HeavenlyPossumApr 27, 2024

When European settler colonists first encountered the indigenous communities of northeastern North America, many things surprised them about the indigenous communities.

Among these, the Europeans were surprised to discover how restrained and personally responsible the people in these communities were. They very, very rarely engaged in interpersonal violence. They didn’t insult each other; they didn’t lose their tempers around each other.

The Europeans were also surprised to discover that the people in these communities rarely, if ever, disciplined their children. They were, the Europeans believed, impossibly indulgent with their children, allowing them immense personal freedom.

I think it would surprise many contemporary readers that those two things don’t conflict with each other. People living in contemporary state-capitalist modernity tend to assume that children require quite rigid discipline, the routinized order of mass schooling, and fairly constant coercion to keep them out of trouble and turn them into civilized, responsible adults.

It turns out that lots of things we assume to be self-evidently true are not actually true at all.

Show threadHeavenlyPossumApr 27, 2024

It’s a baked-in, unquestioned assumption in hegemonic contemporary society that there’s this whole class of people who intrinsically can’t make decisions for themselves and self-evidently must be coercively managed as a result, and meanwhile there are entire societies in which adults don’t even *raise their voices* at children because why would it be ok to shout at people in anger?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger

Show threadHeavenlyPossumApr 27, 2024

“But children don’t know better and have to be forced to do things for their own good”

This logic has also been used to control and abuse women, the disabled, and members of minority communities *in our own contemporary society.* It has been employed to justify the enslavement of Black people and genocidal assimilationist policies for indigenous peoples. Whose good is it really for?

Show threadFoolishOwlApr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum There's toothbrushing, that I've worried about as a problem in non-authoritarian parenting. A lot of things, you can explain to children as having immediate consequences. Tooth decay is pretty abstract.

However, children tend to trust adults, if they do not abuse that trust, so if most of the time you can explain why they should or should not do something in terms of immediate consequences, they'll usually accept the occasional, "Trust me, it's important to brush your teeth."

Show threadHeavenlyPossum

@foolishowl

My kids brush their teeth and I can’t recall ever having to coerce them into it. While there’s inevitably an intrinsic power imbalance between adult and child that will always carry an implicit threat, I’ve always just…talked to them.

Apr 27, 2024 at 3:40pmWeb
Show threadFoolishOwlApr 27, 2024
@HeavenlyPossum Yeah, in practice, it was just calling out a reminder to brush their teeth before bed.
Show threadHeavenlyPossumApr 27, 2024

@foolishowl

I think it’s telling that we get stuff that’s genuinely not coercive (talking to people, persuading them) mixed up with things that are (violence, threats of violence, deprivation facilitated by violence) under the rubric of “parenting” or “discipline.” It’s so normalized that everything gets kind of jumbled up together.

Show threadViolet MadderApr 28, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum @foolishowl

The respect and trust that is built by NOT being coercive, means resistance is a lot less likely to even happen.