Suppose your child starts smoking. A lot of parents would say, "smoking is bad for your health, therefore you must stop smoking immediately." If the child stops they are happy. If the child continues they are sad and start threatening or punishing or manipulating him.

I agree smoking is bad for your health, and is generally a really bad idea, and it's good to point that out. But there is a flaw in the approach I describe. It treats children as not having reasons for the things they do.

In addition to offering advice about smoking, a parent should try to find out why his child wants to smoke. The best way to do this is usually to ask and then to listen without arguing or interrupting (just asking questions to get clarifications and elaborations). Don't worry if everything the child says is wrong. It's not going to kill him in the next 20 minutes, so just hear him out before you respond.

Once you know why your child wants to smoke it can make a big difference in how you react. At the minimum, you can give your child more useful advice. If he doesn't know smoking is bad for your health, then tell him all about that. If he read some pseudo-science saying it makes you smarter, then explain to him about proper science. If he thinks smoking makes him cool, then don't tell him about the health risks in detail, just mention them and then focus on discussing the coolness issue. And so on. This is pretty simple but a lot of parents get it wrong because think don't think of their child as a thinking human being who has genuine reasons for his actions, they just think of him as a simplistic partial human to be ordered about and controlled into doing the right things.

When the issue is something less clear cut than smoking, then it's even more important to find out what the child's reasoning is. Maybe he has a reason you've never heard of before. Then you'd need to think about that instead of just telling him all your standard arguments that don't engage with his idea. Maybe if you know what he wants you can suggest a better way to get it, and then he'll change his approach voluntarily. To have any real hope of getting a child to change his behavior by choice, which is always preferable, you have to think about things from his point of view and see what reasons he does and doesn't have behind a given decision.

If I parent has "the final say" on all issues, that means all the parent's mistakes are final. They aren't going to be corrected.

Parents often speak of "taking into account" the child's ideas, and then making the final decision in a fair way. What this means is that the parent alters his decision exactly as much as he considers right, and if the child considers that wrong, that's too bad, and if the parent is mistaken that's too bad as well.

I do not advocate replacing the rule of the parent by the rule of the child. I advocate that all disagreements be resolved in such a way that everyone genuinely agrees at the end. Until that happens, they must be considered open questions.

One benefit of this is that it does a child a lot more good to learn why something is best instead of having a misconception about it but following some orders. If the child just follows orders without understanding that isn't educating the child.

Another benefit is that it raises the bar for the quality of ideas the parent needs. Everyone makes mistakes, and this will help the parent make fewer. The bar in a conventional household is: whenever the parents feels upset, feels certain, or finds further questions hard to answer (and therefore frustrating), then he ends the discussion and tells the child he needs to stop the sass and listen.

In fact, some of those situations seem to hint that maybe the parent is wrong. (That doesn't mean the child is right. Often they are both wrong, and some other idea is right.)

Having to persuade the child means having to think about how to explain the issue in an understandable and compelling way. It's OK if the parent wants to take a break as long as he comes back to it later. A real discussion also means answering the child's questions. That helps the child learn; any parent should be happy to answer questions. And for the parent, there are two possibilities. Either answering is easy, so it won't be any trouble. Or answering is hard, which means the parent didn't know the answer well enough, and it's good that he thinks about the issue a bit more.

A lot of parents think they should decide what's best, and then make their child do it. If he turns out 90% the way they wanted, then that's a pretty good success.

But consider what happens if I make my kid 90% of what I think is good. Then he takes his values, and makes his kid 90% of that. And then the next kid is 90% as good as his parents. And so on. See how it gets worse every generation? As a percentage of the original, the generations go 90%, 81%, 73%, 66%, 59%, etc

TCS aims for children to be even better than their parents. For that to happen, they are going to need to be something more than not quite perfect copies of their parents. You can't just take the parent, copy it with only a couple flaws, and call it better. That's obviously going to be a little worse.

Children, to turn out better than their parents, are going to have to disagree with their parents about at least one thing, and be right. Parents need to allow and encourage that, not suppress it.

Suppose a parent thinks pizza is so unhealthy it should never be eaten, and tofu is so healthy it should be eaten very frequently by all people.

What a lot of parents would do is buy tofu but not pizza. They control all the money, so that's easy. They make tofu really convenient becasue there is always plenty around, and pizza really inconvenient because there is never any around. Requests for money to eat at a tofu restaurant are always granted. Requests for money to eat at a pizza restaurant always get replies about money not growing on trees. (BTW, apples grow on trees, and apples are worth money. So that saying is kinda silly.)

In the kid's life, tofu and pizza aren't fighting a fair competition for a place in his diet. Suppose the rational way to decide what to eat involves considering the price, convenience, nutrition, and flavor of foods. Of course there are other factors, but those are good enough. The parents make pizza less convenient and tofu more convenient. So they tip the scales. Whatever the rational evaluations of the foods are, they've distorted it. If tofu would normally win 40 to 25, now it wins 50 to 15. So the kid gets the wrong idea of the real value of the foods. The parent is spreading irrationality. The parents don't care about the truth as long as they get their way.

A good way to think of it is that the parent could do the same thing, except in favor of pizza and against tofu. It's totally arbitrary. Whenever the parent could reverse what he's favoring and disfavoring, then it's clear that the parent's policy doesn't depend at all on what the truth is. Maybe he's using reason, but maybe he's using whim. If it's whim, how's he going to find out? His policy doesn't have a mechanism to correct that error.

This is an example of how parents try to make their kid do what they consider best, instead of trying to find out what really is best. They can do it with anything that costs money.

Another resource parents control is transportation. They can hesitate more and smile less when asked for transportation to one place, and behave in the opposite way for another place. That is a way of distorting the value of the places to their children that bypasses reason and disregards truth.

Another resource parents control is what they will help with. Parents know parenting is a lot of work. Good parents are prepared to do it. They change diapers, cook meals, wash clothes, clean messes, patiently answer some questions, read books aloud, and so on. But what if their kid wants help, which is his right, doing something they don't approve of? Then conventional parents resist and try to impose their values on their kid. They deny him the help that is his right, and which they would give if he were doing something they approved of. And often they lie about it. When the child wants one thing they say it's too much work and they are tired, but then if he asks for help finding books about tofu recipes suddenly they aren't so tired anymore and are ready to be very helpful.

Manipulation of these sorts is designed to control the child and make him behave in the ways the parent considers best, both when the child agrees that's best, and also when he doesn't. TCS instead is concerned with figuring out what's best, especially when there is a disagreement, and finding an answer that doesn't distress anyone or cause suffering.

A kid wants to do X. His parent thinks X is bad.

Conventional parenting then asks: "how do we make the kid not do X?" Everything it does is an answer to this question. First you tell the kid why X is bad. This isn't an open ended discussion. You are trying to persuade him, but not thinking "maybe he's right" whenever he says stuff.

If you tell the kid why you think X is bad, and he still thinks X is good, then he "doesn't listen" and it's time for more drastic measures. That's because the issue is how to make the kid not do X, and explanations are deemed ineffective, so we move on to other ways to achieve the same goal. So next parents manipulate. They say X makes them feel bad, or they say it will make the neighbors feel bad, or they lie about how it breaks a law or angers God, or they never remind the kid to do X and always remind him of Y, or they try to make him feel guilty about doing X, or whenever he is about to do X they order him to do a chore.

If that doesn't work, they threaten the kid, and start moving on to punishments and getting angry. That usually works because kids would usually rather give up X than have their parents openly trying to hurt them. If that doesn't work, they deem him a "bad egg" and make his life hell all the time or get him diagnosed with a mental illness and drug him, or send him to a reform school to get rid of him.

TCS has a different approach. It starts with an entirely different question, which is: is X good or bad? Then everything it does is about how to find the truth of the matter, without assuming what's true from the start.

Calling things addictions is a way of stigmatising socially disapproved-of things. Addiction is about "dependency" and "need". For socially approved-of activities, the exact same psychological state would be called "interest", "dedication", "commitment", "expertise", "professionalism" or "enjoyment".

The same psychological state -- liking something a lot and using it all the time -- has both very positive and very negative words. Which is used depends on the values of the speaker, or the authority of cultural traditions, rather than the user. So it's dehumanizing -- it's a subtle way to deny his life should be run by his own values.

The idea of addictions is also a medicalization of ethics. It tries to turn an issue of ethics -- judging lifestyles as good or bad -- into one of medical science with no ethical judgment needed. We have a word for that: scientism.

The only morally sustainable distinction in this area is that between activities that *the person concerned* finds pleasant and/or useful, and those that he himself finds unpleasant and useless but cannot help repeating. When the addict does not want to be an addict is the only time addiction is a legitimate term. Whenever its used because the speaker wants someone to change his lifestyle he's just an authoritarian masking his moral judgments behind a false veneer of science.

Rationality and irrationality are properties of how conflicting opinions are treated, not of specific views. (Except when the opinion is about what to do about conflicting opinions.) For example, a belief in UFOs is not in itself irrational, but the ways in which UFO-believers typically react to evidence is. If the UFO belief wasn't backed up by irrational ways of thinking about rival ideas and criticism then it wouldn't survive for long. Similarly, cannibalism is neither rational nor irrational, except that eating someone prevents his opinions from participating in the debate.

Once upon a time there were anti-semites who wanted to promote their ideas in public and get away with it, but open anti-semitism was frowned on.

They needed some way to deny being anti-semites, while verbally attacking Jews.

One option they might consider is to say, "We don't hate Jews, we just hate Israel." This would let them say all the nasty stuff they want about the Jewish state, and the Jews there, while pretending not to be anti-semites.

This would get them a larger number of TV appearances, newspaper articles, etc, than if they introduced themselves as anti-semites.

No organization or cooperation or central planning is needed for this to become commonplace. Once a couple people try it out, and get publicity, then others will see its effectiveness and can copy the technique.

Today this technique is a daily occurrence. It's used to repeat traditional anti-semitic propaganda with only slight changes.

For example, "Jews murder Gentiles for pleasure or ritual" becomes "Israelis murder Palestinians for no reason" (except that, apparently, they wanted to).

"Jews kill babies" becomes "Israel is a child-killer state."

"Jews cheat at business and steal" becomes "Israeli settlers, especially right-wing orthodox Jews, steal land and water."

"Jews (via conspiracy) orchestrate major world events" becomes "the influential Jewish lobby is behind X"

Blaming Jewish victims for provoking their murderers is a staple of traditional anti-semitism, and of the "anti-Israel" rhetoric today, which finds ways to blame the Jews that Hamas kills.

So when someone says "I'm not anti-semitic, I'm just saying there are legitimate criticisms of Israel," and then says exactly the same things he would say if he was anti-semitic, he is either anti-semitic, willfully closing his eyes to anti-semitism, or extremely naive or ignorant.