 The average relationship between parent and child is characterized by disappointment, frustration, conflict and pain. Now, I have had three children. I still have three children. They've grown up and I feel that I've had all these frustrations and various experiences. Somehow my children have grown up fairly well, so I'm supposed to be in the super parent bracket. But I'm certainly very, very happy to introduce Frances Candle, who is going to speak on her book in general. Thank you very much. And ladies and gentlemen, if we accept that all people should be free to live as they choose, provided they don't initiate force or fraud against others, then this premise should also be applied not only to the relationship between adults and other adults, but also to the relationship between adults and children. This is what my husband said to me very soon after we had met and I had become a libertarian. And although the idea may seem quite acceptable to you and not very new, I was frankly skeptical. I had a little girl of my own and he was a bachelor and I thought, well, he really just doesn't know too much about it. How can we expect children to relate in the same way as adults do, with the same freedom and responsibility? Still, I was prepared to give it a try. And the first thing that we did was look in the catalogs of the various publications that sold libertarian literature for some guidelines on how we could raise libertarian children. And we found, this was six years ago, one tape by Peter, which we Julie sent for and we enjoyed very much, but it didn't give us a blueprint for raising our children, just a couple of pointers. There was a chapter in Harry Brown's book and there were one or two questions answered on some of Brandon's seminar tapes and that was about it. So we decided that we would have to work out the method for ourselves and we set about systematically trying to do this. Now the first thing that was very clear immediately was that children in our society have no rights at all. From the time they get up in the morning till they go to bed at night, they are told by their parents and educators and other adults exactly what they should do. They're told when to get up, what to eat for breakfast, what they must wear, when to have a rest, which toys they can play with and how they should play with them, when to go to bed and when they must have their bath at night. They're even told to put their jerseys on when their mothers are cold. In addition to this, they experience no property rights. They are told that they must share their toys or they will be taken away. Their parents frequently take one toy and give it to a sibling. You're too big for that now. They never bother to ask the child's permission. And if they don't play with the toy in the way that the parent thinks that they should, they often take it away or threaten to, I'll give it to little Johnny down the road. He hasn't got everything you have and he will look after it properly. But we expect them to respect our property rights and we expect them to understand that they should not bite, kick, scratch or hit other human beings. Even though smacking them and beating them is the order of the day. I know of almost no parents who don't hit their children from time to time and regard that as quite acceptable. And children learn in two ways. They learn by experience, and they learn by imitation. And as you see, they neither experience what it is to own property or to have your rights respected, nor do they see their parents doing it so they don't have a role model to imitate either. And in addition to this, when we violate our children's rights, we collide head on with a fundamental drive which they have. And that is the drive for efficacy. The drive to control their environment. Anybody who has had a baby will have seen how they work, all their waking hours at first lifting their head, then sitting, crawling, walking and then reaching, controlling, manipulating and eventually trying to feed themselves, dress themselves and so on. It's a survival drive. In a society more primitive than ours, they simply would not survive if they didn't learn to control their environment. And when we step in and tell them what to do all the time, this is what we're colliding with. And the consequence of the collision is that the child either lapses into efficacy where he simply doesn't try any longer to do anything. You've probably seen these children, they're the ones that sit in the corner sucking a security blanket. They're the ones that the teachers are very so good in school. Or they rebel uniformly against everything and everyone in a desperate attempt to retain some kind of autonomy. Now the kind of behavior on the part of parents, which I have described so far, is authoritarian behavior, clearly. And of course not all parents are authoritarian. Authoritarian parents are the ones who say, I have all the rights and my children have none. I know everything, they know nothing and they'd better turn the line or else. But on the other hand you have the permissive parent. The permissive parent has no rights and his children have them all. And his position is that he will not stop his child from doing anything because he's afraid they might damage their fragile ego. They ride rough shots over all in sundry while the parents' fondly look on. And of course most parents are neither one nor the other, they fluctuate between the two. And in a way this is worst of all because now the child has no cause and effect in his life. He has no way of knowing what the consequence of any given action will be. Will it be praise or punishment? And what Leon and I realized is that these are not the only alternatives available to us. There was a fourth position, the libertarian position. The one in which both the parents and the children have rights and the rights are the same for them. Now the reaction of most people to this is my initial one, that it simply can't and won't work. That only chaos will result from giving children freedom. People say children are irrational, they're immature. Rights have to be earned, I'm often told, and chaos will result. But if we think about it and examine the question, how in fact do children differ from us? Well they're smaller and weaker than we are, they have different sleep needs from ours and they have different nutritional needs, but these differences are also true of men and women. Women are smaller than men. Paraplegics and athletes have different nutritional needs. And that is not a reason for treating the one as inferior to the other. I think really when we consider it the important difference and the only really important difference between us and children is that they lack experience and they lack the knowledge which is a consequence of gaining experience. And that is what we have and they don't. And any action on their part which seems irrational, initially if you examine it you will see that it is a result of a lack of experience. There's a little story which illustrates this very nicely where the little girl said to her mother who was pregnant, what have you got in your tummy, why is it so big? And her mother said, I've got a baby there. And she said, oh how did it get there? And the mother said, well daddy gave me the baby. So the little girl went to her father and said, did you give mommy a baby? And he said, yes I did. And she said, well please don't give her another one because she's eating it. Now initially that sounds irrational. But in the context of a child's knowledge it is a perfectly logical deduction. It is not irrational to refuse an injection intended for inoculation if you do know that the needle hurts and you don't know what might happen to you if you don't have that injection. And of course the other point here is that even if children did act irrationally we don't regard irrational actions on the part of adults as a reason for violating their rights. Now children are irrational and they're logical, often far more so than we are but there are many other reasons why they handle freedom very well. The first one is that they have an extremely healthy self-preservation instinct. When Jean Liedloff who wrote the continuum concept stayed with the Yukona Indians in South America she observed to her amazement that their babies were left completely free to wander around the huts to pick up a flaming brand from the fire to play with sharp knives and arrows and she saw them sitting next to a deep pit and a fast-running river but she didn't see them hurt themselves. Like one baby in the course of two years cut itself slightly on one of the knives. And what she noticed was that they behaved in the way that a puppy or a kitten would. They seemed to have an inherent sense of what their limits were and certain experiments have been done with our children where they have put glass over a surface which appears to drop off and then they put a crawling baby on it and see if it goes over the edge or not and the babies stop before they reach the edge. And it seems that it's quite possible that if we constantly impede the self-preservation instinct by stepping in the way and protecting our children from anything that might danger them at all. I mean even the smallest things like handling a knife or climbing steps and so on. That in fact we reduce their ability to judge what is dangerous in their environment. Now of course I'm not suggesting as many people often seem to think is the case that we allow our children to wander out in front of a motor car. I'm sure I don't even need to say this to libertarians. No more than we would allow a little old lady who was hard of hearing to wander out in front of a motor car she hadn't noticed, we'd jump there and pull her back. When a danger occurs that the children can have no knowledge of and certainly don't have any suicidal wishes we're perfectly within our rights to step in and protect them from that danger. And of course there are a lot of things like electricity which they can have no instinctive knowledge of and which we must protect them from. The second reason that children handle freedom well is that they only make the decisions which they are ready to make. My baby makes it very clear to me when she wants to eat and what she wants to eat she'll push one thing away she's 14 months and she'll gesture that she wants another. But she couldn't care what clothes I put on her. When a child is two for instance he might be very concerned about what he's going to wear because they often are at that age but if you're going on holiday he couldn't care where you go on holiday what he does care about that he's not left behind. So people make the decisions which they are ready to make and they are not interested in making ones which their cognitive development has not reached the point at that point. In addition to this children have a tendency towards growth and health and I'm not sure Dr. Bregen would back me up on this. They have a natural movement towards happiness and healthiness if they're only given the smallest chance and as well as this they have a tendency to be sociable. They want to please they want to be happy and to be loved and to feel lovable and they don't do things which annoy adults in order to because they have some kind of self-destructive wish they do it because their desire to be efficacious is stronger than their desire to be sociable. But if you give them the chance to make their own decisions and to feel in control of themselves then they want to please you and they want to listen to your advice and they're very reasonable. They don't have a need to kick against what you think or say. Now there are two ways this point leads on to here that children derive their self-esteem. One is the way in which they are seen by others and the other is the way in which they experience themselves. So the current position in the relationship between parents and adults is one where the adult the message they get from the adult is very powerfully that they are stupid incapable, irresponsible and inferior and they don't get a chance to prove they can do anything so they don't experience themselves as capable. Now obviously if the message we give them is I think you can manage this on your own I'm sure that you can make this decision you will very quickly learn how to address yourself or whatever not only do they then see themselves in your eyes as a worthwhile human being but they find out for themselves that they can do these things. Our nine year old daughter wakes herself up with an alarm clock gets dressed fixes her breakfast and her school lunch and goes out to get her lift to school without seeing me in the morning because I'm sleeping in with a baby and Leon's left early and she really values that independence and the feeling that she has of capability and control but one very important point that I'd like to make is that we should never protect our children from the consequences of their decisions which is a tremendous temptation for parents because they don't want to see their children hurt they don't want to see them suffer if your child decides, if you say it's your decision whether you do your homework or not then you mustn't write a note to the teacher the next day saying he was sick and so he didn't do his homework here for this people have to discover what the consequences of their actions will be and obviously your children will make mistakes and that's one of the ways that they learn and they won't always listen to you no matter how reasonable you are and how well you explain why you think they should do this and not that in my book I suggest that this principle can be applied completely consistently to any situation which arises between parents and child and since obviously it's not possible to cover every situation I give parents a very simple method or guideline for finding a solution to a problem which arises I tell them to imagine that an adult alien comes to live in their house from another planet now this is a fully grown adult but one who knows nothing about our culture they don't understand the effects of gravity that water spills, that glasses break they don't know what are considered good table manners and how people should behave in order to be socially acceptable how would you if you had such a person come to visit you treat them I believe the answer is that we would with dignity and courtesy help them to learn to control and come to terms with their new environment as quickly as possible and this is precisely what we should do with our children and so I posit what I call the adult test where the parent says in any given situation where they don't know how to handle it what would I do if this were an adult and you would be surprised that you can apply this to absolutely any situation now also in my book I do to some degree take the principle and apply it to all the different aspects of everyday living with children in a very practical concrete way how does one get around problems of going to bed or staying up late or food and feeding which is one of the biggest areas of contention with mothers and small children of later on with adolescents watching television reading what they want to sex and so on today just because I think it will interest you more than most of the others I'd like to talk a little bit about the chapter I call division of labour in the home what I advocate is that instead of giving our children pocket money which obviously leads to all kinds of socialist implications they come and demand so and so gets 30 dollars why don't I they must just get it there because they exist we pay them for work in the home now this is not work which they do for themselves like tidying their room or doing their homework but work which they do for us for instance my children put my newsletter in the envelopes they stick the labels on the stamps and so on and I pay them so much per newsletter and we have a completely free market in our home they work at a mutually agreed rate and they can turn the job down if they want to they can undercut one another and the consequence of this is that they learn that there's nothing for nothing they understand that we work for our money and my daughter goes to me that soup mongers I want that I say well you know mommy and daddy work for their money and they understand that and they quickly learn the little ones learn to add and subtract and the older ones very quickly learn what that money actually means and what its subjective value is another of the positive spin-offs is that they are it gives them again control over their environment if they break something unintentionally they can replace it and I remember very much the feeling of frustration when I was little when I broke my mother's vase and she was upset there was nothing I could do except wish that it hadn't happened it wasn't intentional and I was there feeling guilty but if children are earning money they can replace the thing that's broken and feel the way we do that was a mistake but now it's been rectified and it also provides a way of solving a lot of discipline problems instead of beating your children you can find them but the state doesn't take the money and keep it for themselves what they do is compensate the person who's been wronged so if our nine year old daughter smacks our five year old daughter she owes her five rand which is about seven dollars I think compensation I can assure you that it puts it off smacking very quickly and it makes the other one feel fun the other kind of difficulties which it helps us resolve are for instance many parents are concerned their child will want to buy something which they regard as very dangerous like a motorbike or even a skateboard or something like that and they say well if you let's give them the freedom to decide then they can have whatever they want well they can have whatever they want at the price of paying for it and if a child has had to save up and work hard to buy something they must really want it very badly they have now also had to act in a self-disciplined and responsible way and by the time they get it they're going to value it and not treat it carelessly and will have thought about the consequences of it and you can go further than that and say to them and on buying whatever it is that I regard as dangerous if you hurt yourself I will not be responsible for your medical bills and if you're on some kind of medical aid which most people are your child will probably be quite easily able to afford the tariff should they break their arm or whatever you think might happen as a consequence that's the best you can do the best you can do is tell them what you think the dangers are the reasons why you don't think they should do it and then leave them to do it hoping they will do it in the most responsible way now I know that many people argue that since parents own the house that they have the right to lay down the laws within the house and the children must obey or leave of course in our society this is precisely what happens only the children don't have the option to leave they're stuck there and they obey come what may and one of the primary dangers of this in my opinion and I think one of the reasons that this is perhaps the most important area of all that we should address ourselves to I suppose everybody thinks their own pet area is that but I think that the way in which the average parent is raising their child is leading directly and unavoidably to a socialist mentality it is absolutely inevitable if from the time you are born you are taught all day long that you are not able to make your own decisions that there is always somebody there that knows better than you somebody who will feed you and house you and look after you provided you listen to them because they're cleverer better and more experienced than you are of course when you grow up you turn around and look for a replacement and the perfect replacement is waiting there for you and as Peter said earlier it's more attractive than the home because it just allows you that little bit more freedom than you had when you were growing up and in addition to this of course traditional methods create kind of conflict and pain and hurt that you've been hearing about battlefield metaphors spring readily to mind when people describe the relationship in the average family and this is the feelings in the child the resentment, hostility, dependence inadequacy which Peter described so well in his book psychology of freedom so it is neither in our long term nor in our short term interest to violate our children's rights and the best payoff of respecting their rights is that they they blossom so quickly they thrive on it they're so happy and fulfilled and growing into the kind of people that we so much want them to grow into independent self-confident able to judge what they hear but allowing other people to live the way they want to recognizing the rights of others our children have coined a phrase I am the boss of myself and when their first friends say to them are you allowed to do this or are you allowed to do that they say I'm the boss of myself and they actually have little games discussing who is the boss of what in the house well daddy's the boss of the high five set and mommy's the boss of the sewing machine but we're all the boss of ourselves and they have a little problem when it comes to the dogs and the cats and who are the boss of them I haven't gone into the legal rights of children in society in general not because this issue is not an important one but because I think the most immediate and the most relevant question is the one of the way in which they are treated in the home the way in which they are related to the parents that is what will affect them fundamentally for the rest of their lives before I end I thought you might like to care that my book is going to be translated into Portuguese it's a very strange thing to have happened but a Brazilian book club chose it out of all the books that are available on raising children so there must have been some libertarian minded persons control there and I would just like to finish with a quote by Thomas Babington McCawley who said many people are in the habit of laying it down as a self evident proposition that no people ought to be free until they are fit to use their freedom the maxim is worthy of the fool who resolved not to go into the water until he had learned to swim