I agree with you that honest coercion is better than dishonest coercion, and that a lot of modern parenting attempts to be noncoercive merely make the coercion less honest. I agree that this is a really big problem that causes a lot of emotional damage to children, and I’m heartbroken about it.
I don’t think that’s what Jeff is doing, in part based on patterns present across his parenting posts. One of those patterns is “retesting his children’s capacities on a given goal every few months to see what’s in their zone of challenge”, which predisposes me to believe his assessment of his children’s capabilities in this story, much more so than I would a random person.
I can see a few possible goals for this comment, none of which I think it serves well:
The first is releasing stored emotional pain. I think this would be totally appropriate, often good, as its own post, and I encourage you to write one and post it (I have half a draft on the damage of dishonest coercion myself). I think it would be appropriate to text to a friend and vent about. But is not fair to dump stored pain on a stranger who is not responsible for it, even if they have some things in common with the people who caused it. Based on your edit, it seems like this was your goal, in which case I think you owe Jeff an apology.
The second is changing Jeff’s parenting to benefit his children. If that were goal I think the aggression in the comment would undercut it severely even if your object-level criticisms were 100% correct. Parents get criticized a lot from all sides, parenting is very emotionally charged, if you want to improve outcomes for a particular child by influencing their parent you need to take responsibility for managing the parent’s emotional response to the criticism. No one is more annoyed by this than me but it remains true.
Changing other people’s parenting to benefit their children. I think a top-level advice post accomplishes that better (maybe linking here), in part because when one parent sees another attacked for behavior they share they get defensive by proxy.
I can see a few possible goals for this comment, none of which I think it serves well
Fair, though my goal wasn’t to actually change any currently-existing parents’ behavior, because (among other reasons) that would be an unrealistic goal on my part, given I have no idea what actually good parenting looks like. I only know what imaginary good parenting looks like when injected into broken adults to fix it. (As I disclaimed earlier, I have no real parenting experience and am aware that it has all sorts of gotchas I have never had to nor will ever have to deal with. I have a much clearer idea what NOT to do than to do.)
That is, it was more “This thing is bad (and why) and I wish people would stop doing it”, not a considered treatise on actually persuading anyone in particular to actually change their behavior, especially since I know that rearranging surface behavior does nothing to fix the problem (which is all about implicit communication, not explicit behavior anyway).
I don’t think that’s what Jeff is doing, in part based on patterns present across his parenting posts. One of those patterns is “retesting his children’s capacities on a given goal every few months to see what’s in their zone of challenge”, which predisposes me to believe his assessment of his children’s capabilities in this story, much more so than I would a random person.
As I’ve previously implied, I definitely have obvious biases here. OTOH, I also think most people are biased to see as reasonable and normal or even positive, all sorts of things that can be very harmful to children’s development, as per my earlier reference to Animals In Translation. Adults thinking things are fine has a really high false positive rate from my (incredibly biased) perspective.
Complicating matters here is that I’m reading text and having to assume how the interaction played out, whereas when working with a client they can tell me what they feel like the adult in their memory is trying to accomplish and why, whereas an adult’s report of what they were doing or intended to do is going to be completely different.
But as I’ve also repeatedly said: this interaction is hardly the worst thing I’ve seen. It’s not even that bad on an absolute scale. I mean, it’s a very mild example of things that can be so much worse. I edited my original comment to add the disclaimer at the top shortly after I wrote it, and wanted to figure out a way to edit it further to make it less rant-ish, but wasn’t sure (and am still not) how to rephrase it without turning it into a treatise on what to do instead of what not to do.
And as I’ll say yet again, I’m really not a parenting expert, any more than a car mechanic is a driving instructor.
Honestly, to the extent I want to educate anybody here, it would be the people who are having problems caused by this type of interaction, to help them realize that the patterns they’re stuck in are just bad training data, along with some idea of what to replace it with.
(I suppose an article on that might not be a bad idea, though.)
I think you Jeff an apology.
Having re-read the original comment multiple times at this point, I’m not sure what you’re asking for here. The original comment even before I edited it literally apologizes for the rant, and the addition at the top (added minutes later, possibly before anyone even had a chance to read it) was intended to further clarify that the rant in question was never directed at Jeff personally—the “you” throughout the original comment was always meant as a generic “you” of people in general, that I simply wish would stop doing this thing to children.
On reflection, however, it’s probably the case that I should not have posted at all, because it’s unlikely the comment will achieve even the relatively minor goal of getting even one person to stop, and the odds that it will be effective in helping adults address any of the issues arising from growing up with the described pattern is similarly low.
OTOH, I’m not sure that deleting everything in the thread serves a useful function either, at this point, and it does serve the positive function of telling those other adults they’re not alone, which is presumably why it’s gotten some upvotes as well as downvotes.
FWIW I found the models in your comments useful, and they did make me adjust some of my ideas of how I might want to parent if I ever have kids. (More specifically, I spend some time hanging out with a crowd who’s into ideas around non-coercive parenting, so it was good to see a reminder that trying to do non-coercive parenting and failing at it is likely worse than just doing mildly coercive parenting outright.)
When I was first trying to figure out how to fix my own upbringing (in my head), the book The Continuum Concept was extremely helpful, in providing an example of how implications are far more important than explications. The indigenous people described in the book trust and believe in their children in ways and to extents that “civilized” people find shocking.
trying to do non-coercive parenting and failing at it is likely worse than just doing mildly coercive parenting outright
That’s not quite what I’m getting at here: 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.
This is why I’m reluctant to try to give any actual parenting advice, because it’s not the behavior, but the internal model that generates the behavior that determines the nonverbal status communication that will program the child’s future attitudes and strategies used in relationships with themselves and others. Children’s brains try to extrapolate from outward behavior what the intent behind the communication, with a prior that this intent is ultimately aimed at benefiting the child somehow and reflects the proper morals of the community to which it belongs.
So this totally backfires when the adults are operating on faulty assumptions about the children, as these assumptions are then taken in uncritically as programming for how to act. An adult who tries to proactively teach their children things, for example (vs. exposing them to opportunities to learn), is communicating that they do not expect the child to want to learn or be capable of doing so. So what the child then most learns from this behavior is that they are considered stupid, ignorant, unobservant, or dull.
In the same way, trying to be “noncoercive” at a child when you in fact have an agenda for what you’re trying to “noncoerce” them to, then you’re basically saying you think they can’t handle being told what is going on, or that they are the one in charge, or, well, it depends entirely on what the thinking going on is. If someone’s basically thinking, “I need to do this so the kid doesn’t grow up to be X”, then the child picks up on the idea that they must be X by default. That they’re defective in some critical way, because the adult thinks they’re so dumb or careless or incapable that they would allow themselves to grow up X without intervention, or mistakenly think X was a good thing!
Anyway, if you consider telling a kid what to do coercive, well… in the Continuum Concept, the adults only ever tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing. They don’t tell the kids what not to do, nor do they tell them things “for their own good”, nor nag the children to learn the skills they’ll need later in life, or a thousand other things that modern parents do to their kids all the goddamn time. They just tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing for the family or community’s well-being.
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.
Really, coercive vs. non-coercive is the wrong axis to think on, 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. Not by the behavior itself, but what the behavior tells them about your beliefs and attitudes towards their abilities, inclinations, and judgment.
Modern society has very few opportunities for children to genuinely contribute to the well-being of their family or community in a way that allows them to feel their actions have meaning or worth. Telling them to do these things isn’t coercion for the parent’s benefit, unless the parent thinks it so in their own mind. The people described in CC don’t think that way: they assume 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.
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.
Thanks for sharing that book The Continuum Concept! I’ve had this idea for a while that a huge amount of trauma—and even philosophical underpinnings of ideologies—are actually rooted in subconscious, innate expectations that were dashed in childhood. Looks like this book can give me some fodder for this theory.
Example of what I mean: the belief in a loving god is a generalization of the desire for a loving parent. People who didn’t have a loving parent may be more likely to seek a religion with loving gods as a subconscious compensation. I did, anyway. That’s a testable prediction—are people with bad childhoods more likely to become religious? Given how trauma seems to coincide with greater willingness to join cults, it seems plausible.
That said, I am a bit skeptical of the book’s apparently highly general universal claim (haven’t read it yet of course) about what is best in parenting, which looks as if it’s just sort of posed and argued for without any experiment. Actually, how much of the theory of parenting has been experimentally tested?
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)
Non-coercive parenting is fine – within reasonable limits.
If your toddler ‘wants’ to walk into traffic (i.e. does do so) – too bad; that’s outside of the reasonable scope of their decision-making! It is entirely reasonable to physically coerce (e.g. pick them up) such a child in those circumstances.
Everything short of an imminent and potentially dire emergency is more-or-less plausibly up for grabs. I think it’d be generally better for parents to build a ‘positive’ scope of decision-making instead of trying to patch an initial mostly ‘open-ended’ scope.
I personally think that homeschooling is perfectly fine to consider but others should probably think about it a good bit, or even try it out for a limited period, before (implicitly) allowing that as an option if one of their children doesn’t want to go to school.
Similarly, there’s lots of things that kids/children do or would/could do, mostly out of ignorance, that their parents probably aren’t really committed to living with, e.g. making (spectacular) messes, drawing on walls/furniture, destroying things, etc..
I think it’s much better to ‘flout convention’ explicitly, while also teaching kids about the standard convention(s) too. I was lucky enough to be (explicitly) allowed to draw on the walls of my bedroom at one point. That seems totally fine to allow – unless a parent really isn’t willing to live with the consequences.
At least the first part of your original comment was fine and I think correct.
I was confused as to whether you thought Jeff was doing what you decried. I don’t think he does – and just based on everything else he’s written about parenting. I think he was describing the ‘honest mistake’ version of what you described.
But I think you’re absolutely right that what you described is in fact pretty bad. I remember that kind of thing and some kids I know now definitely share similar negative feelings about it too. Kids are pretty smart!
I agree with you that honest coercion is better than dishonest coercion, and that a lot of modern parenting attempts to be noncoercive merely make the coercion less honest. I agree that this is a really big problem that causes a lot of emotional damage to children, and I’m heartbroken about it.
I don’t think that’s what Jeff is doing, in part based on patterns present across his parenting posts. One of those patterns is “retesting his children’s capacities on a given goal every few months to see what’s in their zone of challenge”, which predisposes me to believe his assessment of his children’s capabilities in this story, much more so than I would a random person.
I can see a few possible goals for this comment, none of which I think it serves well:
The first is releasing stored emotional pain. I think this would be totally appropriate, often good, as its own post, and I encourage you to write one and post it (I have half a draft on the damage of dishonest coercion myself). I think it would be appropriate to text to a friend and vent about. But is not fair to dump stored pain on a stranger who is not responsible for it, even if they have some things in common with the people who caused it. Based on your edit, it seems like this was your goal, in which case I think you owe Jeff an apology.
The second is changing Jeff’s parenting to benefit his children. If that were goal I think the aggression in the comment would undercut it severely even if your object-level criticisms were 100% correct. Parents get criticized a lot from all sides, parenting is very emotionally charged, if you want to improve outcomes for a particular child by influencing their parent you need to take responsibility for managing the parent’s emotional response to the criticism. No one is more annoyed by this than me but it remains true.
Changing other people’s parenting to benefit their children. I think a top-level advice post accomplishes that better (maybe linking here), in part because when one parent sees another attacked for behavior they share they get defensive by proxy.
Fair, though my goal wasn’t to actually change any currently-existing parents’ behavior, because (among other reasons) that would be an unrealistic goal on my part, given I have no idea what actually good parenting looks like. I only know what imaginary good parenting looks like when injected into broken adults to fix it. (As I disclaimed earlier, I have no real parenting experience and am aware that it has all sorts of gotchas I have never had to nor will ever have to deal with. I have a much clearer idea what NOT to do than to do.)
That is, it was more “This thing is bad (and why) and I wish people would stop doing it”, not a considered treatise on actually persuading anyone in particular to actually change their behavior, especially since I know that rearranging surface behavior does nothing to fix the problem (which is all about implicit communication, not explicit behavior anyway).
As I’ve previously implied, I definitely have obvious biases here. OTOH, I also think most people are biased to see as reasonable and normal or even positive, all sorts of things that can be very harmful to children’s development, as per my earlier reference to Animals In Translation. Adults thinking things are fine has a really high false positive rate from my (incredibly biased) perspective.
Complicating matters here is that I’m reading text and having to assume how the interaction played out, whereas when working with a client they can tell me what they feel like the adult in their memory is trying to accomplish and why, whereas an adult’s report of what they were doing or intended to do is going to be completely different.
But as I’ve also repeatedly said: this interaction is hardly the worst thing I’ve seen. It’s not even that bad on an absolute scale. I mean, it’s a very mild example of things that can be so much worse. I edited my original comment to add the disclaimer at the top shortly after I wrote it, and wanted to figure out a way to edit it further to make it less rant-ish, but wasn’t sure (and am still not) how to rephrase it without turning it into a treatise on what to do instead of what not to do.
And as I’ll say yet again, I’m really not a parenting expert, any more than a car mechanic is a driving instructor.
Honestly, to the extent I want to educate anybody here, it would be the people who are having problems caused by this type of interaction, to help them realize that the patterns they’re stuck in are just bad training data, along with some idea of what to replace it with.
(I suppose an article on that might not be a bad idea, though.)
Having re-read the original comment multiple times at this point, I’m not sure what you’re asking for here. The original comment even before I edited it literally apologizes for the rant, and the addition at the top (added minutes later, possibly before anyone even had a chance to read it) was intended to further clarify that the rant in question was never directed at Jeff personally—the “you” throughout the original comment was always meant as a generic “you” of people in general, that I simply wish would stop doing this thing to children.
On reflection, however, it’s probably the case that I should not have posted at all, because it’s unlikely the comment will achieve even the relatively minor goal of getting even one person to stop, and the odds that it will be effective in helping adults address any of the issues arising from growing up with the described pattern is similarly low.
OTOH, I’m not sure that deleting everything in the thread serves a useful function either, at this point, and it does serve the positive function of telling those other adults they’re not alone, which is presumably why it’s gotten some upvotes as well as downvotes.
FWIW I found the models in your comments useful, and they did make me adjust some of my ideas of how I might want to parent if I ever have kids. (More specifically, I spend some time hanging out with a crowd who’s into ideas around non-coercive parenting, so it was good to see a reminder that trying to do non-coercive parenting and failing at it is likely worse than just doing mildly coercive parenting outright.)
When I was first trying to figure out how to fix my own upbringing (in my head), the book The Continuum Concept was extremely helpful, in providing an example of how implications are far more important than explications. The indigenous people described in the book trust and believe in their children in ways and to extents that “civilized” people find shocking.
That’s not quite what I’m getting at here: 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.
This is why I’m reluctant to try to give any actual parenting advice, because it’s not the behavior, but the internal model that generates the behavior that determines the nonverbal status communication that will program the child’s future attitudes and strategies used in relationships with themselves and others. Children’s brains try to extrapolate from outward behavior what the intent behind the communication, with a prior that this intent is ultimately aimed at benefiting the child somehow and reflects the proper morals of the community to which it belongs.
So this totally backfires when the adults are operating on faulty assumptions about the children, as these assumptions are then taken in uncritically as programming for how to act. An adult who tries to proactively teach their children things, for example (vs. exposing them to opportunities to learn), is communicating that they do not expect the child to want to learn or be capable of doing so. So what the child then most learns from this behavior is that they are considered stupid, ignorant, unobservant, or dull.
In the same way, trying to be “noncoercive” at a child when you in fact have an agenda for what you’re trying to “noncoerce” them to, then you’re basically saying you think they can’t handle being told what is going on, or that they are the one in charge, or, well, it depends entirely on what the thinking going on is. If someone’s basically thinking, “I need to do this so the kid doesn’t grow up to be X”, then the child picks up on the idea that they must be X by default. That they’re defective in some critical way, because the adult thinks they’re so dumb or careless or incapable that they would allow themselves to grow up X without intervention, or mistakenly think X was a good thing!
Anyway, if you consider telling a kid what to do coercive, well… in the Continuum Concept, the adults only ever tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing. They don’t tell the kids what not to do, nor do they tell them things “for their own good”, nor nag the children to learn the skills they’ll need later in life, or a thousand other things that modern parents do to their kids all the goddamn time. They just tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing for the family or community’s well-being.
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.
Really, coercive vs. non-coercive is the wrong axis to think on, 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. Not by the behavior itself, but what the behavior tells them about your beliefs and attitudes towards their abilities, inclinations, and judgment.
Modern society has very few opportunities for children to genuinely contribute to the well-being of their family or community in a way that allows them to feel their actions have meaning or worth. Telling them to do these things isn’t coercion for the parent’s benefit, unless the parent thinks it so in their own mind. The people described in CC don’t think that way: they assume 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.
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.
Thanks for sharing that book The Continuum Concept! I’ve had this idea for a while that a huge amount of trauma—and even philosophical underpinnings of ideologies—are actually rooted in subconscious, innate expectations that were dashed in childhood. Looks like this book can give me some fodder for this theory.
Example of what I mean: the belief in a loving god is a generalization of the desire for a loving parent. People who didn’t have a loving parent may be more likely to seek a religion with loving gods as a subconscious compensation. I did, anyway. That’s a testable prediction—are people with bad childhoods more likely to become religious? Given how trauma seems to coincide with greater willingness to join cults, it seems plausible.
That said, I am a bit skeptical of the book’s apparently highly general universal claim (haven’t read it yet of course) about what is best in parenting, which looks as if it’s just sort of posed and argued for without any experiment. Actually, how much of the theory of parenting has been experimentally tested?
As I said, I can’t really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly “use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting” in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.
(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)
I came across the CC at a point where I was researching developmental psych in order to find out what could be done to fix the kind of crap I had in my head and came across in others’. Mostly books tended to give advice like “love yourself” or to “love”, “protect”, “care for” etc. one’s inner child. The best ones talked about re-living past scenarios with good parenting.
But none of those books ever explained what any of that was, so if you didn’t experience love or protection or good parenting, they were kind of useless.
CC and Cycles of Power (by Pamela Levin) were the only books I found that made a significant effort to show just what functional parenting might look or sound like. (Though Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-Dependency” deserves an honorable mention, but I get the impression a lot of its inspiration actually came from Levin’s work.)
I now have a mostly-good-enough model of what functional parenting looks like that is based on more general principles of responsibility, trust, and clean communication, but in difficult cases I still reach for Levin or Leidloff on rare occasion.
(Again, “functional parenting” not meaning actual parenting, but “what kinds of parenting experiences do people need to imagine as alternatives in order to repair their own functioning by realizing what they were missing and why they don’t need to keep running coping mechanisms to work around their dysfunctional parent.”)
Non-coercive parenting is fine – within reasonable limits.
If your toddler ‘wants’ to walk into traffic (i.e. does do so) – too bad; that’s outside of the reasonable scope of their decision-making! It is entirely reasonable to physically coerce (e.g. pick them up) such a child in those circumstances.
Everything short of an imminent and potentially dire emergency is more-or-less plausibly up for grabs. I think it’d be generally better for parents to build a ‘positive’ scope of decision-making instead of trying to patch an initial mostly ‘open-ended’ scope.
I personally think that homeschooling is perfectly fine to consider but others should probably think about it a good bit, or even try it out for a limited period, before (implicitly) allowing that as an option if one of their children doesn’t want to go to school.
Similarly, there’s lots of things that kids/children do or would/could do, mostly out of ignorance, that their parents probably aren’t really committed to living with, e.g. making (spectacular) messes, drawing on walls/furniture, destroying things, etc..
I think it’s much better to ‘flout convention’ explicitly, while also teaching kids about the standard convention(s) too. I was lucky enough to be (explicitly) allowed to draw on the walls of my bedroom at one point. That seems totally fine to allow – unless a parent really isn’t willing to live with the consequences.
At least the first part of your original comment was fine and I think correct.
I was confused as to whether you thought Jeff was doing what you decried. I don’t think he does – and just based on everything else he’s written about parenting. I think he was describing the ‘honest mistake’ version of what you described.
But I think you’re absolutely right that what you described is in fact pretty bad. I remember that kind of thing and some kids I know now definitely share similar negative feelings about it too. Kids are pretty smart!