Help! My baby hates diaper changes! Ideas for baby-pleasing solutions
Solutions many babies have loved!
irrational
Why no ‘common preferences’?
Most problems are solved without any explicit communication. To the extent that people think of ‘finding common preferences’ as requiring or implying the need for explicit discussions, that is an understandable but very unfortunate misunderstanding.
What about instilling values like freedom, fallibilism and the idea of taking children seriously?
We may subscribe to the values of rationality and taking children seriously, but when it comes to detail, we may well be mistaken about particular aspects of it. So instilling anything, including those ideas we most value, is a mistake. We want our ideas to be corrected. We want our children to be able to correct our errors, not be saddled with them.
If a parent has an aversion to something a child enjoys doing, how do you solve that problem?
Such questions are in effect asking how we and our children can solve the problem created by us in effect having a visceral aversion to our children innocently enjoying themselves learning. Why is that the case, and when we are in such a state, what can we do about it?
What to do when your child says “Go away” or “I don’t want to talk about it”
If you think your child needs you, maybe experiment, tentatively trying different ways of being there for her and making sure she knows you are there for her and want to do what she wants and not what she does not want.
Who am I to criticise someone else?
Not all criticism of other people’s ideas is good. Indeed some of it actually interferes with the person’s own criticism in their own mind. Wanted criticism is valuable. Unwanted criticism can be coercive and destructive of knowledge-creating processes that are happening.
If criticism is valuable why not be more critical?
Subjecting anyone of any age to coercive education (unwanted criticism) is not taking them seriously. Nor is it even taking the valuableness of criticism seriously! Let alone taking the growth of knowledge seriously.
Surely criticism is always good?
he idea that criticism of others is always good is a mistake, just like it is a mistake to think that education is always good. It may be good if it is wanted, but not if it is unwanted. Coercive education is not and never has been Taking Children Seriously.
What do you have against coercion?
Coercion impedes progress by impairing error-correcting processes. “The right of the parent over his child lies either in his superior strength or his superior reason. If in his strength, we have only to apply this right universally, in order to drive all morality out of the world. If in his reason, in that reason let him confide.”
Why does parenting feel so hard?
What most parents think they need to do as parents—moulding and shaping their children—is an impossible task. No wonder parenting is a nightmare for so many parents! But there is an alternative!
Taking Children Seriously: a new view of children
Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: children do not actually need to be controlled for their own good. An Oxford Karl Popper Society talk.
Against ego-centric epistemology
A discussion about Karl Popper’s epistemology, reason, the growth of knowledge, relativism and certainty.
(NOT) listening to children
Taking children seriously means taking a child’s wish/decision to go to school seriously too.
Punishment as a teaching tool
Punishment has a very high risk of destroying not only the desire, but also the ability to learn.
Aunt Cynthia and cleanliness
What makes housework so grim is not the time it takes—it takes little time and can be done while conversing, listening to stuff, etc.—but all the other stuff—the resentment, the coercion, the battling, the idea that if you didn’t make the mess, you shouldn’t clean it up. Stop thinking in terms of trying to get others to do what you want them to do, and you will find that housework is not a problem.
Doing nothing academically?
It is a mistake to seek evidence of children’s learning, because that can have a significant destructive effect upon the learning that is going on. They are then highly likely to switch from addressing the problem they were addressing, to the new problem the teacher has introduced, of how to perform and provide evidence for the teacher.