I am the founder of the world-wide TCS movement and editor of the paper journal, Taking Children Seriously. I founded TCS because I think that the future of the world depends upon changing the way we raise our children. TCS is about bringing reason into the sphere of child-rearing and education, so that children can grow up free from the unpleasant and harmful restrictions that parents and teachers have traditionally inflicted upon them. TCS is about helping children to do what they want to do, to be who they want to be, to pursue their own ends in life instead of being treated as a means to their parents' ends. TCS is an educational philosophy, a new style of family life, and a new view of children. But it is more than that. TCS is not just good for children, but for adults too. Traditional ideas about child-rearing demand self-sacrifice from parents. Pre-TCS child-rearing and education is extremely stressful for adults. TCS eschews self-sacrifice and provides a positive alternative to the distressing, conflict-ridden way of life we see all around us in pre-TCS families. Many parents are initially drawn to TCS because they believe that the way people treat children is wrong, but after a while realise that their TCS ideas are changing their own lives for the better too: TCS is about everyone taking everyone seriously, including you taking yourself seriously; it is not just about parents taking children seriously. If you are reading this, you are a person, and your wishes, opinions, and preferences matter too. Many parents, particularly mothers, forget that. If you want to take your children seriously, you have to be able to take yourself seriously.
In most families, when people talk about solving problems, they really mean merely stabilising them. TCS can help people learn to solve problems so that everyone involved genuinely, wholeheartedly, prefers the solutions. That includes the children! It also includes the parents! In TCS relationships, no one is imposing his or her will on anyone else. Every individual is getting what he or she wants. The consent-based TCS approach to resolving disagreements has a profound effect upon relationships within the family, producing a virtuous circle in which the more problems are actually solved, the more each family member wants to solve problems, and the more problems the family actually can solve.
TCS can change adult relationships too: some couples find that TCS helps them create deeper, more fulfilling relationships together. Clinging to destructive relationships is a vice, not a virtue. One should either change them for the better or disengage. TCS can help some people find the courage to face the truth about their relationships – for example, to consider (amicable) divorce if there is no hope of positive change. TCS can be good for childless single people too, not just parents or couples. It provides a whole new world-view which can affect positively even how one thinks in the privacy of one's own mind.
In case I have given the wrong impression in this quick summary, let me stress that TCS is not a panecea. If it were easy to create fulfilling relationships, solve problems, and to grow and improve as a person, there would be no need for TCS in the first place. But all these things are difficult. They can't be achieved by fiat, by a mere act of will. Living a TCS life requires great creativity, and there is no recipe for creativity. It takes effort, and we are fallible human beings who make mistakes. We can't become perfect TCS parents and partners overnight; we can't achieve perfection ever! Perfection is impossible in any human undertaking. All we can do is to start from where we are, and grow and improve from here. Sometimes, we shall make great strides in a blinding flash of insight; other times improvement will be frustratingly slow. The thing to do is not to devote precious creativity to beating ourselves up about our failures, but to try to view each mistake as an opportunity for growth and to learn from it.
To find out more about TCS, visit the TCS web site.
As the founder of the TCS movement and editor of the paper journal, Taking Children Seriously, I accept speaking engagements all over the world on a wide variety of related subjects, some academic, others not. Click here for a list of topics, upcoming speaking engagements, comments, etc.
I am List Owner of the following internet discussion Lists:
People sometimes complain that I do not give anecdotes about how TCS works with my children. But my children are individual persons in their own right, and they should not lose the right to determine what information others have about their lives just because they happen to be my children. They did not ask to be born to a mother who speaks and writes about child-rearing, children's rights, and education, and I think it would be wrong of me to violate their privacy by using them as examples to (spuriously) bolster my arguments for TCS. So I do not and will not discuss, or even mention publicly, any specific details of my children's lives, opinions, problems or achievements.
The main reasons are more subtle than the one I give above, and more difficult to explain to people who are not already familiar with TCS ideas.
Privacy is necessary for the growth of knowledge, because the choice of both when to apply criticism to an idea under construction, and what sort of criticism to apply at a given time, is an integral part of the creative process. The growth of knowledge depends on a highly sophisticated scheduling of criticism. This applies even within one mind. Writers can get stuck if they get too diverted into editing for form when first creating the substance. The knowledge of how to schedule such things is an extremely important part of creativity itself. And the same applies to knowledge of when to divulge information about oneself – and when to keep it private.
See also the summary of my article in Taking Children Seriously 23 – “Beware the Curriculum Mentality” – where I spoke of the danger that if parents keep their children's work for later inspection by an authority
Children's creativity is diverted into the problem of how to be seen to be meeting the external standards implicit in the curriculum and to produce “evidence” of “progress”, instead of solving problems that arise naturally out of their own personalities and experiences.
If it is harmful for children to see their lives as producing evidence of progress, how much more harmful would it be for them to be living evidence of their own wonderful attributes, or evidence that I am right about TCS or, conversely, that TCS is false – which is what discussing them in public would inevitably amount to.
Many of the general points I make are generalised versions of things that I have experienced, but that is really neither here nor there, for I want my arguments and ideas to be judged on their own merit and not because I claim any spurious authority of experience to justify them.
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, formerly Sarah Lawrence; Sarah Fitz-Claridge, formerly Sarah Lawrence
Copyright © 2000, 2003 Sarah Fitz-Claridge
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