The Sovereign Child

For my parents. Thank you.

This book is inspired by a philosophy of parenting called Taking Children Seriously, a noncoercive parenting movement that was co-founded by Sarah Fitz-Claridge and David Deutsch and was prominent in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. At the time, Fitz-Claridge was pursuing the radical idea that it was possible to raise a child with zero coercion. She familiarized herself with various schools of thought on children and parenting but found that none of them fully measured up. Eventually, she happened upon an unlikely collaborator who lived in her city, Oxford physicist David Deutsch. Deutsch is a world-renowned thinker for, among other things, establishing the theoretical groundwork for quantum computing. In addition to physics, Deutsch was attracted to philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of Karl Popper. In subsequent years, Deutsch added to Popper’s work in epistemology, personal identity, morality, and aesthetics, all of which are detailed in his two books, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity.

Deutsch’s views on personhood aligned with Fitz-Claridge’s intuitions about childhood freedom, and the two of them started a movement promoting a radically noncoercive approach to parenting. Fitz-Claridge went to conferences and met with parenting and schooling groups, and she organized a print journal called Taking Children Seriously that had thousands of paid subscribers at its peak. The movement lost steam in the 2000s, but the content of the journals remained online as a half-functioning web forum when I stumbled upon it in 2018, just in time for the birth of my first child. Six years later, my wife and I have been applying this philosophy with all of our five kids. We consider ourselves enormously lucky to have encountered these ideas, and the purpose of this book is to share them with others.

What Is Taking Children Seriously?

The simplest way to describe Taking Children Seriously is to describe what it is not. Taking Children Seriously avoids the two questions that frame almost every other school of thought on parenting:

What are the necessary limitations, restrictions, or boundaries for kids? Where should the parent draw the line on what is allowed and disallowed?

How do parents enforce these lines, limits, and expectations? Should they use harsh words, positive reinforcement, time-outs, confiscations, bribes, or breathing techniques?

Taking Children Seriously steps away from all of this. It has no interest in what the best rules should be, or how to enforce them, because it has no interest in rules. When most people hear this, their first reaction is to assume Taking Children Seriously is a fancy version of complete permissiveness, a well-known and ancient parenting style otherwise known as neglect. Rest assured: Taking Children Seriously is not neglect.

So what is it? 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.

This book is inspired by the themes in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Unlike the self-sovereignty that Davidson and Rees-Mogg outline, which requires huge, society-wide innovation, the self-sovereignty we might unlock for children can take root in any home, anywhere, by anyone of any financial status. The sovereign child doesn’t have to wait for anything except a curious parent.

Chapter 1 begins with freedom around food, then Chapters 2 and 3 move on to sleep and screens. Chapter 4 takes an extended look at the problems with enforcing rules in general. Chapter 5 presents problem-solving as the formal alternative to rules. Chapter 6 addresses the counterarguments. Chapter 7 presents various additional applications of the philosophy to daily life. Chapter 8 takes siblings seriously. Chapter...