On Friday morning I had the opportunity to be interviewed for an hour on ABC Radio National's Life Matters programme. The topic for the morning was "Being Made to Do Things." You can hear the entire programme via the ABC's podcast here (just go to Fri May 13th).

We spent considerable time discussing the different ways that people - particularly parents - make other people do things. I spoke about how force makes people feel, especially our children. And I discussed ways that we can respect our children's agency and autonomy. I'll write in more detail about these ideas in my next post.

For this post, however, I wanted to highlight a comment that made my jaw drop for all the wrong reasons.


A listener visited the Radio National website to comment on what I had said. After disparaging me for being a "ph" student (she forgot the 'd'), she stated:

"Your guest speaker is a parenting ph student it shows, he talks about young people & children as "People" and what they like & dont"

Mary went on to argue that "wisdom, strength, self confidence, self esteem, etc etc" is obtained by discipline and the benefit of hindsight.

In other words, Mary was asking me what I was talking about? She's scoffing that I'm suggesting that young people and children are actually "people". I'm suggesting that it does, in fact, matter whether they may have a preference for something over another thing? How absurd!

I find this view disturbing but all too common. Far too often adults forget that children are people too. They forget that children's feelings, perspectives, and preferences are legitimate. They choose to disregard, overpower, or deny what a child may wish for.

Such thinking on the part of the adult diminishes the feelings of worth and confidence that are important for the child's success in life. My response to Mary Waters, the listener, was as follows:

Mary,

Dare I say that "Children are people too."

By taking their perspective and understanding them, sharing our values, and giving them choice, internalisation of values (including work they don't like doing) is far more likely to be successful.

Decades of research substantiate this claim. Autonomy supportive childrearing is empirically shown to provide "wisdom, strength, self confidence, self esteem, etc etc" far more effectively than any version or form of control, negative or positive.

Children will grow to be respectable when we respect them. They will value themselves as we value them. It is our responsibility as parents to remember at all times that they are people, and to treat them as such.