Does a person with more knowledge have the right to control those with less knowledge? Not with adults of course: I don’t want a nutritionist to control what I eat or a film critic to control what I watch, or the government to control what I say.
With pre-verbal children we have to be creative and come up with concrete ways of conveying information about dangers, rather than just giving explicit explanations. (I suggest both.)
A conversation between prospective parents, about taking children seriously.
Babies are full human beings with astonishingly amazing creative minds. They are absolutely fascinating. Enjoy every precious moment with them.
Often, we need to increase the bandwidth by communicating not just explicitly in words, but simultaneously also inexplicitly, through our facial expressions and body language, and we also need to find more concrete ways of expressing theories. Show them concrete effects. Help them understand.
Sometimes life can be challenging for toddlers even if we are doing our best to take them seriously.
If your young children are curious explorers who like taking things apart, find more things for them to take apart. Embrace their interest.
Many fun activities suggested to entertain and delight very young pre-verbal children.
A child is angry for a reason. They may not know what that reason is; they may not want to say what it is, but there is a reason. Parents can be a child’s best helper in figuring out good ways to solve the problem.
Grandma should be persuaded to put precious items away when being visited by toddlers. It is just too much to expect toddlers not to be curious if such things are in front of their noses and it is not good for them to be constantly being discouraged from playing with something. Grandma really should put such items away.
Some ideas for sleep-deprived burnt out parents of babies who do not sleep.
Lots of practical ideas for sleep-deprived parents whose young child is wide awake 24/7 (or so it seems!), and who do not want to resort to coercing their child.
Coercion is stressful because it conflicts with most people’s wider ideas about morality, human relationships, and how to run a society, etc. Unless one mentions children or parenting, everyone agrees that consent-based solutions are better that coercion every time. That theory is held on some level by most people. They just suppress it in their parenting.
Any differences in reasoning you may think there are, are an artefact of the differences in knowledge, not any actual differences in reasoning.