TCS is a parenting philosophy designed around error correction which recognises that no matter how sure we feel, we may be mistaken, and that children are people and may be right. It also recognises the grave dangers involved in propagating ideas through force instead of persuasion.

Originally published in Taking Children Seriously, the paper journal (TCS 30).

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

There is a very nasty syndrome which parents sometimes inadvertently pass on to their children while trying to help their children have better lives. I call it the Keeping-One's-Options-Open mentality. Here is one example of what it looks like:

You study hard to ensure that you pass your school exams. In Britain that would be GCSE exams at the age of 16, which you do to keep your options open so that you can do A-level exams at 18 if you want to. Then you do A-levels to keep your options open in case you want to go to university.

Then you go to university to get a good degree (not necessarily one that you will enjoy) so you can get a good job. Then you take the wrong job (a ‘good’ job) and kowtow to your boss so that you can get promotion and thereby security, to keep your options open after retirement.

This is a very common syndrome in which people sacrifice themselves for the next phase of life, which itself consists of nothing but sacrificing themselves for the following phase.

A friend of mine, whom I'll call Henry, has this syndrome badly. He is so desperate to keep his options open and set himself up financially that life is passing him by. He is living for retirement, and totally forgetting to live now. And as retirement looms, he is increasingly fearing it. In this lifetime of unhappy sacrifice, he has systematically sacrificed his real interests, and has destroyed his capacity to acquire any. When I think of Aristotle's dictum: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, I think of my friend Henry. What has his life been for? It was supposed to have been for him.

And the most frightening thing of all is that in his desperate wish to help his daughter have a good life, he has successfully instilled in her the very same syndrome. She now studies hard whether she enjoys it or not in order not to end up in a dead-end job. Henry's job, apparently, is not a dead-end job, but it does take all his time from when he gets up to when he goes to sleep, almost every day, and this has been the case for the many years I have known him – and there is no reason to expect that to change.

When we shut down the old TCS Discussion Board, I received several complaints, so to satisfy those who prefer web-based discussion forums, we have now created a new discussion board, the TCS Discussion Forum. Visit it now, or simply click on the “forum” link under the main title.

Please be sure to read this before you post.

Introduction

The Taking Children Seriously web site, the TCS List, and the TCS Discussion Board are for the discussion of TCS theory and practice, and for the support of TCS parents. As such, it will not appeal to all. TCS is a philosophical theory having moral implications, including implications about what sort of discussions there should be on the TCS forums. In order to maintain an atmosphere conducive to the growth of knowledge of real TCS families in their real lives, TCS discussion forums are lightly moderated.

The TCS forums are unusual in a number of ways. Most notably, criticism is welcome (as long as it is friendly), but meta-discussion (discussion whose subject matter is, say, how to hold discussions instead of how to treat children) is unwelcome. Moreover, discussion on TCS forums should be general and hypothetical, not discuss or mention children's lives in ways that could embarrass them later, when they are the President of the United States, say. Indeed, please do not violate anyone's privacy.

The Specific Rules

• Do not post meta-comments/discussion. (Send complaints, comments and suggestions about the management of the TCS List, website or the TCS Discussion Board to me, Sarah Fitz-Claridge, privately at founder@takingchildrenseriously.com.)
• The TCS website and Discussion Board are public forums but the TCS List is private.
  

What if children want to risk doing something that you think might be distressing for them? For example, what if they want to spend the weekend with their very coercive grandparents, or play with a neighbourhood child who is rather violent, or go to boarding school, or play Truth or Dare?Based on a Fri, 7th April, 2000 TCS List post

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

What if children want to risk doing something that you think might be distressing for them? For example, what if they want to spend the weekend with their very coercive grandparents, or play with a neighbourhood child who is rather violent, or go to boarding school, or play Truth or Dare?

The answer is that TCS parents:

1. try to ensure that their children know the risks, dangers, options, and so on (giving them as much information as they want to hear),
2. think ahead to what might go wrong, and make contingency plans,
3. ensure that the children have an escape from the situation in the event that they want that,
4. thoroughly support their children in their choice to take this risk,
5. if the children change their minds later, TCS parents then support them in that, helping them effect a rapid escape.

If Jane wants to go back-packing in the wilderness, for example, her parents will ensure that she understands the risks and make it possible for her to get out in the event that she wants to escape. They will equip her with a phone or radio, etc.

But what if the thing that the child wants to risk is specifically a matter of not being able to easily get out of the situation? What if Jane wants to go pack-packing in the wilderness without a phone or radio?

Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1992

‘School phobia’ is a dreadful label for some children's perfectly understandable response to being compelled to go to school against their will. They are not phobic, any more than a conscientious objector is a coward; they are refusing – and in most cases very nobly. Over the years, I have spoken to many worried parents of school-refusing children. The outrages these children have been subjected to in the name of ‘education’ disgust me. They have been saddled with a pseudo-medical label that has deliberate connotations of ‘mental illness’ – with all the stigma and the implied (and not-so-implied) menace that goes with that. Their perfectly reasonable dissent, and their desperately courageous resistance to being hurt and harmed has been cynically redefined as ‘overdependence,’ ‘psychological instability,’ and ‘immaturity.’ They have been psychologically tortured under the guise of psychiatric or psychological ‘treatment’ for a non-existent ailment. Their parents – also demeaned by labels such as ‘overprotective’ – have been threatened with court action unless they physically force their terrified, traumatised children into school every day. Many such parents who have sought my advice have themselves been in a terrible state of stress and trauma. Why don't they just comply? Because they know that forcing their child to go so school is immoral, psychologically harmful, and inimical to their child's education.

Or do they know that? Parents often do not seem to know it consciously. Or if they do, they also ‘know’ the contradictory idea that it is right and important for children to be schooled, because the law, the psychiatric, psychological, and educational professions all say so.

Posted by David Deutsch on the TCS List on Fri, 1 Aug, 1997, at 03:46:39 +0100

A poster wrote, in defence of requiring children to do chores:

I'm not willing to go to work everyday to earn the money needed to pay for the computers, toys, food, etc that everyone else buys if I must live in a messy house because the person who made the mess didn't feel like cleaning it up today and decided to wait until next week!

This unwillingness of yours, stressed by your outraged exclamation mark, means that you cannot be happy unless someone else does certain chores that you want done. On the other hand, ‘requiring’ others to do these chores (which is a euphemism for hurting them when they refuse or fail to perform to your satisfaction) makes you unhappy too. It follows that you are destined to be unhappy.

Or does it?

You see, there's another way of looking at all this, and that's what TCS is all about. But from the way you are analysing this problem, I guess that your main obstacle in understanding what TCS is all about will be a moral one: you believe that a parent's financial support and other services for his children morally obliges the children to provide certain services in return. But there is no justification for that belief. It is just a rationalisation of the traditional status quo between parent and child. The truth is that there is a moral asymmetry between parent and child: in the event of an intractable dispute between them, the parent chose to place the child in the situation that caused the dispute; the child did not choose to place the parent there.

Hence the fact that you “not willing to go to work every day” etc., without receiving services from your children in return is (morally) your problem, and not theirs. The fact that your children would be unhappy without those services, and are also unhappy to provide you with the services you demand, is also (morally) your problem. You chose the latter problem for yourself; you were saddled with the former by your own parents.

Alice Bachini

Taking children seriously is about more than not deliberately hurting them. It’s about helping them learn good things, protecting them from bad things and enabling them safely to develop the knowledge they need for their next set of problems (interests and challenges). And taking toddlers seriously seems to me as complex and challenging or more so than taking kids seriously at any other age, in a very general sense, for various reasons: most of society is not set up to accommodate them in sensible ways (would you want to spend two hours tied into your chair eating chicken nuggets?); most adults don’t especially enjoy sharing toddler activities particularly much (depending on the toddler activities – Noddy jigsaws no thanks, but I can watch Terminator 2 quite a few times and still enjoy it); toddlers need a lot of ongoing constant help with simple things like using the toilet, finding bits of lego between the floorboards etc, which is frankly not most people’s idea of fun most of the time; and toddlers aren’t always brilliant at expressing their ideas verbally, which is still adults’ favourite form of communication. Erm, certain other forms notwithstanding.

So, all in all, life as a toddler-parent can get tough. And there are no times tougher than When Toddlers Get Upset. The train is coming into the station, you’ve got to get on, and Toddler decides he wants to buy another kit-kat right now, from the station café, because (who knows why?) he liked the wallpaper and the general vibe and feels like repeating the whole kit-kat buying experience he had five minutes ago.

This is one of several lists of articles to which new articles will be added on an on-going basis. As with the other article lists, this is just a beginning, and the more articles TCS folks send in, the more there will be.

Introduction to TCS, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Is Hiding Medicine In Your Child's Food Wrong?
When Toddlers Get Upset , by Alice Bachini
Taking Toys Seriously (Yes, Really), by Suzanna Slack
Curious Young Children Taking Things Apart, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Feeding The Family: Some Tips For the Cooking-Phobic, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
“Getting Children Reading”
Natural Consequences, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Parental Aversions, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Waste Not, Want Not, by Eponymous Anonymous
Housework Help For a Harried Mother, by Starlene Stewart
Practical TCS, by Annette Abma

Visit this page again soon for more articles about the philosophy of TCS.

What is TCS?, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Introduction to TCS Theory, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Introduction to TCS, by Virtue Pure
TCS and Karl Popper
Common Preferences and Non-coercion
TCS and Fallibilism, by David Deutsch
TCS Theory and Practice, by Alice Bachini
Wanting to Risk Not Being Able to Change Your Mind, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Video Games: A Unique Educational Environment, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Enacting A Theory, by David Deutsch
In Defence of TV Soap Operas, by Sarah Fitz-Claridge
Creativity and Untidiness, by David Deutsch

In a discussion about keeping your house clean without keeping your kids in cages, Rowina wrote about what a difficult issue cleaning has been for her:

I want to keep the house clean, but at eleven or midnight, I don't want to clean it. And when I say want, I mean really, REALLY want to, to the point of being anxious if I do something else (computer, bed) instead of cleaning. It has taken me months to get a point where I can even begin to consider the dilemma rationally. And it is precisely this that motivates me--I do NOT want my kids to feel this way about cleaning! Or anything! EVER!

The article on the old TCS website ( www.tcs.ac ) about cleaning really helped me change my perspective.

Feeling ghastly about housework is horribly common, and wanting not to cause your children to grow up having the same conflicts is a commendable start. I hope that anyone in this situation will be able to move beyond that to replace the horrible intractable conflicts, anxiety and self-sacrifice with the peace of actually solving these problems. As one who has been there and come out the other side, thanks to insights gleaned from fellow TCS folks, I have a lot to say about this, so lookout for another article on this soon. In the meantime, here is the piece Rowina found helpful. It is by Starlene Stewart, and was originally posted on the TCS List on Sun, 3 Jan 1999 13:37:20 -0800.