The Sovereign Child

Key Takeaways

1. So what is it? Instead of focusing on rules, Taking Children Seriously focuses on fostering understanding. Parenting is the process of supporting a child until they understand the world well enough that they can support themselves. What is the best way to foster understanding? To provide freedom and security for a person’s creativity to discover how the world works. Rules limit freedom, and hence understanding, and therefore impair the parenting project.
2. Taking your kids seriously gives them reasons to take you seriously as well.
3. The biggest difference between our household and other households is how our kids eat, sleep, and use screens. At first glance, screens don’t seem as fundamental as food and sleep, but they are—perhaps even more so. That’s because screens are bound up with attention, which might be the most basic element of our autonomy. When we lose everything, the last thing to go is control of our attention. At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values.
4. Nearly every misconception about children in general is revealed by how adults manage children’s use of screens. All of the usual tropes are at work: kids can’t be trusted, they don’t know what’s good for them, it’s dangerous, it’s bad for them, it’s addictive, it corrupts them.
5. The truth is that when kids are pursuing their interests, they are always learning, even if adults can’t see it. Unfortunately, when it comes to adults assessing the merits of what their kids are doing, seeing is believing. When a child is constructing a jigsaw puzzle, an adult can see the physical manifestation of the child’s mind at work. The child’s mental effort is on display as she tries to connect a piece, fails, rotates it, and tries again. The adult can hear her groan when a piece isn’t fitting and sense her joy when she figures it out. But when that same child is watching a cartoon, that same adult may take the kid’s vacant look and physical activity as surefire signs that they’re watching a fertile mind turning to mush.
6. Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right. We wouldn’t arbitrarily expose a child to pain with the argument that pain is an inevitable part of life that they need to “learn to deal with.” Such cruelty teaches children that, not only are we indifferent to their suffering, but they should accept their suffering as well.
7. My goal in this chapter is to show that enforcing rules on children produces so many problems that you’ll become interested in seeking an alternative. Rules-based parenting always damages children’s relationship with their parents and with themselves, and it introduces deep and persistent confusions about the world.
8. Not all of the rules in a kid’s life are obligatory, such as the rules of a game. The rules of chess or baseball are special because they have been found to be so much fun that children comply with them voluntarily, and that makes all the difference. Everyone can opt out, but they willingly engage because these rules solve problems for all parties.
9. One last type of beneficial rule is a boundary. Boundaries are rules or limitations that people voluntarily impose on themselves. When I set a boundary on myself, I am declaring how much of my own space, time, and resources I’m willing to offer others. The nice thing about boundaries is that other people, including kids, can opt out of them.
10. This is the key: doing something without the presence of enforcement or threats thereof is one of the best indicators that a person has a good understanding of what that thing is for. By forcing things, the parent is virtually guaranteeing that they can’t possibly determine whether or not their kid understands. In fact, forcing the kid to act under duress only hinders their ability to understand why the thing is worth doing in the first place.
11. In the adult world, we solve our own problems. From the most trivial to the most consequential, we are the authors of our own lives, or at least we aspire to be. Given this aspiration, it’s hard to think of a more important gift to give our children than the confidence to be the authors of their own lives, to acquire the knowledge, skills, and assertiveness to take ownership of their own affairs. And this reveals the fourth Foul of enforcing rules—it confuses kids by teaching them that there are external authorities who know the answers about how to live.
12. And I’m not saying it’s easy or that we should expect 100 percent success in safely preserving our kids’ autonomy. I’m saying it is an achievable ideal worth striving for, not just in select areas but in every domain of life. And when preserving autonomy is a top priority, not only can we get quite good at it, but our kids become more open to trusting our input. When they know we are not trying to take control and demote them to a minor role in their own lives, they are more open to our suggestions.
13. Enforced rules are manipulative falsehoods about the world.
14. I resolved that, no matter what, I would never turn my kids away if they wanted to “help out around the house.” Even if it slows me down or creates a lot more work overall, involving them voluntarily is an opportunity for them to learn to value things like cleaning and repairing.
15. Discipline and Punishment We never do either. The closest I’ll get is with our six-year-old when I tell her that aggravating her younger siblings makes work for me. Rather than discipline, this is more of an appeal to her to be more understanding and forgiving. One peculiarity I’ve noticed is how difficult it is to convey to a child the idea of being understanding, of giving others some slack or the benefit of the doubt. It’s interesting that such a crucial concept is so difficult to put into words that a child can understand. At first, I thought this was a deficiency of language, but now I think it shows how the norms of civility are really quite subtle. Discipline and punishment run roughshod over these subtleties and make it that much more difficult for children to discover them. Discipline and punishment, and coercion in general, never get kids to do anything. Instead, they raise the costs of doing something else. There are many ways to raise the costs of pursuing alternatives, from simple beatings or threats of beatings, to shaming, withholding possessions or denying privileges, or sequestering them to listen to lectures. If a person does something because alternatives are made too unpleasant, they tend to do the bare minimum in order to obtain relief. They do it to satisfy the disciplinarian, not themselves. The resulting learning is thin, based on a performance, and only loosely connected with other knowledge. Discipline and punishment show us what Taking Children Seriously is not. Rather than raising costs to get a certain behavior, Taking Children Seriously lowers costs to get understanding. Specifically, costs are lowered in order to open up freedom for curiosity to search for and discover knowledge, and knowledge that works forms an understanding. Parents are cost reducers and freedom promoters.
16. Yes, it’s important to be able to handle boredom, but only if you understand why-–for instance, if you understand that it’s a sign of respect to sit and listen to an older person tell stories that you’re not interested in. But if a kid doesn’t understand that, then being bored in front of Grandpa just makes the kid resentful of visiting Grandpa, which is the opposite of respect. For the same reason, we never make our kids greet extended family. Forced greetings and the like disrupt the growth of bonds that create intimacy with others. Similarly, forced thank-yous for gifts and forced apologies for mishaps like spilled food or broken tchotchkes disrupt the discovery of the subtleties of expressing gratitude and regret by contaminating the process with shame, fear, and embarrassment.
17. My role as parent is as guide and protector, not manager. To support my daughter’s discovery and eventual mastery of the world, it’s at least as important that I avoid making her feel nervous, afraid, and bad about herself as it is to teach her.
18. Improvement requires error correction, and error correction requires error detection. Many strategies for softening or eliminating rules merely obscure their coercive nature, allowing them to persist under the radar. Fortunately, there is a simple test to check if a rule-reducing strategy still contains coercion or not, and that is to switch the roles from you and your child to you and your partner or spouse.

What I got out of it

1. Definitely didn’t agree with everything Aaron shared, but it definitely made me think about certain frustrations and fights I’ve had with my girls and how they likely weren’t necessary. Fundamentally, thinking about your kids as adults and giving them freedom and autonomy to learn on their own resonates a lot for me.