Instead of focusing on rules, Taking Children Seriously focuses on fostering understanding. Parenting is the process of supporting a child until they understand the world well enough that they can support themselves. What is the best way to foster understanding? To provide freedom and security for a person’s creativity to discover how the world works. Rules limit freedom, and hence understanding, and therefore impair the parenting project. (Location 41)
The reason kids should have free rein with regard to food is that they are building an understanding of how to eat in the same way that they are building an understanding of everything else in life: by exploration, discovery, and trial and error. (Location 96)
Not being overweight because your parents forbid you from overeating is worlds apart from understanding your own desires and cravings and tailoring them to suit your other preferences for how to live your life, including body size and appearance. (Location 117)
There is nothing wrong with exposing a child to your preferences. Quite the opposite. The key is allowing them to reject your preferences. If they aren’t allowed to opt out, then your preference necessarily disrupts their understanding of the world. If vegetables are unwanted, then being forced to eat them would cause resentment toward the person doing the forcing. (Location 133)
Forcing always introduces confusion, extra layers of problems to solve, or both. (Location 137)
Yes, if you can be the helpful problem solver rather than the adversarial gatekeeper, if you can patch over rough spots by, say, supplementing nutritional deficiencies with multivitamin gummies or figuring out a few “healthy” dishes that are made genuinely appealing. (Location 177)