The parent's nightmare of loss of control, with the children behaving in bizarre, dangerous and harmful ways, is a consequence of, not a justification for, coercive styles of child rearing.
Puzzled parents often ask questions of the form: “what if a child does [insert some absolutely awful thing, X, here]? Then what would a non-coercive parent do?” This question may seem meaningful, but it is pointless and misdirected. It assumes that children are inherently irrational, foolhardy or wicked and asks how non-coercive parents handle these ghastly problems. But such problems arise out of the relationships between coercive parents and their children. They are caused by coercion.
To ask what a non-coercive parent would do if her child did X, is a bit like someone in Eastern Europe just after the fall of communism asking nervously about the free market: “But what if no one ever opens any food shops and everyone starves to death?” The point is that this sort of mis-allocation of resources is characteristic of centrally planned economies and is caused by central planning. This problem simply never arises in a market economy.
But there is more to this misunderstanding than that. Non-coercion is not defined by the answer to the question “what happens if a child does X” any more than the free market is defined by “what happens if no supermarkets are opened.” The very question “what mechanical response does the parent have to such-and-such behaviour?” is meaningful only in coercive child rearing, just as questions like “what laws are there to ensure that there will be enough supermarkets?” is characteristic of a centrally planned economy.
The idea that our choice in life is between ‘self-gratification’ and consideration of other people's needs is not only false, it is one of the most wicked and harmful ideas to have been bequeathed to our culture by Christianity (though nowadays it is mediated more by secular movements such as socialism, nationalism and that recent vile variant of them, communitarianism).
The basic human choice is not between ourselves and others: it is between right and wrong. And doing right cannot be achieved by adhering to some mindless rule – whether it be ‘do what feels good at the moment’, or ‘put yourself last’ or anything in between. It requires thought. It requires creativity, and rational criticism of rival ideas of what is best. Rationality requires a commitment to judging ideas according to their content and not their source, and that in turn necessitates non-coercive relationships.
When someone complains of a child being, or growing up to be, ‘self-centred’ or choosing ‘self-gratification’, remember that what they are really saying is: “He is doing what he thinks right – and I fear what he may think.”
Lo! What a fiend is here, said he.
One who sets Reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.
(William Blake)
There is a terrible fear abroad, the fear that if we think too clearly about issues of right and wrong, we shall tend to choose wrong; so that the only hope of salvation is the suppression of independent thought. We have to spend half our time reassuring people who have this fear, and the other half fighting them tooth and nail.
In a conventionally coercive environment – yes. Faced with a conflict, people assume that resolving the problem is simply a matter of choosing between two possibilities – what you want or what I want – or taking a mathematical average between them, a choice that has the dismal property that no one considers it best. This whole approach fails to account for the new ideas, real solutions, and real agreement, that can be discovered through human creativity. In a dispute between parent and child the inevitable result of this conflict-of-interest approach is either coercion of the child or self-sacrifice on the part of the adult, or a mixture of the two.
Finding common preferences includes finding new preferences and new wants, not suspending or overriding wants. It does not mean compromise or consensus – i.e. still wanting the first thing but suspending that want in return for the other parties' suspending some of their wants. As Margaret Thatcher once said: “I am in favour of agreement, and against consensus”.
The TCS approach to family decision making is incompatible with retaining the right of parental control. If the family's decision-making processes involve forcing the children not to act in the way they believe to be right, then the children lose the incentive to apply their creativity to working out what they believe is right. Moreover, they are also being taught, implicitly as well as (usually) explicitly, that there is no such thing as a ‘right’ solution in our sense, there is only the right of stronger parties to get their way.
This is to misunderstand what we mean by “creativity”. Building a satisfying life is itself a creative endeavour. Developing good moral theories is a creative endeavour. Understanding physics is a creative endeavour. Building good relationships is a creative endeavour.
Creativity is the subject-specific meta-knowledge of how to solve a problem. A problem does not have to be conscious, explicit, or mathematical. Creativity plays a part in all improvement in each and every area of life. Coercion impairs creativity. This is not limited to the narrow sphere which is often called “creativity.”
There is no such thing as “raw”, undifferentiated creativity. It is a commonplace observation that creativity is problem-specific. For instance, a person might be a highly creative physicist but, though highly knowledgeable about music and loving it greatly, might be quite unable to compose any music that satisfies her. Another person might be able to write wonderful novels, containing great wisdom about the human condition, yet be chronically unable to solve the simplest problems in his own life. A family might not be able to create anything that particularly satisfies or impresses other people, yet might have what it takes to create a rich and satisfying lifestyle for themselves alone.
Being creative depends on being able to recognise useful and relevant conjectures. But it depends on even more than that. For instance, there is the matter of being able to create or recognise useful and relevant problems. And the ability to invent or recognise, and apply, powerful methods of criticism. And the ability to discard theories that fail to survive criticism, and to re-adjust one's background knowledge so as to reveal new and better problems.
An entrenched theory is a preconceived idea of what the outcome of the problem-solving interaction must be. If the parent's perspective is that the child will not go outside without a coat and that the only acceptable outcomes are those that involve the child wearing the coat when outdoors, this is an entrenched theory. If the parent refuses to have a TV in the house because TV is “bad” for children, this is an entrenched theory.
Holding entrenched theories is anti-rational. Instead of looking for new knowledge that will solve the problem, creativity is shut down. The only way to create new knowledge is to resolve the disagreement by finding a proposal that each person prefers – a common preference.
When you have entrenched theories, and they are false (which, since you are fallible, some of them will be) you will never know. You will never consider an alternative that might be truer. Whatever problems you have will remain, at best, unsolved – and you will attribute it to the harshness of Nature, or Society, or the perversity of other people in not accepting your Truth blindly. And you will tend to pass on the same irrationality, the same falsehood, and the same suffering, to your children.
Copyright © 1997, 2003 Taking Children Seriously