Taking Children Seriously

Don't be misled by the title. This discussion is not just about what to do in a case where a child heates wearing an eyepatch, it is about how to think about problems in such a way that you can solve them.

Correcting a few common misconceptions about TCS.

Video games are not about any obvious direct product. They are about interacting with a complex autonomous entity.

When a toddler hits a parent, should the parent communicate their honest reaction, whether it be showing hurt if they've been hurt, or any emotional response, such as feeling anger, or sadness?

David Deutsch is very untidy and very successful.

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.

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.

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.

We hold it to be true that many of the ideas that we now believe to be true, including some of those that we believe most strongly to be true, are in fact riddled with errors.