Only Asking Real Questions

When I was first trying to figure out how to fix my own upbringing (in my head), the book The Continuum Concept was extremely helpful, in providing an example of how implications are far more important than explications. The indigenous people described in the book trust and believe in their children in ways and to extents that "civilized" people find shocking.

trying to do non-coercive parenting and failing at it is likely worse than just doing mildly coercive parenting outright

That's not quite what I'm getting at here: trying to do "non coercive parenting" as a technique that is aimed at a result is the problem. Actually trusting and believing in children is an entirely different thing altogether, and the superficial behaviors have little to do with it.

One of the most common things that happens when people first try to reimagine their own upbringing is to try to change their idea of their parents' behavior to something better, fairer, nicer, more non-coercive, more supportive, etc. This attempt invariably fails because what they're imagining at first is a parent who does all these things on the outside with no change to how the parent is thinking or feeling on the inside. So compassionate behaviors become pitying or contemptuous, noncoercion is manipulation to fix the broken or defective subpar child, etc.

This is why I'm reluctant to try to give any actual parenting advice, because it's not the behavior, but the internal model that generates the behavior that determines the nonverbal status communication that will program the child's future attitudes and strategies used in relationships with themselves and others. Children's brains try to extrapolate from outward behavior what the intent behind the communication, with a prior that this intent is ultimately aimed at benefiting the child somehow and reflects the proper morals of the community to which it belongs.

So this totally backfires when the adults are operating on faulty assumptions about the children, as these assumptions are then taken in uncritically as programming for how to act. An adult who tries to proactively teach their children things, for example (vs. exposing them to opportunities to learn), is communicating that they do not expect the child to want to learn or be capable of doing so. So what the child then most learns from this behavior is that they are considered stupid, ignorant, unobservant, or dull.

In the same way, trying to be "noncoercive" at a child when you in fact have an agenda for what you're trying to "noncoerce" them to, then you're basically saying you think they can't handle being told what is going on, or that they are the one in charge, or, well, it depends entirely on what the thinking going on is. If someone's basically thinking, "I need to do this so the kid doesn't grow up to be X", then the child picks up on the idea that they must be X by default. That they're defective in some critical way, because the adult thinks they're so dumb or careless or incapable that they would allow themselves to grow up X without intervention, or mistakenly think X was a good thing!

Anyway, if you consider telling a kid what to do coercive, well... in the Continuum Concept, the adults only ever tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing. They don't tell the kids what not to do, nor do they tell them things "for their own good", nor nag the children to learn the skills they'll need later in life, or a thousand other things that modern parents do to their kids all the goddamn time. They just tell the kids to do stuff that needs doing for the family or community's well-being.

For a child at the age where they want to do everything the older people are doing, telling a child to do something isn't coercion: it's acceptance and respect, recognizing their desire to belong and contribute in a meaningful way. The idea that this is "coercive" is completely ass-backwards.

Really, coercive vs. non-coercive is the wrong axis to think on, because whether you're being "coercive" has little to do with whether you're trusting kids. If you're trying to shape their behavior so they don't grow up to be X -- regardless of what "X" is -- you are undermining their agency and self-trust. Not by the behavior itself, but what the behavior tells them about your beliefs and attitudes towards their abilities, inclinations, and judgment.

Modern society has very few opportunities for children to genuinely contribute to the well-being of their family or community in a way that allows them to feel their actions have meaning or worth. Telling them to do these things isn't coercion for the parent's benefit, unless the parent thinks it so in their own mind. The people described in CC don't think that way: they assume children want to be a part of big people things and do stuff that's important, so telling them to do stuff is recognition that they have reached a level of capability to be trusted with an important task!

This is about as far opposite of coercion as you can get, despite literally telling the kid to do something.

Non-coercive parenting is fine – within reasonable limits.

If your toddler 'wants' to walk into traffic (i.e. does do so) – too bad; that's outside of the reasonable scope of their decision-making! It is entirely reasonable to physically coerce (e.g. pick them up) such a child in those circumstances.

Everything short of an imminent and potentially dire emergency is more-or-less plausibly up for grabs. I think it'd be generally better for parents to build a 'positive' scope of decision-making instead of trying to patch an initial mostly 'open-ended' scope.

I personally think that homeschooling is perfectly fine to consider but others should probably think about it a good bit, or even try it out for a limited period, before (implicitly) allowing that as an option if one of their children doesn't want to go to school.

Similarly, there's lots of things that kids/children do or would/could do, mostly out of ignorance, that their parents probably aren't really committed to living with, e.g. making (spectacular) messes, drawing on walls/furniture, destroying things, etc..

I think it's much better to 'flout convention' explicitly, while also teaching kids about the standard convention(s) too. I was lucky enough to be (explicitly) allowed to draw on the walls of my bedroom at one point. That seems totally fine to allow – unless a parent really isn't willing to live with the consequences.

The first parent response to the choice is "That's gonna make a mess everywhere. I don't think that's a good idea." How is that "eventually"?

"I don't think that's a good idea" is not communicating anything in particular. It masks your personal preference behind an illusion of objectivity ("good idea").

In contrast, "it will make a mess and I don't want to have to clean it up" is clear on the subjectivity involved. It teaches (by example) that it's okay not to want to do things and that it's good to plan in advance to keep from needing to.

You eventually admitted to not wanting to clean it up, but waiting that long to say so implies that you're not supposed to tell people what you want directly, only imply it.

It's not good at getting me to stop asking non-real questions, so I wouldn't want to fall back to it always.

If you believe on a feeling level that it's better to ask your kids than tell them stuff, you'll probably keep doing the same thing, yeah. If you are aware that doing this kind of "autonomy theatre" is not just not doing any good but actively doing harm to your kids' models of agency and interpersonal relations, you might stop wanting to ask them questions that aren't driven by curiosity.

To put it another way: if you're asking them questions for any other reason than you want to know the answer, it's probably manipulation. It might be relatively benign manipulation -- a lot of adult conversation is, after all. But it may not be.

But in the example they're not doing what the parent wanted them to do. Instead they're making a different choice, and practicing ensuring that the choice is not unfairly burdening others.

Are you telling me that you didn't know exactly how that entire series of events was going to go? That you weren't steering it to your desired end state? (Specifically, the end state of "the car is clean and the child has outwardly agreed with a course of action leading to that".)

IOW, you had an outcome from the beginning of not having to clean the car yourself, written on the bottom line of your report, and worked backwards to fill in something that gets that end result. But you didn't actually say that was what you wanted until well into the interaction. All the stuff before the point where you said you didn't want to clean it up was pretending to be about objective values or about what the child wanted, rather than being up front about what you wanted.

How do you see the child being misled about power here?

I didn't say they were being misled, I said, "social illusion". That is, a ritual of denying public common knowledge of who's in charge of this entire interaction, despite everybody knowing the score.

They totally know that the messy food will leave a mess they won't want to clean up. So do I.

Yes? I meant that they lack the reflective ability to process the higher-level concepts you were trying to teach, without treating them as teacher-password-guessing. On the explicit knowledge level, they've learned the password for this interaction, but the implicit learning was about how one should treat people (themselves included) when one wants them to do something.

Completely disagree. Kids are smart. After a conversation or few like this, I would expect next time they would open with "...and I'll clean up after" and follow through on the cleanup.

Sure, they know the password now. There are tons of ways to treat kids that will produce the results you want in the short run, creating kids who appear to be far more mature on the outside than they actually are on the inside. Society will perhaps even praise you for being a great parent. Then, as grownups, the kids run into problems because they find themselves doing as you did, not doing what you said.

Again, in fairness: I work with a very limited sample of people. I can't say with confidence that interactions like this will screw over every child. Maybe the people I work with are more sensitive and introspective than most. Maybe there's some other factor that allows some or even most children to be treated like this and come away with a sense of agency and boundaries intact.

I just know that I spend an awful lot of time helping people undo the effect of interactions like the ones you describe, where basically adults ruin kids' boundaries by pretending they're doing things to helpfully teach kids stuff that is actually for the benefit of the parent's ego and/or convenience, or playing out patterns of concealment and manipulation they learned from their parents.

From my perspective, this is a bit like Temple Grandin's Animals In Translation, where she talks about all the things where humans think animals are being well cared-for if their surroundings are clean and various other things that are important to people and not animals, while completely missing all the shit that is scaring or stressing the crap out of the animals.

In the same way, parents do lots of things that make them feel like they're being really good parents even as they stunt their children's growth as independent individuals and ignore the child's real needs or wants -- which often run paradoxically counter to what a child might say or even believe they want at the time.

What kids most want is for their parents to be in charge and discerning and to then pass their parents' tests of discernment. So if they think there's approval to be had, they will happily distort their sense of self to match whatever passwords they can guess you want to hear.

You can't not test them, but it works better if the tests are simple actions. "Wait to eat" is a test they can win and immediately feel good about, and doesn't require warping their self-perception. But the test you implicitly gave here is like, "be somebody who can reason about consequences and make binding pre-commitments while looking out for the implicit motives of others with power over you" -- which is a lot harder to be sure whether they've passed, assuming they can even reverse-engineer the intent of the interaction that specifically and correctly!

And when a kid can't pass the tests you're setting, they will distort their sense of self to try to make themselves into someone who can (without even being aware they're doing it), until their emulation of your apparent desired person is sufficient to pass the tests.

But maturity emulated in software (rather than grown in hardware) is fragile. It's highly state-dependent, and it's poorly aligned both internally and externally. It's good enough to pass your tests (by definition), but when the kid leaves home everything becomes OOD and they don't know how to act in the real world except by going through the motions of what they were (implicitly) taught.

To me, this is tragic, and not just because it's a lot of work to fix afterwards.

They have the goal of eating messy candy now. I have a goal of not having to clean up. Neither of our goals are being thwarted.

The child has many implicit goals being thwarted here, including "receive good examples of guidance and leadership so I know what to do and how things work around here", "make sure I know who's in charge and what I can and can't do", "win my parent's approval and respect through actions I can control", "prove I am independent of my parent... up to the point where it's detrimental to my well-being, at which point they should prove I'm not that independent".

Most of those goals are much more easily met if you just tell them what to do, or at least what you want, as explicitly and clearly as possible without talking about abstractions like whether something is "a good idea".

They're the way all social mores are understood in most cultures

And that's precisely why they're so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.

But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother's attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.

So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed as a universal can also be derived (as an adult) from one's desires, values, reasoning, etc., and is a term to be weighted in your utility function, not a true absolute driving utility to zero or infinity.

(And if there is any emotional objection to questioning the absoluteness of a principle, that's a double-extra sign of manipulation to be investigated, since a truly universal value would still make sense even when deeply questioned.)

people don't all have terrible childhoods in traditional cultures

I wouldn't know; my bias is that I work with people who have problems now, and some of those problems can be linked to their upbringing. I literally can't even say for sure that bad parenting causes problems, all I know is that fixing mental models of bad parenting fixes problems for the people that have them. And in that context, absolutes and universals are always a big red flag.

People who are taught everything that way have a lot of trouble figuring out what they want, because they've never really thought about it... or if they tried, they couldn't get very far because it kept getting shut down by critical voices.

Again, I can't say that's a cause of problems with people in general, since If I tried to do that kind of reasoning from the people I see, I would also have to conclude that bad parenting makes children more intelligent, talented, and sensitive!

(In reality, the causation probably goes the other way: intelligent and sensitive kids are perhaps more likely to be damaged by shit parenting because they take in more, think more deeply about it, and more acutely feel the effects of it. Maybe create broader associations and generalizations, for that matter.)

Anyway, within the context I'm speaking of, healing this kind of damage requires practice hearing one's own feelings, wants, desires, values, all that kind of thing -- and thinking in terms of universals, absolutes, and other abstractions is the exact opposite of listening to one's own self. That's why it's a red flag to me.