What Does Respect Mean?

The most common objection to The Heart of Parenting is the fear that I am encouraging parents to treat their children as authorities. Now, don’t misunderstand me, children are authorities on themselves and their experience, but they are not authorities on Being Alive nor should they be treated as such. In fact, doing that is called Parentification and is generally considered to be a source of childhood trauma if not a form of child abuse.

The respect of The Heart of Parenting is to acknowledge that children are people. Small people. New people. Young people. But people nonetheless. None of this empty vessel nonsense of Locke nor tiny adult drivel from Lamarck; but actual human people with disappointments, joys, preferences, irrationalities, and impulses. And it means being gentle with them and giving them the same level of grace we give our age-peers who surely we do see as other people in terms of not taking things personally if they make mistakes, but still not erasing all the consequences of those mistakes even so.

And by the way, treating someone as an authority? That’s called deference. You are deferring, or paying homage to, to their authority. While deference contains respect, for the person you are deferring to is indeed a person, it is so uniquely itself that it gets its own term.


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