Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Taking Children Seriously

Recently, my favorite mothering magazine, the excellent Brain, Child, ran an article on a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously. This article was controversial enough to spawn two issues (so far) of responses and responses to responses, but I felt while reading all of them that I didn't have a clear idea of what TCS was. Something about believing children are rational, something about not coercing them. It was hard to follow--or care about--the argument when I felt unclear about the foundation of it.

So, of course, I turned to the World Wide Web. I wasn't sure what I'd find, since TCS is supposed to be so controversial that its practitioners won't give their real names to the media. However, it took mere miscroseconds to locate the website of no less an authority on the subject than the founder of TCS, Sarah Fitz-Claridge.

Here I found a lucid explanation of the philosophy, short enough that I will simply quote it here in its entirety (this can be found right up front on the TCS home page):

TCS is an educational philosophy. Its most distinctive feature is the idea that it is possible and desirable to bring up children entirely without doing things to them against their will, or making them do things against their will, and that they are entitled to the same rights, respect and control over their lives as adults.

As a philosophical statement, that's pretty clear, but I felt unsure about how TCS parents put their philosophy into practice (never do anything against children's will? Really? How the heck does that work?). The original article in Brain, Child (I'd give a citation, but magazines have yet to be unpacked from our no-longer-very-recent move; if it was in fact two issues ago, as I remember, it can be found in Vol. 4, issue 1, Winter 2003) included an example of a mother using TCS with her children that seemed very like something I myself would do: one of her children wanted to leave the park, and the other was still playing. Rather than insist the ready-to-go child stay in the park, the mom negotiated for the kid to listen to the radio in the car until his sister was ready to leave, too.

From the website, I've learned that the approach has several tenets beyond simply the ideas that children are rational and have rights. Adversarial, win-lose solutions are avoided; the belief instead is that if there is a conflict of desires between parent and child, a "rationally creative" solution can be found which is acceptable to both parties. This means rejecting the idea that one person gets their wish and the other gets nothing, and also rejecting the idea of compromise, in which nobody gets what they want. Arbitrary authority is rejected; coercive parental behavior, which can be identified by the distress of the child, is likewise out the door.

I believe it is that last idea, that children's distress is a sign of unhealthy coercion (to clarify, all coercion is unhealthy), that gets TCS mixed up with permissive parenting in many people's minds. I spent a fascinated afternoon digging through the articles on the site, and Fitz-Claridge and others repeatedly assert that TCS does not mean caving in to children at all times or subsuming parental needs and desires to those of children; it means something more like taking everyone's needs and desires seriously, and believing that solutions can be found that do not do violence to the humanity of any party involved. Perhaps this is challenging to people because it requires a great deal of thought and effort on the part of parents to craft--in cooperation with their children--unique solutions to problems.

Another idea in TCS is that people often act out of entrenched theories, "ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind." Fitz-Claridge and the other authors on the site argue that many parents shape their expectations of children's behavior based on these entrenched theories. Recognizing and unrooting them requires both openness and diligence on the part of parents.

I can't say I agreed with everything on the website; since I am neither a libertarian, a rationalist, nor an atheist, it is inevitable that Fitz-Claridge and I would diverge on some important points. But what kept me clicking links was that I found enough food for thought on the site that I was curious to see what the next article said...and the next...and the next.

I came away with several useful ideas I am chewing on. The idea of entrenched theories is one I've thought about before under different names, and it's one that I recognize from my own experiences as a parent. I think the TCS people are talking mainly about big, global issues like "do children require coercion to become willing members of society or is it their desire to do so?" The experiences from my own life that immediately resonated, however, had to do with what I will perhaps call "entrenched mini-theories." When I find myself in conflict with my son, it is often because his desire conflicts with an idea I have about how the day should go, yet there is usually no necessary reason the day must go that way except that it took that shape in my head over breakfast that morning. For instance, I'll find myself wanting to get him away from the toy trains and out the door at the library. "We have to go!" I'm thinking, and he is wanting to keep happily playing. 9 times out of 10 (or more), there is not really any reason we can't stay longer (heck, we're at the library--I can certainly find something to read while he plays!), and if I can remind myself of that, the conflict dissolves. I have never yet had to carry him out the library door screaming, nor have we ever stayed so long, at his insistence, that the librarians vacuumed around us or turned out the lights in preparation for going home.

In a similar vein, the article on hair washing made me realize that the pressure I feel to wash my son's hair at least every other bath even though he hates it comes from my fear that if his hair is visibly dirty people will think I don't care for him well enough, and from the abstract notion that hair must be washed. It also comes from the discomfort I feel if I don't wash my hair every day. But my son shows no sign of feeling uncomfortable if his hair hasn't been washed, and fear of other people's judgment is a bad motivator.

I've decided to experiment with not washing his hair unless he agrees to it; we'll see what happens. So far he's had one bath since that decision of mine. I told him I wouldn't make him wash his hair, and I wonder whether it's a coincidence that he was entirely cooperative about having the rest of him washed--the body-wash is usually a precursor to hair-washing, and lately he's been resisting it, too. I also got in the tub with him and let him spend some happy time pouring water over my head; he experimented with pouring water over his duck's head as well, telling the duck to "close eyes tight!" Perhaps if he has some time to think about his past hair-washing experiences, he'll be willing to try it again. But perhaps not--the TCS folks would warn me against expecting a certain outcome, and I will agree with them so far as to say that a "non-coercive" parenting decision that is actually a sneaky new way to control the kid's behavior is merely manipulative.

Fitz-Claridge also articulated for me my experience that my son and I do something that looks like "time out" even though I reject time-outs as punitive and don't use that language. The distinction she draws between "time off" and "time served" is a useful one.

And David and I both found this, from an article on video games, to be an a-ha! insight:

So let's ask first, "Why do so many adults hate [video games]? What evidence is there that there is anything bad about them?"

If you look at it closely, the evidence boils down to no more than the fact that children like video games. There seems to be a very common tendency among parents to regard children liking something as prima facie evidence that it is bad for them.

Though we found its corollary a bit harder to swallow:

The right attitude is: if children are spending a lot of time doing something, let's try to find ways of letting them do even more of it. Prima facie, the fact that they like doing it is an indication that it is good for them.

I'm sure you can generate questions, counter-examples, and objections to that claim yourselves.

I am a committed future homeschooling mother in large part because I believe our educational system operates from the premise that children must be coerced to learn, rather than that they are natually curious learning machines who will soak up knowledge if only they are not prevented from doing so or forced into aversive experiences that sour them on education. The TCS people extend that idea to children's whole lives, arguing that as a culture we tend to believe that children will not become civilized members of socity unless they are coerced to do so, whereas in the TCS view children are rational beings who want to be productive and comfortable in society.

The TCS folks hold ideas that are far enough out of the mainstream that if you visit the site you will probably be offended or disturbed by at least some of its content. You will probably think they are extremists (and you may even be right). You will certainly not be surprised that the theory and practice have raised such ire in certain circles. But I found that if I shifted my focus off the more abstract rationalist theorizing and onto the practice, I found many things that appealed. I kept reading, and reading bits out loud to David, and saying, "I just can't quit reading this even though I think their rationalist approach is wrong-headed and their application of it is extreme." Something was attracting me, and David put his finger on it: What we have in common with the TCS folks is, in David's words, "the radical notion that children are people."

Posted by Su Penn at June 8, 2003 10:41 PM | TrackBack