trying to do “non coercive parenting” as a technique that is aimed at a result is the problem. Actually trusting and believing in children is an entirely different thing altogether, and the superficial behaviors have little to do with it.
One of the most common things that happens when people first try to reimagine their own upbringing is to try to change their idea of their parents’ behavior to something better, fairer, nicer, more non-coercive, more supportive, etc. This attempt invariably fails because what they’re imagining at first is a parent who does all these things on the outside with no change to how the parent is thinking or feeling on the inside. So compassionate behaviors become pitying or contemptuous, noncoercion is manipulation to fix the broken or defective subpar child, etc.[...]
For a child at the age where they want to do everything the older people are doing, telling a child to do something isn’t coercion: it’s acceptance and respect, recognizing their desire to belong and contribute in a meaningful way. The idea that this is “coercive” is completely ass-backwards. [...]
… children want to be a part of big people things and do stuff that’s important, so telling them to do stuff is recognition that they have reached a level of capability to be trusted with an important task!
This is about as far opposite of coercion as you can get, despite literally telling the kid to do something.
I think I agree with all of this.
because whether you’re being “coercive” has little to do with whether you’re trusting kids. If you’re trying to shape their behavior so they don’t grow up to be X—regardless of what “X” is—you are undermining their agency and self-trust.
I’m defining “coercion” as something like “overriding the child’s preferences and values and treating them as intrinsically less important than your own”; the opposite of coercing (in this sense) would be to resolve conflicts by seeking solutions that satisfy both the child’s and the parent’s preferences.
It seems to me that under this definition of coercion, non-coercion is tightly linked to trusting the child and having an internal model of the child as capable. If you believe things like “the child needs to be forced to do Z or they won’t grow up properly”, then that forces you to override their preferences in cases when they’d prefer doing non-Z. Whereas if you do have trust in them turning out fine when allowed to pursue their own preferences, and consider those preferences equally important as any adult’s, then that naturally tends you towards non-coercion (as defined here).
This is also compatible with telling them to do things if they want that—if it’s their preference to be told things, then you’re obviously not overriding their preferences when you do that!
Definitely agree that non-coercion is about the internal models more than the behaviors. I think that the value of thinking and talking about a concept such as “non-coercive parenting” is that it forces one to more critically examine their models. One nice example was an article I once saw—I’ve unfortunately lost the link—where the author had done a survey of various people, asking them about things they thought children have to be forced to do. Most of the people who responded agreed that there are some things children really have to be forced into—but they tended to disagree with each other over what those things were! Doing that kind of an inquiry of “what do children really need to be coerced into” can help find ways where it’s not actually necessary in the first place, and where one’s models that suggested otherwise were flawed.
I’m defining “coercion” as something like “overriding the child’s preferences and values and treating them as intrinsically less important than your own”; the opposite of coercing (in this sense) would be to resolve conflicts by seeking solutions that satisfy both the child’s and the parent’s preferences.
Yeah, that seems… wrong to me, though it’s hard to say precisely why. It has to do with why I think this is the wrong axis of consideration.
I mean, I agree that the intrinsic-less-important thing is indeed the bad thing. I’m just not sure I agree that “seeking solutions that satisfy both preferences” is the correct solution, depending on the details of how that exactly cashes out.
For younger children especially, that should generally mean the adult listens, and then makes the decision, rather than placing responsibility on the child for being part of the resolution. A lot of damage I’ve seen comes from adults trying to make kids responsible for things they’re not ready to be responsible for—something that’s just as damaging as never letting them have any responsibility.
So to me, the relevant axis is probably something more like how much responsibility does the child get, with the adult ultimately being responsible even if some is also being taken by the child.
I think one of the things I was originally reacting to in this post was that the dialog described seemed to me to be putting a bunch of responsibility on the child that they implicitly aren’t ready for: asking questions of a child regarding their actions in such a way can have the effect of forcibly assigning them responsibility and depriving them of leadership support.
Anyway, I think that’s why I see coercion/noncoercion as a not-very-helpful axis of distinction. It’s more about who is responsible for what, and allowing children responsibilities they ask for (implicitly or explicitly) -- even knowing that they’ll screw them up—without ever letting go of the fact that final responsibility still lies with the parent. You can’t just make stuff their fault and blame them for it, even if they were the one who asked for the responsibility and made the mistakes.
The people in the Continuum Concept basically have the concept that if a child makes a decision, they’re old enough to accept the consequences of that decision. This only works for them, however, because their entire system is set up in such a way that the children mostly don’t assert themselves until they’re old enough to accept the consequences. Since the adults have been only ever telling them to do useful things, they trust the adults enough to mostly follow their guidance and example.
But it’s kind of hard to distill that down into a nice helpful “technique” or list of dos and don’ts.
That makes a lot of sense. To be clear, I agree that “noncoercion” probably isn’t quite the central thing, and also that you can’t really distill it down into a technique. I view it more as like… there’s a cluster of related things, and “noncoercion” is pointing to one incomplete aspect of it that can help clarify things, but to require everything to be fully noncoercive would probably be Goodharting.
For younger children especially, that should generally mean the adult listens, and then makes the decision, rather than placing responsibility on the child for being part of the resolution.
This makes intuitive sense to me, though it feels like it’s maybe slightly in tension with the thing you said about trusting and believing children—if the adult reserves the right to make the final decision, doesn’t that imply disbelief in the child’s ability to make it?
(The way of reconciling those that comes to my mind would be something like “trust that children are doing their best and acting out of sensible motives, even if they don’t yet have enough knowledge and cognitive capability to reliably arrive at the right decisions”.)
if the adult reserves the right to make the final decision, doesn’t that imply disbelief in the child’s ability to make it?
No. The trust is that the child is capable of learning and growing to ultimately take care of themselves, not a belief that the child currently has all the information, skill, or wisdom needed to make decisions for their own or the family’s long-term good.
The thing that doesn’t work is that when parents try to micromanage children’s behavior and development in a way that puts responsibility on the child, the message is, “you’re broken and I have to constantly fix you or you’re going to wind up defective.” Like, an awful lot of stuff adults do sort of presuppose that the child is never going to learn from their own mistakes or the consequences of their actions (let alone the example of others), and therefore have to be explicitly told things. Or they presuppose that a child being focused on short-term things means they will never improve their time horizon and must be constantly nagged about future concerns.
The people described in the Continuum Concept don’t do this kind of thing. They basically assume that children will grow up to be wise and responsible adults, without any need for explicit teaching or management by adults. They provide learning opportunities (toy bows and food processing tools) but do not nag the children to practice. And if they need to tell the kids what to do, they don’t act like this is something the kids are supposed to know or want to do already, or to blame for not doing.
(The way of reconciling those that comes to my mind would be something like “trust that children are doing their best and acting out of sensible motives, even if they don’t yet have enough knowledge and cognitive capability to reliably arrive at the right decisions”.)
This still feels orthogonal to the real thing to me. Partly, this is because the CC’s description of how decision-making works is that they consider that a child who asserts a thing is old enough to make that decision. In the absence of any micromanagement or pressure to appear more mature than they are, this assumption works.
A big part of what happens, I think, in that environment, is that their children grow up with an unconditional sense of belonging and acceptance. A lot of talk about the Continuum Concept tends to focus on the part where children are constantly held and carried, from birth on, and never put down or left alone, until they want to crawl or walk. And they’re not just carried by parents, but by siblings, cousins, any random person more or less, all of whom are visibly happy to be interacting with them.
A kid growing up with that is not operating at a deficit of approval, so while they may want to grow up as quickly as possible, they have no need to fake a higher level of maturity than they actually have—a child who diligently practices the bow will get no more approval or acceptance than the one who does it randomly and sporadically as the mood moves them. The adults will not pay any particular attention one way or the other.
In modern child-rearing, there is nearly always something a child can immediately gain by faking a greater maturity level than they actually have—often because the adults themselves will feel rewarded by their children’s apparently-improved behavior or performance.
So the thing that I am trying to point at here is that “non-coercive” seems broken and wrong to me because it still seems to me to imply the goal is to somehow make something happen to the child, vs. an approach of say, “benign indifference” or “Genuinely Not Giving A F*ck”. The CC describes adults who are not in the least bit absorbed by the question of how their kids will turn out, and have difficulty understanding why the author is asking such dumb questions about how they raise their kids. They’re like, you carry them until they can carry themselves, and then they figure it out for themselves from there. Like, “duh”.
That’s what I mean by trusting: it’s not that they believe children are already adults, but that they believe that growing up is something kids learn, not something adults teach. Modern discussions of raising children, OTOH, nearly always seem to assume there’s something adults have to do to turn children into Real People, whereas the CC folks believe children are already Real People who just happen to be temporarily embarrassed by being short, ignorant, and not particularly wise, and thus need some seasoning, but will of course start volunteering for progressively more important responsibilities as soon as they feel ready. (And they trust them to also back off if it turns out they’re not as ready, or to gradually titrate up how much of a thing they do.)
If anything, I would call this “non-interventionist” rather than “non-coercive”, as it doesn’t matter whether intervention is framed in coercive or non-coercive terms. Or to put it in LW-dialect, they don’t believe in “other-optimizing” their kids.
I think I agree with all of this.
I’m defining “coercion” as something like “overriding the child’s preferences and values and treating them as intrinsically less important than your own”; the opposite of coercing (in this sense) would be to resolve conflicts by seeking solutions that satisfy both the child’s and the parent’s preferences.
It seems to me that under this definition of coercion, non-coercion is tightly linked to trusting the child and having an internal model of the child as capable. If you believe things like “the child needs to be forced to do Z or they won’t grow up properly”, then that forces you to override their preferences in cases when they’d prefer doing non-Z. Whereas if you do have trust in them turning out fine when allowed to pursue their own preferences, and consider those preferences equally important as any adult’s, then that naturally tends you towards non-coercion (as defined here).
This is also compatible with telling them to do things if they want that—if it’s their preference to be told things, then you’re obviously not overriding their preferences when you do that!
Definitely agree that non-coercion is about the internal models more than the behaviors. I think that the value of thinking and talking about a concept such as “non-coercive parenting” is that it forces one to more critically examine their models. One nice example was an article I once saw—I’ve unfortunately lost the link—where the author had done a survey of various people, asking them about things they thought children have to be forced to do. Most of the people who responded agreed that there are some things children really have to be forced into—but they tended to disagree with each other over what those things were! Doing that kind of an inquiry of “what do children really need to be coerced into” can help find ways where it’s not actually necessary in the first place, and where one’s models that suggested otherwise were flawed.
Yeah, that seems… wrong to me, though it’s hard to say precisely why. It has to do with why I think this is the wrong axis of consideration.
I mean, I agree that the intrinsic-less-important thing is indeed the bad thing. I’m just not sure I agree that “seeking solutions that satisfy both preferences” is the correct solution, depending on the details of how that exactly cashes out.
For younger children especially, that should generally mean the adult listens, and then makes the decision, rather than placing responsibility on the child for being part of the resolution. A lot of damage I’ve seen comes from adults trying to make kids responsible for things they’re not ready to be responsible for—something that’s just as damaging as never letting them have any responsibility.
So to me, the relevant axis is probably something more like how much responsibility does the child get, with the adult ultimately being responsible even if some is also being taken by the child.
I think one of the things I was originally reacting to in this post was that the dialog described seemed to me to be putting a bunch of responsibility on the child that they implicitly aren’t ready for: asking questions of a child regarding their actions in such a way can have the effect of forcibly assigning them responsibility and depriving them of leadership support.
Anyway, I think that’s why I see coercion/noncoercion as a not-very-helpful axis of distinction. It’s more about who is responsible for what, and allowing children responsibilities they ask for (implicitly or explicitly) -- even knowing that they’ll screw them up—without ever letting go of the fact that final responsibility still lies with the parent. You can’t just make stuff their fault and blame them for it, even if they were the one who asked for the responsibility and made the mistakes.
The people in the Continuum Concept basically have the concept that if a child makes a decision, they’re old enough to accept the consequences of that decision. This only works for them, however, because their entire system is set up in such a way that the children mostly don’t assert themselves until they’re old enough to accept the consequences. Since the adults have been only ever telling them to do useful things, they trust the adults enough to mostly follow their guidance and example.
But it’s kind of hard to distill that down into a nice helpful “technique” or list of dos and don’ts.
That makes a lot of sense. To be clear, I agree that “noncoercion” probably isn’t quite the central thing, and also that you can’t really distill it down into a technique. I view it more as like… there’s a cluster of related things, and “noncoercion” is pointing to one incomplete aspect of it that can help clarify things, but to require everything to be fully noncoercive would probably be Goodharting.
This makes intuitive sense to me, though it feels like it’s maybe slightly in tension with the thing you said about trusting and believing children—if the adult reserves the right to make the final decision, doesn’t that imply disbelief in the child’s ability to make it?
(The way of reconciling those that comes to my mind would be something like “trust that children are doing their best and acting out of sensible motives, even if they don’t yet have enough knowledge and cognitive capability to reliably arrive at the right decisions”.)
No. The trust is that the child is capable of learning and growing to ultimately take care of themselves, not a belief that the child currently has all the information, skill, or wisdom needed to make decisions for their own or the family’s long-term good.
The thing that doesn’t work is that when parents try to micromanage children’s behavior and development in a way that puts responsibility on the child, the message is, “you’re broken and I have to constantly fix you or you’re going to wind up defective.” Like, an awful lot of stuff adults do sort of presuppose that the child is never going to learn from their own mistakes or the consequences of their actions (let alone the example of others), and therefore have to be explicitly told things. Or they presuppose that a child being focused on short-term things means they will never improve their time horizon and must be constantly nagged about future concerns.
The people described in the Continuum Concept don’t do this kind of thing. They basically assume that children will grow up to be wise and responsible adults, without any need for explicit teaching or management by adults. They provide learning opportunities (toy bows and food processing tools) but do not nag the children to practice. And if they need to tell the kids what to do, they don’t act like this is something the kids are supposed to know or want to do already, or to blame for not doing.
This still feels orthogonal to the real thing to me. Partly, this is because the CC’s description of how decision-making works is that they consider that a child who asserts a thing is old enough to make that decision. In the absence of any micromanagement or pressure to appear more mature than they are, this assumption works.
A big part of what happens, I think, in that environment, is that their children grow up with an unconditional sense of belonging and acceptance. A lot of talk about the Continuum Concept tends to focus on the part where children are constantly held and carried, from birth on, and never put down or left alone, until they want to crawl or walk. And they’re not just carried by parents, but by siblings, cousins, any random person more or less, all of whom are visibly happy to be interacting with them.
A kid growing up with that is not operating at a deficit of approval, so while they may want to grow up as quickly as possible, they have no need to fake a higher level of maturity than they actually have—a child who diligently practices the bow will get no more approval or acceptance than the one who does it randomly and sporadically as the mood moves them. The adults will not pay any particular attention one way or the other.
In modern child-rearing, there is nearly always something a child can immediately gain by faking a greater maturity level than they actually have—often because the adults themselves will feel rewarded by their children’s apparently-improved behavior or performance.
So the thing that I am trying to point at here is that “non-coercive” seems broken and wrong to me because it still seems to me to imply the goal is to somehow make something happen to the child, vs. an approach of say, “benign indifference” or “Genuinely Not Giving A F*ck”. The CC describes adults who are not in the least bit absorbed by the question of how their kids will turn out, and have difficulty understanding why the author is asking such dumb questions about how they raise their kids. They’re like, you carry them until they can carry themselves, and then they figure it out for themselves from there. Like, “duh”.
That’s what I mean by trusting: it’s not that they believe children are already adults, but that they believe that growing up is something kids learn, not something adults teach. Modern discussions of raising children, OTOH, nearly always seem to assume there’s something adults have to do to turn children into Real People, whereas the CC folks believe children are already Real People who just happen to be temporarily embarrassed by being short, ignorant, and not particularly wise, and thus need some seasoning, but will of course start volunteering for progressively more important responsibilities as soon as they feel ready. (And they trust them to also back off if it turns out they’re not as ready, or to gradually titrate up how much of a thing they do.)
If anything, I would call this “non-interventionist” rather than “non-coercive”, as it doesn’t matter whether intervention is framed in coercive or non-coercive terms. Or to put it in LW-dialect, they don’t believe in “other-optimizing” their kids.