i stopped at a park and sat on a bench for 15min today and there were parents and little kids

they did a lot of awful things in that short time

like 6-8 different parents came by. there's like a daycare or something next to the park

i got there at 1pm

one thing i noticed is sometimes parents hold their kid's hand while walking

and i saw a kid trip a bit

and i realized holding hands wasn't affecting parent's balance or stride

but it WAS affecting the kid's

to have his hand held upward and immobile

and also to try to match parent's pace

and i thought parent contributed to the tripping

and prolly thinks kid needs hand held to yank him up to prevent falls

but i think parent causes more falls

another parent said kid could only go down slide once and then they had to go

so kid delayed. a lot. and banged on the slide. and sat on top.

and parent got impatient asked him to come again before he'd even gone down once. and parent gave the reason that his brother was in the car waiting.

which is so nasty to put the two siblings at odds against each other. to create a conflict btwn them, where the brother is the excuse for why he can't use the slide

and the amount of time before the left, i figure the kid could have gone down the slide 5 times if he was reasonably quick

but the parent told him once, so he did it really slow

if the parent had said "you can slide 3 times if you are quick"

they might have left faster and with a happier kid

it's so wasteful to drag it out enough time for 5 slides, with parent resenting it, and kid resenting only getting to slide once. so inefficient.

there were 3 trikes someone had left at the park. it's in a good neighborhood, small park, bit isolated, low theft risk.

a mom praised the hell out of a dad who she found out was the owner

she gushed about how big a difference the trikes made. later she said she had one on her porch she never remembers to bring.

it was very like boring smalltalk, very low content, very gushy and exaggerated

but also note the trikes are a big deal for the kids – that she'll gush about – and she just keeps forgetting to bring one she already has. that's how much she actually cares about about kids. not enough to make the effort to remember.

and she said something about 3 trikes being a good number. i was thinking if it was only one then some parents would prefer zero trikes instead of one to avoid kids fighting over it. they'd rather have no resources so kids don't expect anything than some resources kids really want and have to deal with resource allocation. (and these people have plenty of money and other resources to provide plenty for the kids. they all present as being well off financially and it's not a neighborhood for poor people. they just, in various ways, choose not to provide their kids with resources.)

then later i saw a little girl, like 3, was on a small plastic trike. and her mom tried to help her peddle but it wasn't working. she pushed along with her feet on the ground. the mother just gave up and ignored it. she was obviously way too big for it. her knees were bent heavily for her to sit on it.

while the mother was standing 2 feet away but ignoring her, the girl, on her own, noticed the 3 trikes the other guy had left at the park. they were metal and larger. they fit her better. she went to one. the mother followed.

and then she put her doll in the seat and then realized it blocked her from sitting on it herself, and tried to figure out what to do

sigh. and the mother was not helping or offering to hold the doll or suggesting how to handle it

and the gender roles. none of the guys had this problem. they would play. the girl is taught priorities that get in her way.

the girl is taught to treat a doll like it's special and important and fragile

which is inconvenient

so she manages to get on the trike and hold the doll in her lap. and her mom pushes it around for her some. it had a poll sticking up the back the mother could push. kid didn't figure out how to peddle and mom didn't even try to help with that this time.

with the first trike the mom was physically grabbing the kid's feet and putting them on the pedals

and then spun the pedals with her hands when kid had feet on ground like a demonstration

i think she was very bad at explaining it and was not a patient helper

anyway mom says something about time to go, pushes the trike onto the grass instead of stone, stops pushing it, leaves kid stuck and not moving, and stands there

i thought she did it on purpose to end the activity but later found out she didn't have much trouble pushing the trike on the grass, it still rolled fine

but kid had to wait a while. mom talked to someone else or looked at her phone or just stood there, idk, but kid wasn't moving for a minute

and for some reason mom got the doll

and dropped it into a little basket on the back of the trike that was like 2 inches above the ground

mom was unaware or uncaring that her daughter cared about the doll, and treated it very carefully

which i knew from watching her with the doll for 20 seconds a few minutes earlier

and then what next? mom just looks away or ignores kid, doesn't pay attention

and kid tries to reach back and arrange doll better in basket

and spends like 30s trying to get doll more comfortable and properly taken care of for the ride

and mom isn't helping or paying any attention or realizing she just fucking dropped the doll like 1 foot into the basket, carelessly, that kid is trying to treat like a fragile baby

then mom pushed her on the grass some more then made her leave

all the parents were pressuring their kids to leave and no one stayed for long

my friend commented, "Ppl think my sister is weird cuz she asks toddlers for permission to like pick them up"

it's so sad how the parents consistently aren't interested in helping their kid get plenty of trips down the slide, get his fill of the park.

and it's so sad how parents mostly just don't pay attention to what their kid is doing. they can't help much because they don't pay attention. they say "we're going soon" and then talk with another parent and look away and then a few minutes later say "we really gotta go now" without even checking or caring what their kid is in the middle of. they mostly don't play with their kids. they don't try to understand what their kids are thinking. they don't try to help with it. they just don't care or pay much attention.

the one mom did help push the trike. but she wasn't paying any attention to the great care and attentiveness with which her daughter treated her doll. and i'll bet the kid has been loving that doll for months and treating it much the same and mom just doesn't care or have any respect for her kid's wishes and goals. and she just stopped in the middle of pushing the trike for a while for no apparent reason and then kid was stuck sitting still for a while. and she's not a good enough helper to help her kid peddle a trike. and she doesn't care or have the patience to keep trying. she just grabbed her kid's feet, placed them, didn't seem aware the trike was way too small for the kid (knees super bent), and then promptly gave up. kid will have to learn how to use a trike later from some other kid who knows how to use one. or maybe figure it out herself if she gets the opportunity to spend more time with a trike instead of being made to leave. or maybe, being a female, she'll just go through life being bad at that kind of thing because if a girl apparently "doesn't like trikes" parents think that's normal and ok and ignore it instead of figuring there's a problem to help with. but if a boy isn't playing with trikes, a lot more parents would figure something is wrong and help him solve the problem instead of just thinking it's a matter of taste. stuff like that, which isn't very blatant, is how a lot of gender role stuff ends up happening.

my friend also commented:

and it's so sad how parents mostly just don't pay attention to what their kid is doing. they can't help much because they don't pay attention.

when ppl do try to “help”, they mostly just interrupt with their kid is doing

they aren’t paying attention to what the kid is trying to do

so they interrupt and are like “here, do this”

but that won’t even help with what the kid is trying to do

like, say kid is trying to make swing twist around

parent will kind of see what kid is doing, but will think they are just incompetent at swinging

so if they try to “help” it will be either by pushing kid on swing, or trying to make them pump their legs

or maybe they know kid is trying to twist swing around, but they just think that is the wrong way to use the swing. so they are trying to make him use it right

i think both things happen

i don't entirely get how people are so blind to this stuff. you watch anyone interest with kids for a few minutes and you see horrors. they consistently don't pay attention to what their children or doing or why. they consistently don't try to understand. they consistently suck at helping or explaining anything, or don't even try to.

and they try to control their kid and make him leave. with no idea what kid is doing, they have no idea how important staying more is. they don't care. they don't try to figure out if it's worth staying because kid is in the middle of something great. they just have a very limited amount of patience for kid to delay them and they don't care about the park.

some reason people are blind to these horrors:

• they don't think of children as people
• they see it all the time so it just looks normal to them
• they make excuses like parenting is tiring enough without actually paying attention to your kid and his activities and having to help
• they don't respect children "playing", don't regard it as important or having anything to do with learning or education
• they're not very nice to anyone in their lives, including themselves. this isn't all kid-specific
• they treat people by categories (e.g. "child") rather than worrying about specifics like what that individual child cares about

it's so fucking simple though. your kid treasures a doll. you don't just drop it. the parent is just doing generic actions without knowing about her kid as an individual.

if your kid wants to use a slide, that's great. he likes it. this thing exists, people built it, and then other people enjoy it. they didn't have to build it but they did. and here it is. and your kid didn't have to find things in life he likes but he did. liking things and thinking things are good is not automatic. people take it for granted but it's wonderful and takes some positive human spirit and thinking. and then people grow up and don't actually like much stuff, or feel much joy, or have many interests, and they wonder why their lives are so empty. it's because their parents crushed their interests young and had no respect for their joy and preferences.

then people cover up their empty adult lives with a bunch of lies and make excuses for their parents and then do it to their own kids. they pretend getting drunk and partying and having sex are interests, when they're really just doing it because they have no idea what to do with their lives and that's what society offers. some pretend their profession is an interest. some pretend to like video games but play "casually" – meaning without really thinking about it much, just to kill time like watching TV. (some people don't even want to watch TV at higher speeds because then they'd just need to watch more shows to take up the same time slots in their life. they don't actually care about what they watch, and aren't interested in seeing more, they are just killing time.)

I was asked:

How did people find out about how to find Common Preferences and TCS [Taking Children Seriously] stuff?

Here are two of the big ideas that went into TCS:

• Karl Popper's philosophy, which is about how people learn.
• Liberalism, which is about how people deal with each other.

Liberalism includes some of the world's most important ideas. Many thinkers and writers have tried to advocate it. And its opponents often try to steal its concepts. Some liberal ideas are peace, freedom, progress and cooperation. Today, everyone says those are great – even the people who actually hate peace, freedom, progress or cooperation.

Liberalism talks about how peace, freedom, progress and cooperation imply capitalism and free trade.

Most liberal thinking focuses on politics. It looks at topics like government, laws, rulers, production, wealth, commerce, and fighting (including big stuff like wars and genocides, and also little stuff like robberies or assaults).

Liberal ideas also have a place in families. Families need peace and cooperation, not fighting. People in families need freedom and want to make progress in their lives.

Liberalism has criticisms of authority. Families usually have the parents as the authorities over the children. And sometimes the "man of the house" is the authority over his wife, too.

So part of where TCS comes from is taking liberal ideas, and understanding them well, and applying them to families.

Popper focused the most on how learning works in science. But his ideas apply to all learning. And he knew that. But he didn't write much about children or students learning. He didn't write much about education.

TCS took Popper's ideas and worked out what they mean for education and parenting. We looked at what the implications are.

Popper's ideas contradict authority. They don't fit with having authorities.

Popperian philosophy says to judge ideas by what the idea says, not by who said it. So if the child says an idea, it doesn't matter who said it, it's just an idea. You have to look at whether the idea is good, not whether a child or parent said it.

Popperian philosophy says that people have to think in order to learn. The learner has to do most of the work. You can't pour ideas into someone's head like water into a bucket. The learner has to figure stuff out.

Popperian philosophy says that finding and fixing mistakes is really important. People make mistakes. So we should look for them and fix them. And to find and fix mistakes we need criticism. Criticism means trying to point out mistakes. Lots of people don't like criticism, but it's really helpful. Parents should be happy to get criticism from their kids, but usually they aren't.

If someone understood liberalism and Popper really well, and then they thought carefully about education and parenting, they could come up with some ideas similar to TCS. Maybe not all the details, but a lot. It'd be really different than regular parenting. But people don't do that, instead they hurt their children's ability to learn.

Having one child is hard enough. Having more will lead to more mistakes and problems.

Sharing is overrated and it's generally better if people have their own property with no strong pressure/expectations to share it. They can share when it's convenient, but when it's a problem then stop sharing. And the borrower can be happy to borrow things sometimes, but realize sometimes other people's stuff won't be available. This is the same as how two adults friends would typically treat each other.

Sharing space is problematic too, not just possessions. It's typical for adults who share spaces to either have conflicts about the spaces. The main things that prevent this are being flexible and conflict-avoiding rather than picky, and having shared culturally-standard expectations about how the space is used (e.g. most adults in our culture have a similar concept of what to do and not do in a kitchen space or bedroom space).

Sharing rooms is typical in our society. Even if everyone has their own room, they still will share a living room, dining room, kitchen, etc. Usually parents mostly get what they want regarding shared rooms and children have to defer. That's somewhat bizarre because parents are the ones who are much better at dealing with problems, finding alternative ways to get stuff they want, etc. Parents are better at delaying an activity until later and dealing with life over a longer time horizon, and have way more other options, so usually they ought to be the ones deferring about the use of shared spaces (unless child is happy to defer in this case). What about two children sharing a space? That's hard and our society causes that difficult situation to happen far more than necessary – then complains that children get upset too much, squabble too much, etc

Children are people and ought to be treated like full people. So they ought to be able to choose their friends, rather than being required to be extra close friends with their siblings. This is often problematic in terms of various resources like money or parental attention to multiple children in different places all wanting help, now, with their separate projects.

Once you have a situation with several children trying to get along with each other (no other choice), sharing stuff, etc, then what has to be done is help them learn skills to deal with this situation. These are difficult skills – most adults have lots of problems with skills like these. It sucks to pressure children to learn these particular skills at a young age or else have ongoing conflicts with their family. It'd be better, in general, if children learned to deal with siblings after they learn how to deal with people more at arms length (which is an easier place to start). Yet getting along with siblings can be learned and children can be resilient to all kinds of difficult situations.

Children can forgive and deal with a lot – people massively underestimate this because other stuff is going wrong (coercive parenting, coercive schooling, treating the child like he's sub-human, etc) which is using up most of the child's coping and problem-solving ability. If parents would act less like irrational, cruel rulers then that'd free up tons of child's creativity, energy, good will, etc, to be used on smaller problems like learning how to deal with siblings.

When dealing with sibling problems it's important to keep in mind the perspective I've outlined. That's not just being negative, it's part of the solution. The key to fighting with siblings less is to lower expectations – recognize it's a tough situation and be less ambitious about what one expects from it. Just like if you live in a poor family, it helps a lot if the children recognize they are poor, recognize that's bad and hard, and calibrate their expectations accordingly. Children in poor families can be happy if they learn skills like sometimes being OK with not getting to buy something. Children with siblings can be happy if they learn skills like sometimes being OK with giving up a shared space or shared possession. Children can learn standard coping strategies for how to do this – e.g. have a list of activities they like which they can switch to which use a minimal amount of space, are flexible about where they can be done, and don't require any shared possessions. For example, if each child has their own phone/iPad/laptop then they can watch movies, watch youtube, listen to audio books, etc – and those activities will always be options they can fall back on to avoid a conflict over a shared space.

There are lots of other things to learn that also help. Like how to communicate one's preferences and make clear statements about what outcomes one is OK or not-OK with.

I think a lot of problems in multiple-children families are because everyone involved thinks having multiple children in a family is normal or good, and they don't see the problem with it. So they aren't putting effort into coping with it. They think it should work better than it does work, and their unrealistic expectations lead to ongoing fights.

people should take pre-existing values and traditions about liberalism and reason seriously, and apply those to all their relationships (friends, coworkers, parent-child, etc).

you value the pursuit of happiness? why won’t you help your kid pursue his happiness, now?

you value freedom, and each person choosing his own way in life? why, exactly, should there be an exception for children? whatever you answer, be super clear about the limits of the exception, and how the same reasoning won’t apply in other cases.

you think children are stupid and need to be controlled by their betters? what’s the difference between this and other authoritarian views? why is this authoritarianism more rational or less cruel? why does it apply by age rather than by IQ test or by having psychologist-kings interview everyone and decide who is competent to run their own lives?

why do you think it’s OK to take your child’s phone away as a punishment? is it his property, or not? do you respect property rights, or not? if you think your answer is that your child is not a property owner, you’re just lending him stuff, then why do you think that’s a good model for dealing with children but property ownership is a good model for the rest of society?

how do you think about voluntarily persuading others and what your options are if they disagree? why don’t you apply similar thinking about consent, persuasion and voluntary action to dealing with your child?

This is an incomplete list of some of unacceptable, uncivilized parenting behavior. These are pretty normal in our culture, but should be viewed with horror. They're pretty blatantly intolerable to a reasonable, classically-liberal-minded person.

• Making children do things they don't want to (e.g. making a baby go in a carseat when their crying indicates they don't want to, or enforcing an unwanted bedtime, or making a child brush his teeth or take a bath when he'd rather not, or making a child go to school). In general anything that causes crying or "tantrums" indicates the parent is doing something wrong.

• Punishments.

• Anything that relies on parent being bigger/stronger than child, such as spanking or carrying a child from one location to another when child doesn't want to be moved (which is literally assault and kidnapping – it should be a crime).

• Rules that child doesn't like.

• The parent putting his foot down or doing "nicer" pressures and manipulations to get his way. Frowning, having a stressed voice, or being selectively less energetically helpful/friendly/cheerful can be pressuring and controlling. (E.g. parent is "too tired" to do an activity child wants, but would suddenly be available if child wanted to do a different activity that parent cares about more.)

• Screen time limits.

• Not getting a baby an iPad and helping them get apps and use it (by around 6 months old, for people who can afford one).

• Having multiple children. (Parenting one child well is hard enough. Having more kids is much harder. That guarantees more mistakes in the treatment of the first child. Knowingly, intentionally guaranteeing to treat one's first child worse is a betrayal).

• Posting baby pictures online (privacy violation).

• Skipping vaccines (scarily trendy lately and literally killing kids), or denying children anesthetics for shots.

• Circumcision (genital mutilation).

• Having child to evaluated by a psychiatrist or giving him psych drugs, or letting a school do this. ("Mental illness" is a myth, and psychiatry is an attempt to "scientifically" legitimize the use of violence against non-criminal non-conformists without following the rule of law. People today are imprisoned without getting a trial, with psychiatry as the excuse. Psychiatric drugs literally cause brain damage – as their primary effect, not a side effect.)

• Giving children (oral) herpes (sometimes called "cold sores"). Herpes is widespread and uncurable, and is often spread by people kissing babies without adequate medical knowledge or herpes testing.

• Not prioritizing what child wants. The parent's proper role is as a helper to enable the child to get what he wants, not to control the child. That means e.g. helping child get sugar and other foods he likes, and "violent" games and movies he wants.

Read about more details.

Ask questions or add to the list, in the comments below!

Deliberateness is a tricky issue, whether it comes to hurting kids, making mistakes, or breaking promises. Parents do all kinds of stuff kids hate and still think they "meant well" – including sometimes literally beating their kid up. If I honestly meant well, was I "deliberately" hurting my kid? What if I think I meant well, but I was lying to myself?

Parents often consciously and intentionally choose actions which hurt their kids. Their goal isn't to hurt their kid, but they know he will find it painful to have his phone taken away for a month, and they take the phone anyway.

Why do parents hurt their kids?

• They think it's justice (kid did something bad).
• They think it's educational (makes it memorable, seems to "work" in that kid stops doing the things the parent yells/hits/punishes about).
• They think it's good for the kid somehow, possibly because a positive outweighs the negative. E.g. leaving a baby alone in a crib to cry himself to sleep is a negative, but some people think it's a larger positive for the child to learn to sleep in his own room. They don't know that the child stops crying because he learns his parent won't help him, so the child gives up on problem solving and happiness (in some ways, not all ways).
• Habit.
• Carelessness.
• Accident.
• Anger (they will say they didn't deliberately choose to be angry).
• Not having much control over what one does/says/feels in one's life in general.
• Doing common, normal parenting behaviors without thinking about whether they are hurtful.

None of these involve consciously thinking, "I will now hurt my kid, on purpose, just for the sake of hurting him." (That would clearly be deliberate.)

Regardless of deliberateness, the child is still hurt. Whether or not the parent is morally guilty, it's an ongoing, recurring problem that needs to be addressed so that the child stops getting hurt.