This guest column, by homeschooler, Marti Gardner, was first published in Taking Children Seriously, the paper journal (TCS 20).

Our homeschooling support group meeting was last night and we had a lovely couple there who have home schooled all four of their children, three of whom have gone on to college, the other of whom is in high school. We broke into smaller groups of five to six people, in which we discussed our different methods and ideas, then our group spokesperson shared the general ones with the whole group.

It was great until we reached two areas. Before I touch on those, I'd like to ask a few questions that are related.

Suppose that your household chores are to make your bed (spouse is up before you so it's your job),

clean the house, do laundry and dishes, feed the kids breakfast and lunch – whatever your list looks like. Now, suppose come dinner time, the laundry isn't done yet. Maybe you got a call from your sister/neighbour/friend and you got side-tracked, or just flat out didn't feel like it. Now, suppose you were told that because you didn't finish your chores for the day, you don't get dinner. Your spouse says, “Forget it, you get to eat when it's done.” Excuse me, but mine better start running and ducking cause this girl eats dinner despite her chores being incomplete. What about you? Do you have to go without your meal because of this?

What about the other things maybe the other spouse is responsible for, like mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, working on the car, weeding the flower bed, going to work? Now suppose for a minute the yard is only half mowed at dinner time and the trash is still sitting by the door to go out. Okay, do we tell them they can't eat dinner until it's done (who cares if it's dinner time and they are hungry)? Mine would probably tell me that if I really thought I could keep him from his plate to go ahead and stand there in front of the stove and watch him reach around me or pick me up and move me.

TCS Glossary

What Is TCS? An Introduction, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Introduction to TCS Theory, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Introduction to TCS, by Virtue Pure

Common Preferences and Non-coercion

TCS and Karl Popper

TCS and Fallibilism, by David Deutsch

TCS Theory and Practice, by Alice Bachini

Optimism

Choosing Creativity, by Kolya Wolf

The TCS Survey (1997)

My Heavenly-Horrific Vision of TCS, by Suzanna Slack

Great Change of Mind Without Self-Sacrifice, by Kristel Nybondas

“Getting Children Reading”

Natural Consequences, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Parental Aversions, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

There But For An Internet Post Go I...

Waste Not, Want Not, by Eponymous Anonymous

The Education of Karl Popper, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

How Would You Like It?

Parenting By The Book, by Francine Lucidon

Curious Young Children Taking Things Apart, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Feeding The Family: Some Tips For the Cooking-Phobic, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Housework Help For a Harried Mother, by Starlene Stewart

Children Are Not Born Knowing Right And Wrong

Taking Toys Seriously (Yes, Really)

When Toddlers Get Upset, by Alice Bachini

Is Hiding Medicine In Your Child's Food Wrong?

Practical TCS, by Annette Abma

TCS Parenting Is Self-Improving, by Alice Bachini

Beware the Curriculum Mentality, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Taking A Wrong Turn, by Alice Bachini

Requiring Children To Do Chores, by David Deutsch

TCS doesn't mean attempting to create a problem-free state, it means simply actually starting to solve problems rather than being stuck. Happiness is not being without problems, it is being in the process of solving your problems. Being TCS doesn't mean miraculously developing perfect knowledge and rationality and becoming perfectly non-coercive and a godlike paragon of every virtue known to man overnight; it means starting from where you are and making improvements and correcting mistakes as best you can, as you go along. That, after all, is all one can do.

If you would like to send in quotations you think might be of interest to TCS parents, please do! If possible, please include the full reference details (Author, where said/written, date and other publishing details).

Lord Avebury

“It is customary, but I think it is a mistake, to speak of happy childhood. Children are often overanxious and acutely sensitive. Man ought to be man and master of his fate; but children are at the mercy of those around them.” (1887)

Robert Briffault

“The effects of infantile instruction are, like syphilis, never completely cured.” (1931)

Winston Churchill

“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor. The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading. When I was nine and a half my father gave me Treasure Island, and I remember the delight with which I devoured it. My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.” – My Early Life (1930)

Karl Popper's general idea of how a human being acquires knowledge – by creating it afresh through criticism and the elimination of error – applies equally to non-scientific types of knowledge such as moral knowledge, and to unconscious and inexplicit forms of knowledge. Thus we see ourselves as trying to extend Popperian epistemology into areas where, by its inner logic, it applies, but where Popper himself resolutely refused to apply it.

This new site has a forum for supportive discussions of TCS.

Some years ago, TCS conducted a fascinating survey and reported the results in the paper journal, Taking Children Seriously (TCS 23). We asked: “Which of the following things are so important that children must do them even if they cannot be persuaded to, and are distressed at being forced to?” The results are both fascinating and useful for those of us striving to take our real children seriously in our real lives. Noticing and understanding the phenomenon that the survey highlights can dissolve fears and help us question our unchallenged false assumptions. Several readers have asked for this to be made available on the TCS web site, so here it is.

To argue that there can never be such a thing as parenting and people so good that they don't ever resort actively to hurting their own immediate family(!) is rank pessimism. Wherever we are on the scale of moral evolution today, we can always go up a rung tomorrow. Unless we prefer to turn away from growth and start claiming there are no more rungs, of course.

“Finding common preferences” and “solving problems non-coercively” have exactly the same denotation (meaning), but somewhat different connotations (suggested implications).

The recent release of the new Harry Potter book brings to mind some of the extremely strange things that people under the influence of the prevailing educational cult theory are wont to believe. One of the reasons many adults praise Harry Potter is that it gets children reading:

“It's wonderful to see kids so interested in reading,” said Susan Polk, manager of the bookstore. “It's a 750 page book and they still want it that much. That's exciting!”

What is good about Harry Potter is not that it gets children reading, but that it is a jolly good read. Like many parents and teachers, Ms Polk apparently thinks that:

• there is something inherently good in early reading that is independent of the early reader's wish to read
• reading is not generally something that people of sound mind would choose to do for their own interest and pleasure
• we need to get children reading
• we should seek out books that “get children reading“ and ensure that children come into contact with said books
• children need to be made to learn to read
• children must read, and if they are not interested, they must be pressured to do so, for example, by threats, bribery, positive reinforcement, or by reducing their choices to two, where one of them is reading and the other is something unpleasant such as cleaning the toilet.

TCS parents reject all these ideas and don't think in terms of getting children reading at all. Instead, they take the view that getting children reading is a manipulative aim. “So what?”, you might ask. “Isn't it manipulating them into something good?” Not really. Even if it ‘works’, it is also manipulating them into the attitude that reading is something tedious and useless and difficult and painful now, even though it will help them in their distant future lives. And therefore, even in the rarely-realised case of a perfectly docile child, the resulting conflict in the child's mind, with the child preferring to do or think about X, but also wanting the conflicting end of satisfying the parent, is quite likely to be counterproductive. How do you feel when you sense that someone is leaning on you to do something? The natural reaction is to do the opposite. Even if it is something you would have wanted to do, being pressured to do it can cause you never to go down that path, or to lose any such desire that you already have. It is likely that at least a proportion of people who can read, but come out in a cold sweat at the suggestion that they might like to read a book, react like that precisely because they originally learned to read under pressure.

One important concept in TCS is that of common preferences. Common preferences are policies that all parties after a successfully resolved disagreement prefer to their initial positions: everyone gets what they want.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

The Taking Children Seriously List is a forum for the discussion of TCS parenting/education theory and practice, and for the support of parents trying to improve their lives and the lives of their children in part by making their interactions with their children consentual (that is, consensual in the sense of wholehearted consent, not ‘consensus’).

All parents ideally want their interactions with their children to be pleasant and consensual, and all parents coerce their children only when (they think it) absolutely necessary. The problem is that we all disagree about when it is necessary, as we discovered when we conducted the TCS Survey. On the TCS List, we try to create new knowledge and improve our ability to solve problems in ways that everyone involved positively prefers. “Everyone involved” includes the parents too, not just their children. TCS is not about parents gritting their teeth and self-sacrificing for their children. It is not about compromise, in which each person gives up something and no one is very happy with the outcome, it is about creating something better.

That is what is so exciting about TCS: those moments when we succeed in creating a better idea, a better frame of mind, a better atmosphere, a better action, a better way of being together, can be mind-blowing as you suddenly see something you could not see before.

Sometimes, of course, being the fallible human beings we are, we start feeling terrible guilt, the more we realise all the ways we have harmed our children. If you start to feel terrible about past mistakes, remind yourself that the fact that you can see what you could not see before means that you are objectively a better person than you were before.

Kristel Nybondas

Thanks to TCS in my everyday life....

....I have noticed that I have changed my mind about a lot of small practical every day things that used to bother me and made my life more complicated, even before the children. This has not happened only by thinking about them, but by doing things differently and after that realising that I've been extremely inflexible about how I view myself(and through that, others at times). I might still prefer certain things and I'm perfectly free to do as I wish but there is no self sacrifice in helping children do similar things differently.

Once I realised this I also realised that I hadn't been self sacrificing at all, in certain areas. Nor did I defer. This hasn't diminished “the practical doings”, BUT emotionally I feel completely different. Help feels like helping and not like a stress.

Change can be extremely good. That was one of my fears throughout my life. This fear of doing things/beginning to think differently caused a lot of mental pain for me. I even used to think that I was a very flexible person, and partly I was, otoh, not at all. I used to actively NOT think at all about painful issues, leading to big emotional outbursts at some point instead. Outbursts that never helped, because it hurt so much that I only endured and then pushed the subject away again in my mind, when I was exhausted enough. No growth happened. No new knowledge. Just going in circles.

The idea of little tyrants leading our lives is deeply entrenched I think. If we live by that attitude it affects them. It's a statement of mistrust and not supportive of the capabilities children have. I don't think certain expectations automatically lead to certain outcomes, but I do think that a negative assumption about where the line between self sacrifice and helping goes, actually creates more self sacrifice in the mind of the person thinking about it.

I think the most difficult thing about all of this is to know oneself, and realising what kind of things are good things to do in order to help children(and oneself) grow knowledge.

It might be that some things one thought were perfectly fine wasn't that at all, that the self sacrifice was completely elsewhere, and vice versa. One might end up actually doing and thinking in ways that are very surprising if one does the, imo, mistake of comparing things too much, with other people, but also with our past self.