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The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents

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The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents

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Highlights & Notes

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?

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.

To be sure, parents are obligated to provide food for kids, since they’re incapable of acquiring it on their own. But the duty to provide food does not imply the right, let alone the injunction, to control food.

Parents don’t just control their children’s food, they control them with food. Since sweets are generally restricted, they become a default reward for any desired behavior, and their restriction a punishment for any undesired behavior.

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.

It is hard to imagine something more damaging to a life well lived than anxiety around eating.

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.

A crucial guard against risk is to have a trusted and knowledgeable person available for questions. This lifeline can only work if this person has the child’s best interests at heart, and only if the child believes this.

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.

Forcing always introduces confusion, extra layers of problems to solve, or both.

Put differently, overeating might provide its own signal for why not to overeat.

Building on this, the third reason is that avoiding or overcoming bad habits requires understanding, not mandatory avoidance.

An unsatisfied desire is a problem, and all problems have solutions. We adults spend our days seeking solutions to all of our problems, and we very often succeed. Imagine consigning ourselves to this or that shortcoming, because “we can’t always get what we want.”

The truth is we should always try to get what we want. When our desires are damaging, it’s crucial to understand why they are damaging so that we can change course and pursue new and better desires, not apologize for being desirous in the first place.

As with adults, so with kids.

Like eating, sleeping needs to be figured out, and kids need to become attuned to the signals coming from their bodies so that they can make the appropriate trade-offs between staying awake and getting rest.

Autonomy is much more than the pleasure and pain of making good decisions. It is being the architect of your own life.

A kid can only come to truly understand how rest and fatigue impact everything else in the context of the freedom to try them out.

The magic of childhood is that kids don’t have dependents or even a responsibility to ensure their own survival, so it is precisely during this time that a person is most free to engage with the world directly.

Just because kids have free rein doesn’t mean parents are their slaves. When I feel like going to sleep, I tell my kids that I’m tired and that I don’t feel like playing with them anymore. Then, just like adults, my kids find ways to entertain themselves with technology like iPads until they’re ready for bed according to their own preferences.

Taking your kids seriously gives them reasons to take you seriously as well.

Unlike the spent leaf blower, when a baby is left to cry herself to sleep, she is left to deal with her problem on her own. A baby crying herself to sleep marks a solution for the parent, but not for the baby. Babies are helpless, and a soothing parent is not some counterproductive crutch.

Like eating, sleeping is connected with almost every other thing one does in life. Living well requires adjusting and fine-tuning priorities when things change.

One’s preferences around eating and sleeping should be as seamless as those for breathing and walking, although the former are far richer and more dynamic. It is therefore essential that parents not muck up a child’s discovery process.

At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values. Adults communicate this awareness to other adults with phrases like “Pardon the interruption,” but with kids, it’s often assumed that the interruption is rather a necessary redirection or correction.

Parents might object that their control of children’s attention is not at all indiscriminate, that it is directed toward avoiding particular harms or some other superficially lofty end point. But the child doesn’t know this, and so it will feel indiscriminate and arbitrary to them.

A kid’s interest is the prime indicator that the content is generating thought and learning.

Children’s programming is a stepping stone to more sophisticated content.

Media is a portal to cultural knowledge, but adult gatekeepers have always been prone to moral panics about media’s influence on children.

One reason that this prejudice against virtual experiences carries weight is because it’s such a useful tool for control. Parents can control their child’s physical world much more easily than they can the world in their head, and hence many parents try to gatekeep the access points to their kids’ imagination.

The discussion of screen addiction has suffered from a confusion between two senses of the term addiction: the medical and the casual. The medical definition is precise: Addiction requires a chemical dependence on a substance and a self-injurious compulsion to maintain this dependence. The casual usage of the term is more of a general description of how much we like something and how much we are seemingly powerless to resist.

Exaggeration is fine, except when it is used to justify limiting others’ freedom because they supposedly can’t help themselves.

Repeated use of something may look like addiction from the outside, but that tells us nothing about what’s happening inside the person’s mind. I repeatedly use electricity, but I’m not hooked on it. I depend on it economically, not chemically.

A pastime, even an obsessional one, is a wonderful thing, and it’s nobody else’s business. Labeling those pastimes that violate your sensibilities as addictions misses the fact that everyone’s interests and problem situations are infinitely unique.

But horror stories about kids retreating from life and engaging only with screens almost never address other things going on in their lives. The assumption is that the screen lured them away from an otherwise happy childhood and duped them into wasting their lives. When we hear of these reports, we almost never hear about other contributing factors, such as stresses in the home, issues with friends, or any of the myriad of things that can make kids seek out a refuge.

Finally, a common argument for addiction is that, when kids get irritable and restless when their screens are taken away, this is evidence that they are going through withdrawal. But I get irritated when the power goes out, not because I’m addicted, but because I need electricity in order to pursue my interests. What’s more, if another person switches off my power just to thwart me, I might erupt into a full-blown rage.

This is the ultimate rationale for controlling children. It denies that they are people with interests, motivations, and values and falsely assumes that they are mere slaves to the chemical processes in their brains.

Third, truly addictive chemicals like alcohol, nicotine, and heroin exert their influence directly on the brain. Electronic devices and digital media, on the other hand, never even get inside our bodies, so the only way for them to influence the brain is through an intermediary. And that intermediary is thought. Before the phone can trigger a pleasurable dopamine surge in the brain, the user must figure out if whatever is happening on the phone is enjoyable. If, for example, your phone buzzes when someone likes your Facebook post, the amount of dopamine that surges in your brain will depend on what you think about the person who liked the post, how proud you are of that particular post, and the reasons you had for composing it. A like from a respected friend about something you care deeply about will produce more dopamine than a like from a mere acquaintance about something you posted in passing. In contrast, addiction to alcohol and other drugs is unthinking.

A unifying theme is that no one can know ahead of time how a process of discovery will play out. This includes parents and other adults. Parents cannot know what’s best for their children because they don’t know what their children will discover about their own interests.

We aren’t passively controlled by our information diet—we make choices based on our interpretation of it.

Successful companies supply exaggerated but mostly true information about their products. The same is true with tech algorithms—they have to be mostly true in order to work.

there’s nothing wrong with getting what you want. If you want to engage with the most interesting people and content on the internet, a social media app just might be your thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A trusted, knowledgeable, and approachable parent is a crucial safety mechanism for dealing with nasty stuff online. My kids regularly show me what they’re watching, so I see everything that comes across their screens. They ask me questions about anything new, they tell me about what disturbs them, and since I have never taken their tablets away from them or expressed disapproval of what they see or do, they have no reason to hide anything from me.

One of the few things we can control is how open and trustworthy we are with our kids as they navigate the culture.

As I described in Chapter Two, if kids are missing sleep because they’re forced to wake up for school, then school is the culprit.

Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right.

All suffering is caused by some form of ignorance, and it can be mitigated and outright prevented by some form of knowledge. All of parenting can be summarized as supplying the child with the knowledge to reduce their own suffering.

The desire to explore doesn’t turn off when children pick up a screen. Instead, their options expand more than with any other household object.

Limiting screens does not open kids up to the outside world; it closes them off from it. It deprives kids of a safe, low-cost avenue through which to sample the world on their own terms, from the comfort and convenience of a couch or the back seat of a car. Screens are one of the most unambiguously useful things in life, for adults and kids. If we deprive kids of these crucial cultural tools, we deny them one of the most dynamic portals to discovery that humanity has ever created.

Kids, on the other hand, can rarely opt out. Rules for kids almost always entail force. Even if force isn’t applied, the mere threat of it is enough. In the absence of force, a kid may be made to feel so uncomfortable, either through shaming or deprivation of privileges, that they are essentially forced psychologically. And since kids are dependent on their parents, they can’t escape.

You simply cannot limit things that kids want without giving them reasons to at least consider becoming manipulative and deceptive.

I’ve seen parents bemoan how deceptive even small children can be, while ignoring the fact that they’re the ones who gave the kid a reason to deceive in the first place.

Even if there is no need to enforce a rule, the mere presence of an arbitrary enforcer implies that the hammer could drop on any activity at any moment. Under such a capricious and omnipresent threat, it’s perfectly reasonable for a child to develop a constant psychological backdrop of alertness and anxiety.

Think about what it’s like to work in the direct presence of your boss. Even if they don’t say anything, you are slightly on edge, because you have to police yourself so that you don’t step out of line. The range of acceptable things to do has narrowed, and part of you needs to pay attention to your impulses so that you don’t break a rule.

I’m only saying that neglect is not a viable alternative to rules.

This example shows several reasons kids have for taking rules personally, for assuming it says something about them as a person, about their character or their self-worth. If I want a thing, but getting that thing is bad, then something about me must be bad. If some essential part of me is bad, then following my desires can get me into trouble. This means my own desires, my gut intuitions, are not to be trusted. And not trusting oneself is the heart of self-doubt and insecurity. Hence, the second Foul of rules is their damage to kids’ relationship with themselves.

For instance, one popular strategy for softening rules is to “help” kids control their emotions. The idea here is that the real problem with rule enforcement is the kids’ expression of anger or unhappiness.

In reality, emotions bubble up for reasons; they are always about something. We feel grief about a loss, fear about a threat, and anger about being wronged. If a kid gets angry, it is a disservice to ignore the object of their anger and instead try to lessen or neutralize the angry feelings. In reality, resolving anger is about resolving the injustice in the eyes of the aggrieved, not taking deep breaths or taking the feeling out on a punching bag.

It’s a double insult—forced to brush and forced to be quiet about it.

Emotions are good. In fact, they are among the best and most enriching things in life. Teaching kids to doubt or suppress or be ashamed of their emotions is potentially catastrophic.

If a kid decides to have a standoff with Mom or Dad, then brushing teeth is really about fighting with one’s parents. This is such a common occurrence that there is a lot of parenting advice about how to make your kid brush their teeth without battles.

If something is so important that it’s worth incurring relationship damage to get a kid to do it, then it’s even more important that the kid understands why that thing is necessary. When kids grow up, all they will have to rely on when navigating the risks and pitfalls in the world is their own understanding and their relationships with people who have experience and knowledge. Forcing kids to comply with rules about these important things disrupts their developing understanding of these things.

If a child is simply told to act polite or say they’re sorry, then their learning might stop once they have muttered the magic words and gotten their parents off their back. Gratitude, with all of its emotional richness, gets replaced with an authoritarian “Say thank you” and its accompanying tit-for-tat emotional sterility.

Forced gratitude is nothing like actual gratitude, and the result is emotional confusion instead of mastery. “Teaching kids to show respect” can disrupt actually learning to show respect.

From the most trivial to the most consequential, we are the authors of our own lives, or at least we aspire to be.

it’s hard to think of a more important gift to give our children than the confidence to be the authors of their own lives, to acquire the knowledge, skills, and assertiveness to take ownership of their own affairs. And this reveals the fourth Foul of enforcing rules—it confuses kids by teaching them that there are external authorities who know the answers about how to live. It teaches them that, when their interests conflict with those around them, the answer is to find the proper authority and do what they say, rather than to resolve the conflict themselves. It subverts their own autonomy and orients them to an external locus of control.

Specifically, there are two kinds of good interpersonal constraints: Other people’s boundaries. We don’t want kids to think they can demand anything they want from others. Constraints that they accept voluntarily, such as the rules of a game or conventions of politeness.

We raise kids in a kind of training environment where they need to conform to authorities, and then we release them into the world hoping that they suddenly make the mental pivot to figuring things out for themselves.

I’m saying there is a way to help people without impairing their agency.

When they know we are not trying to take control and demote them to a minor role in their own lives, they are more open to our suggestions.

Fortunately, many people correct the mistakes that were made during their childhood and don’t harbor resentment or insecurity as adults.

When the parent wants their kid to brush their teeth but the kid refuses, they both have a problem. Is there a way to solve this problem that works for the parent and the kid? In short, can we find a win–win solution? Fortunately, the answer is always yes. (Not only is there a win–win solution for every problem, but there is an infinity of them.)

If you can figure out what the essential elements of fun are in a certain situation, and then re-create and even amplify those elements in a related situation that better suits your needs, then the what-ifs melt away.

Instead of becoming a gatekeeper and adversary, the parent becomes an agent of fun.

Exploring the problem situation of your child produces several dividends: It helps you bond with your kid. There’s nothing like sharing the moment, especially when it’s a moment that breaks the conventional rules and adds novelty to otherwise staid adult life. It helps you understand what makes your kid tick, what it is about the world that interests and delights them. This is a superpower, because it enables you to convert almost any boring or unappealing experience into fun. It switches your role from being on the outside as a nag or a stern enforcer into a curious and explorative insider, partner, and guide.

That’s the problem with rules—they are an attempt to force a solution to work while ignoring the collateral damage. Seeking win–win solutions, on the other hand, is an attempt to improve on bad solutions, reduce collateral damage to zero, and replace it with fun. Doing this requires dropping bad ideas so you can focus on thinking up better ones. It requires resisting the temptation to try to justify a bad solution, and instead actively looking for better ones.

There are several important points in this example. The first is that failure is part of discovery. The path to a nearly flawless solution like the one I found almost always includes several bad ideas along the way.

This is a powerful feature of Taking Children Seriously, because it gets you in tune with them, helps you get to know them, and helps you and your child be open to each other. It’s hard to think of anything more worthwhile.

Taking Children Seriously is just a commitment to remain open to a brilliant idea as long as you can.

A requirement for fun is the freedom to opt out. Rejecting an activity provides feedback that helps me further refine it and make it more fun.

Enforced rules are manipulative falsehoods about the world.

Any good thing can be used for bad ends.

Ironically, a life of rules creates a sense of urgency. For rule enforcement to maintain credibility, it must be swift and reliable. If the parent pauses before enforcing the rule, then this gives the kid an indication that perhaps this rule is optional after all, especially if it is resisted with sufficient resolve.

But if you are fun to be around, then kids are more open to your suggestions and honoring your wishes. They are more trusting of your explanations about why you’d prefer they do this or not do that.

The truth is, with most conflicts, you have far more time than sixty seconds. Being in a rush for an appointment is our fault for not getting ready to leave five minutes earlier.

After all, the kid is pursuing destructive behavior for a reason.

When parents shuttle their kids around to activities that the kids aren’t passionate about, they are eating up time that could be spent in search of something they are passionate about. A state of boredom and inactivity has the virtue of leaving a kid open to discovering a passion, while a state of apathetic activity closes kids off to new passions.

Parenting could be summarized as the process of dealing with dependents who aren’t understanding what they’re told.

Any subject that is important enough to be taught in school can be made relevant in a project at home.

Taking Children Seriously lowers costs to get understanding. Specifically, costs are lowered in order to open up freedom for curiosity to search for and discover knowledge, and knowledge that works forms an understanding. Parents are cost reducers and freedom promoters.

Improvement requires error correction, and error correction requires error detection

A conflict between two siblings is about the siblings, not the parents.

Most sibling conflict is really just ignorance or confusion about boundaries.

Living in harmony with others requires communicating and negotiating boundaries. To do this, we must know what our boundaries are and respect ourselves enough to assert them. And this requires understanding and developing our own preferences.

Solving interpersonal disputes builds relationships, and top-down rules prevent this mutual discovery and social development from happening.

Successful reconciliation requires careful attention, and this comes from wanting to get it right. People who don’t want to resolve their conflicts don’t resolve them.

For example, if a child doesn’t like how their sibling is using a toy, they’re more likely to appeal to the adult than address it directly with their sibling. This can lead to constant pestering for the adult to settle disputes—and worse, manipulation, where one sibling tries to turn the adult against the other.

As I’ve said before, staying out of conflicts and only intervening when they start to get out of hand does require a lot of effort. However, in the long run, it results in less work, as my kids more quickly learn to read each other’s signals and get along. Kids who can entertain each other without conflict require very little work.

Reprimands and punishments in the moment are unlikely to be understood in the way that you intend. But they will always produce the Foul Four. They damage trust, make kids feel bad about themselves, confuse the issue by making the behavior about avoiding punishment rather than about doing what’s right, and reinforce a system of authority as the means to achieve harmony.

Our kids own their stuff and get to decide what happens with it—we never tell them they have to share, or that they have to take turns with it. One reason is because that is confusing.

Sharing is forced on kids to teach them to be kind and generous, but instead it inculcates them into a mindset of possessiveness, envy, enmity, and suspicion.

Life is figuring out the trade-offs between getting more ice cream and doing other stuff with your time and money. Imposing an artificially fixed supply of ice cream fosters anxiety and territorialism among siblings rather than generosity and restraint.

Since the system of private property works well for adults, we should give that system to kids. We shouldn’t force them to use some other, inferior system until they’re old enough to join the adult world where property is privately owned. That would be like teaching them incorrect physics until they’re old enough to learn the physics that adults use.

In the end, creative problem-solving trumps ownership.

Ownership and property rights are not infallible rules, but they are the default to fall back on in the absence of problem-solving, the best known way to seamlessly and continuously coordinate who gets to use what.

It may seem like an extravagance, but I detect a bit of the Greedy Child Fallacy at work here as well. For adults, privacy is considered essential, almost sacred, but for kids, asking for privacy is often considered asking too much. Who are they to want what we adults have?

By and large, try to stay out of it, and when you occasionally get involved, do it nonjudgmentally. When outbursts happen, pay attention so you can anticipate and prevent the next outburst. Abundance, clear ownership, and privacy are your friends.

Popper’s solution to achieving progress while avoiding these pitfalls was to pursue small, reversible changes that can easily be undone if the change proves mistaken.

think this is part of the reason why kids like their grandparents so much—it’s time with a knowledgeable and skilled person who can help them unlock and explore exciting things about the world without the constant interruptions and distractions that come from someone who is trying to manage them.

Often the most effective persuasion comes from observing a real-world problem get unambiguously solved. If you can solve problems with your kids to your spouse’s satisfaction, you will definitely get his or her attention, at least for the moment. If you can then describe or illustrate the principles underlying your method, you’ve taken an important step—even if the spouse is still not fully convinced.

At the end of the day, conflicts with your spouse are really the same as conflicts with your kids—they come from not knowing how to do it better, and the goal is to discover a solution that works for you and your spouse. Just as you don’t want kids doing things without understanding the reasons for doing so, you do not want your spouse blindly going along with your parenting ideas. Rather, you want him or her to understand them and implement them willingly. And improve on them! One way to present Taking Children Seriously to a skeptical spouse is to ask that all rules in the house be considered subject to improvement, and any ideas about how to improve them are welcome from anyone in the household. As long as rules are allowed to change and someone makes an effort to think about improvements, you will find some that work to the satisfaction of your spouse and make things better for your entire family. You can’t ask for anything more than that.

I like asking for criticism, both because criticism is helpful and because it helps alleviate the concerns of skeptics. If they see something going wrong, I’m going to accept their feedback and make adjustments if necessary, not neglect their input.

Progress in how we raise our kids is important to all of us, so let’s not dismiss possible improvements without giving them a fair hearing.

The real question for parents transitioning to no rules is not if, but when.

Taking Children Seriously sets children free from the beginning, when their parents are around to catch them if they fail. Over time, this authentic engagement with the world on their own terms will build up the necessary knowledge and skills to handle responsibilities such as living on their own, securing a career and future savings, supporting their own dependents, and integrating into a community.

The most durable barrier to removing rules is fear.

I learned the reasoning behind the expression “Don’t smile until Christmas.” A teacher can shift from being a hard-ass into a softy, but not in the other direction.

Freedom is not incompatible with human nature, but it is incompatible with locking kids in a building all day and forcing them to learn math.

Of course, you can always fail with and because of rules, but rule enforcement grants you the excuse that at least you tried in the socially acceptable way. You did not neglect your kids. You may have failed, but you didn’t fail them.

We control children because we can, not because it is right. Our decisive advantage is also a destructive one. Even if we could wield psychological superiority against other adults in our lives, we wouldn’t, because relationships wrought by manipulation lack richness and depth, the very reasons for building relationships in the first place.

critical rationalism, as developed by twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper.

Critical rationalism says that knowledge functions in the same way that genes function in biology. Genes are solutions to the problems of survival and reproduction. For giraffes, genes created longer necks that solved the problem of food scarcity by reaching leaves that are high above the ground. Genes created eggs with shells to solve the problem of embryos drying out when birthed on land. Indeed, every biological structure and behavior solves a problem pertaining to survival and reproduction. It is the same for human knowledge—everything we know is a solution to a problem.

Human knowledge growth is likewise the story of solving an endless sequence of problems through a process of variation and selection. But with human knowledge, the problems are not limited to survival—they can be about anything, either in the real world or imagined. And instead of mutation, the engine of variation is conjecture, or creative guesswork. Selection consists of, first, criticizing all of our candidate guesses and, second, choosing only the guess that seems to work best. Often, this involves actually trying out the guess in the real world to see if it solves the problem in question.

Guesswork is lighthearted and fun, but as a reliable source of knowledge, it makes people uneasy. It seems too precarious a foundation upon which to build our understanding of the world. But random genetic mutation may seem like a precarious way to design well-adapted life-forms that can solve high-stakes problems of survival across an infinite number of circumstances. And yet that is precisely what has happened for billions of years.

Similarly, when guesses at solutions in human affairs flow freely across the infinite range of possibilities (when people are able to try out as many “mutated” ideas as they wish), solutions can pop up that are so well-suited to the problem that we may wonder why we didn’t realize it before. Notice the deep connection between freedom and the growth of human knowledge—the former is a prerequisite of the latter.

In short, for human knowledge to grow, we can’t limit conjecture or criticism. We can’t gatekeep new ideas according to where they come from or on whose authority they rest. Instead, they must be judged only on whether they solve the problem at hand.

When solutions work well, we keep using them until a better idea comes along, or until circumstances change.

This theory of knowledge stands in stark contrast with the conventional view that our knowledge is what has been justified by the evidence, the research, or some authority on whom we can rely because they hold a particular virtue, often signaled by a degree or credential.

Critical rationalism says that explanations are never justified. Rather, candidate explanations are “simply” conjectured, and then we come up with reasons why any of them might be wrong. In criticizing all of the candidate theories on offer this way, we tentatively discover which of the explanations best account for the evidence. Evidence is still crucial, but it always comes after the conjecture.

The theory that the earth revolves around the sun is correct not because of the weight of evidence, but because that theory best accounts for many other observations, such as the motions of other planets and stars.

In fact, as we grow knowledge and make progress, mistakes proliferate. As we solve problems, we discover new, better errors that we were not previously in position to resolve. So, the faster we solve problems and grow knowledge, the more errors we’ll make. Mistakes are the smoke that signals the fire of progress. Learning is a process of correcting mistaken guesses at solutions until we find a guess that works. And mistakes can even be useful, as they might trigger new ideas that otherwise would not have occurred.

Taking Children Seriously is simply the recognition that, in the realm of parenting, the source of knowledge does not determine its validity, that knowledge does not require authoritarian justification. On the contrary, knowledge creation is an entirely egalitarian enterprise—anyone’s conjecture might solve the problem at hand, anyone’s criticism might be reason to choose one path over another. Kids’ ideas are just as valid as adults’, and they should be taken seriously and accounted for in any solution to any conflict.

One of Karl Popper’s famous maxims is that all life is problem-solving. Parenting is teaching children how to live, which means how to solve problems. Fortunately, children have the same problem-solving engine that adults have—a mind that produces guesses and can work through criticisms internally. In fact, this creative guessing machine tends to be more active in children because they have not yet learned to be ashamed of their guesses, to mistrust them, or to self-censor them. To be sure, children are ignorant of the background knowledge that adults have, but that’s what childhood is—the process of building up sufficient background knowledge so that they don’t need an adult to take care of them.

But there is nothing in principle preventing a nine-year-old from becoming a functional adult. If the boy attains the requisite knowledge to solve new problems as they arise—which he can, just as any other person can—then there is nothing stopping him.

The general pedagogy, therefore, is to expose children to the “right” ideas—those that have been justified—and to shield them from wrong, unjustified ideas, and hoping that the right ideas “stick.” In a controlled setting like school, this means conjecture and guesswork are forbidden. After the exposure, kids are asked to spit out replicas of the same ideas that were “poured in” to demonstrate that they’ve acquired them. Success is judged by whether the output sufficiently matches the exposure. Output that doesn’t match is mistaken, erroneous, failure.

All understanding is built up inside of the individual’s mind. This process is critically dependent on feedback from the outside, but the building—the conjecturing—itself happens internally. Learning is a sovereign act.

All new knowledge comes from within and none from without. Knowledge is always created, never consumed. Therefore, creativity is central to all understanding. It’s not a sideshow or a pastime. It’s not just for people who indulge in the arts or eccentrics who tinker in their garage. It is at the core of what makes humans unique, something we all use all the time as life throws problem after problem at us. Creativity has produced every new idea that led us from the caves to the moon.

The main reason that some people are more creative than others is not that they were born that way. It’s that they have not learned, via shame, punishment, or simple conformity, to suppress it.

Making progress on a problem situation that we care deeply about is how one lives a satisfying life.

Fortunately, living life as a fun, dynamic process of engaging with better and better problems can begin today. There is no need to hold real life in abeyance until one’s true self is revealed. The real work begins now.

Replace “find yourself” with “develop your tastes and preferences.”

Restraint is not about containing urges; it is about having reasons to do something else.

We don’t have a flawed human nature, an inner brute, in need of control. We instead have many competing ideas about what to do next, including desires for quick gratification as well as for long-term goals. The way to select the best choice is to compare the reasons for those choices, not to blindly and forcibly reject those we label as brutish and declare war on them.

People are the only living beings that create unlimited knowledge.

Knowledge creation is special because it is the basis of having an understanding of values, of having preferences, and of being able to suffer and prosper.

Since people can create unbounded knowledge, we can utterly transform any environment. We are already transforming the earth, and there’s nothing stopping us in principle from transforming the moon, Mars, and eventually the solar system as a whole. In fact, given enough time, knowledge creation may become the dominant phenomenon in the universe, more influential than features like gravity or mass.

If you care about something, you must also care about people, because people will think up things that could come to affect it. Knowledge creators have consequences for the entire universe, and that gives us cosmic significance. Since children are fully capable of creating knowledge, they are full-status people who are just as cosmically significant as adults.

The central message of this book is that controlling knowledge growth in people is not possible, including children. In fact, we should pursue the opposite: freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean neglect—it still involves safety, health, and order. But these are achieved while preserving kids’ autonomy, not at the expense of autonomy.

Maximizing control and maximizing freedom both take work, but the latter is more fun and less work in the long run because the sovereign child can take care of themself sooner.

Childhood is a period of supported knowledge growth until a person is capable of solving life’s problems on their own. Knowledge grows by guessing and testing, trial-and-error elimination, conjecture and criticism. The necessary condition is freedom, where guesses and criticisms are encouraged and given a chance to work, and mistakes are never punished or shamed.

Rather than try to figure out new solutions to problems, ancient people tried to figure out how to preserve their existing solutions. This not only meant preventing the loss of these solutions but also preventing them from changing at all, including changes that were improvements.

As we’ve seen, people make guesses in their minds that form an understanding, and then they try those guesses out in the world, creatively refining their understanding accordingly.

But for ancient people, the capacity to do things differently wasn’t regarded as a means by which they might solve new problems and improve their lives. Rather, it was considered a liability that had to be guarded against. Knowledge was so precious that it couldn’t be altered, lest it be lost.

In a fully dynamic society, the only thing holding back an idea is whether or not it works. Its source, the weight of evidence, and the blessing of an authority are irrelevant with respect to whether it gets used to solve a problem. Mistakes are recognized as inevitable, and while steps are taken to mitigate their impact, they are nonetheless welcomed as a necessary by-product of progress (and often are themselves grist for discovery).

Having an outsized amount of fun almost universally signals a straying from the static norms. Conformity is almost never wildly fun.

A simple rule of stasis is to be watchful and stamp out excessive enjoyment among children.

Unlocking the creative potential of children is a major lever that, once pulled, would lurch us closer toward the prosperity of a fully dynamic society.

Bryan Caplan describes in The Case Against Education, school functions as a sorting and labeling mechanism for employers, not as a productivity booster. It delays the time at which kids can engage with real life.

Parents should not pressure their kids to take a job they don’t want, but they also shouldn’t pressure them to be bored at school. Even a menial job offers more freedom than compulsory school. A kid who is bored bagging groceries can quit and find another job. A kid bored in social studies class cannot.

Instead, we could be training up a generation of problem solvers with unprecedented productivity. We could be reshaping adulthood around productivity and value. We could be giving them the confidence to chart their own way. We could support them as they align their interests with their careers such that they become valuable to others on their own terms—strangers, colleagues, and eventual families of their own. The biggest impact of liberating children will be unlocking the creativity and productivity of adults.

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