seems like an important one. “If your husband took to making his love and connection conditional on you complying with rules he sets for you, would that be taking you seriously? How loving would it feel?”

The authors point to some practical solutions I hadn’t thought of. They point out that if your child understandably hates injections, you can get numbing cream that makes it much less painful rather than just powering through with “that’s the way things are.”

More generally, I like the emphasis on looking for solutions you both actually feel good about, rather than treating problems as a zero-sum game. Your kid wants to be taken to the park (and can’t go alone), and you want to stay home. A mainstream approach treats this as basically the parent’s decision (but with the expectation that they’ll be a benevolent dictator and take the child’s wishes into account.) Taking Children Seriously treats this as a problem to work out the same way you’d work out with your partner ​​— can you think of a third option that you’d both like? Can you figure out a way to make staying home, or going to the park, be more enjoyable for the person who doesn’t prefer it?

I also like some parts of the approach to safety, about trying to give the child information about how a thing is dangerous (like this example about how to give young children a sense of why streets and cars are dangerous.) Though I do think there are some rules worth teaching by rote when the child is too young to grasp serious injury.

Stuff I find hard to swallow

Ability to interface with mainstream society

Taken to its full extent, avoiding coercion seems really inconvenient for parents. Kids rarely want to go anywhere on a clock-driven schedule. In the adult-driven world, as Jessica Winters writes, sometimes “you just need to put your freaking shoes on.” I do think avoiding these battles can be good if you can afford it  — having in-home care has spared us a lot of fights about getting out the door on time.

I believe that a non-coercive method works fine in the end — it seems like people rear great humans with lots of different methods. But it seems hard to combine full non-coercion with an expectation that when they’re five they’ll sit fairly quietly on a rug with other kindergarteners.

Of course, differences between different adults’ expectations come up in any parenting method. But I’d expect that the starker the difference, the harder the adjustment for the child (and everyone else). At some point I’d pull my children out of mainstream society if I thought society was bad enough, but I’m not there. Being able to use mainstream childcare and schooling is really useful.

That said, I think more independence for kids allows them to interface better with more aspects of society. A lot of kids with weird independence-favoring parents strike me as unusually capable at navigating the adult world (though maybe that’s largely from being related to said parents).

How far do informed choices go?

Taking Children Seriously emphasizes that children are ignorant but not stupid. I think that doesn’t do justice to the amount of brain development that continues through age 25.

People are impulsive to different degrees, and children are especially impulsive. If you can’t keep that stick away from people’s faces, I’m taking it away.

Some facts are harder than others to grasp. Things with immediate consequences, like a burn from a hot stove, are easier to understand at a younger age. “You should avoid sunburns so you have a lower risk of skin cancer later in life” is a lot harder. 

It’s also hard to understand the relationship between some habits and happiness. I didn’t realize that my mood tanked several days after a night of bad sleep until Jeff insisted that I track my mood and various other aspects of my life. I’m in favor of parents enforcing regular sleep schedules for kids most of the time. I also think a lot of adults would be happier and healthier if someone pushed them to go to bed on a regular schedule.

I think unlimited smartphone access is bad for kids, for reasons Zvi covers here. (It’s probably bad for adults too!)

I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid addictive substances, and it’s good for parents to protect children from addiction. I’m ok with adults being protected too to some degree, like I favor New Zealand’s phase-out of tobacco. (Social media is also arguably in this category.)

Some coercion I still support

Adults interfere children in lots of ways I think are bad (“Give grandma a hug,” “Because I said so, that’s why”, micromanaging children’s play, etc.)

But I see examples where I think the adult does actually know better.

  • A friend coaxing her reclusive home-schooled child to go to activities with other children.
  • Us requiring sitting-down-at-meals time (but not forced eating) for our underweight kids who would rather than play than eat. (Related: Ellyn Satter and the division of responsibility in eating.)
  • The times when we’d plan a family outing somewhere and one kid would want to stay home to play with legos or whatever. We’d say, “Sorry, the rest of us want to go to the lake and we can’t leave you here alone.” Nearly always once out of the house, they agree the trip was more fun than staying home. (Related examples from Jeff in Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners.)
A. being thwarted from eating them all

Everyone thinks their method is best

What’s considered “good parenting” has varied hugely across times and cultures. Perhaps a difference now is how many methods coexist in the same neighborhoods.

People will tell you that their preferred method is easier in the end. “It seems like it takes a lot of work, but actually children reared this way are easier to get along with.” 

People also tell you that their preferred method is better for the children. Their method will make them more creative and independent / will give them a good work ethic / will not screw them up like those other systems do.

A crux seems to be whether getting kids to do things “for their own good” is actually good for them. Maybe it just messes up their internal motivation and ability to judge what’s good for them. 

It seems really hard to judge, given the very low proportion of children who have been raised non-coercively so far. It’s likely that all the happiest, healthiest adults (and all the most messed-up adults) you know were raised with a fair amount of coercion.

…..

I asked my nine-year-old what she thought about all this. “Do you think adults should do less trying to get kids to do stuff that the kids don’t want to do?”
“Well, there are some things parents have to make kids do.”
“Like what?”
“Homework.”
“Why is it important to make kids do that?”
“Because… you have to do it! It’s homework!”

So maybe we’re raising more of a conformist than I intended…

  1. Denise M

    I am also a lot more willing to use coercive methods than when my first was small. I also pointed out the same principle: if it wouldn’t be okay to treat an adult this way, why is it okay to treat a child like this? Of course adults and children have different capabilities, but I don’t think the differences arise only from there. I wanted to treat adults and children with the same principles at least.

    Then I started to notice that actually coercive methods can do a lot better (for my kids at least and keeping everything else equal). Sleep time is a good example. For me I have resolved this conundrum of wanting to treat adults and children with the same principles with favouring a lot more paternalism towards adults as well, where previously I had a more liberal attitude.

    It seems like plenty of adults would do a lot better if they had an enforced bedtime!

    Around teenagehood where we are now I have had to ease up a bit again though. I will not be around to enforce bedtime forever, so I’d rather have my teen experience during the school holidays that staying up past midnight is not all that great than her finding out at university. We also stopped restricting smartphone access which is going better than I expected.

  2. Craig

    It might be good to start with, when we ask which parenting method works better, what do we mean by “work”? There are so many different people, outcomes and experiences involved in raising kids while living one’s own adult life, there can be no single “optimum” in this landscape. One’s approach depends on what one is trying to prioritize at the time. Thus, I think one’s *motivations* as a parent are more fundamental and important than the approach — the parents’ motivations (I’m not just going to lump it all together as “love”) inform/guide their selected approaches.

    For example, my personal experience was that my father’s prime motivation was for me to get the education he didn’t have — and be the engineer he wished he could have been. He was pretty distant from whatever I was interested in. While I would in fact have professional success, I don’t think his method “worked” for me. So, when I was raising our children, I was preoccupied with preparing/letting them to make their own decisions about their futures — but not necessarily all the ones about their presents. Sometimes I wonder if I was too hands-off regarding their life plans, but I can sleep at night.

  3. Caperu_Wesperizzon

    > “Do you think adults should do less trying to get kids to do stuff that the kids don’t want to do?”
    > “Well, there are some things parents have to make
    > kids do.”
    > “Like what?”
    > “Homework.”
    > “Why is it important to make kids do that?”
    > “Because… you have to do it! It’s homework!”
    >
    > So maybe we’re raising more of a conformist than I intended…

    It might be interesting for her to know that the opposite case does happen, though it’s probably more likely in your teen years: you decide to take your studies seriously, learning as much and getting as good grades as you can, and your parents resent it more and more. Even if they used to pressure you to study, now they pressure you relentlessly to devote less time to studying, so you’ll be available to them. They won’t believe you when you warn them about the consequences, deciding instead that you’re mentally ill. They’ll make you feel like the world’s most selfish and ungrateful child, as they’re still feeding and clothing you so you can enjoy your big and absolutely unearned privilege of studying. And, since you’re being such a bad child, you’d better forget entirely about pursuing any goal of your own besides studying, such as extracurricular activities, socializing with your peers, or merely trying to learn on your own something you’re interested in: any time those activities would take, you owe to your parents—and this debt keeps growing—and you’d better not ask them for money on top of what they’re already paying; besides, what you want to do is probably a vice and a sign of mental illness anyway—if even studying is, what is not?

    Having no social life probably helps to get this vicious cycle started, and then the cycle ensures you’ll stay isolated, proving your parents right about your mental health, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At least, they’ll be spared the troubles of dating, since you won’t date, or go out much at all.

    As one of these former “conformist” (whom or what was I conforming to?; if I conformed to school, I definitely wasn’t conforming to my parents) teenagers, imagining myself in your daughter’s shoes, the question, “Why is it important to make kids do that?” sends shivers up my spine. It sounds to me too much like, “If you decide to take good care of your studies, seeing them as your own self-interest, not only will I not encourage you, like you probably hoped I would; I’ll effectively oppose it, pressuring and guilting your academic ambitions out of you, questioning and destroying your sanity, and, if you don’t hurry up to become independent—which I won’t make easy at all—ruining your whole life. Not that I’ll admit, even to myself, that this is what I’m doing, of course—I’ll blame it all on your mental illness and bad moral character, and, in fact, eventually I’ll be right”.

    I really hope I’m very wrong.

  4. Julilla

    Taking Children Seriously was where I first saw the idea of children controlling their own lives, but since then I’ve also read different views saying that everyone (who wants to) should have the same rights as adults, not just within the family. For example, Escape from Childhood by John Holt and Birthrights by Richard Farson were both published fifty years ago. (I don’t like everything about the former book, and haven’t read the latter one yet.)

    For me, thinking about effective altruism highlights the difference in the treatment of adults and children. It seems like children may be coerced “for their own good” even for smaller goals (like wearing their hair in two braids), while adults often may not be coerced for either their own or others’ good even for larger goals (like helping save another person’s life).

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