Taking Children Seriously

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“When we talk about the harmful effects of coercing children, we are at heart talking about the harmful effects of coercing human beings,” says Annette Abma, a Toronto author and mother of two children who runs two online discussion lists about noncoercive parenting. In Abma’s view, a child under coercion is no longer rational because she is living by one theory while a conflicting theory is still active in her mind. “She is, in essence, contradicting herself. Because of our innate rationality, however, we find this state of mind extremely uncomfortable and will strive to right the wrong by making sense of it.”

Some TCS parents cite the work of Alice Miller, a Swiss psychoanalyst who has written many books about children, including For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Noonday Press). Miller argues that when harm is done to a child by a loved one, the child will try to make sense of this harm by making it right in her own mind. If the child believes “My father hit me for my own good,” then she herself may grow up and hit her own children for their “own good,” furthering the abuse cycle. Extending this thesis, TCS advocates say that coerced children grow up to be coercing parents who believe it is their duty to thwart a child's natural desires and inclinations.

Taking children seriously means breaking this cycle by insisting on absolutely no coercion no matter what the circumstances. Parents can share their “theories” about the consequences of a child’s action. But because, in their view, no one is infallible, they insist that a parent's theories are not necessarily more right than the child’s.

This way of thinking doesn’t come naturally for most of us. It takes a seasoned TCS parent to explain it well. Abma uses the example of a 4-year-old named Jane who won't brush her teeth because she finds it painful. But Jane’s mother believes that if Jane doesn't brush, she'll get cavities. Even though Jane's mother explains this to her, Jane does not yet have the knowledge or experience to understand this theory's validity, Abma says. So Jane, being a rational human being, will strive to make sense of this conflict (the pain of brushing versus her mother’s insistence that she do so) in an attempt to escape the coercive state of mind.

She may decide that toothbrushing has to hurt to work, or that her own feelings don’t matter, or that she must always listen to someone older when it comes to her body, or that her mother isn’t trustworthy.

Had I been Jane’s mother, I might have tripped out to buy a fancy electric toothbrush with an appealing cartoon character on the end of it, but I would still have insisted on nightly tooth brushing. They may be Jane’s teeth, but they’re my dental bills. Besides, I get embarrassed when my child goes to preschool with fuzzy teeth and smelly breath. Exactly, say the TCSers: I’m making it about me, not about my son. A parent’s duty, they say, is to help children achieve their own desires, not the parent’s.

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