Elliot Temple about Taking Children Seriously

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is a rational, non-coercive philosophy of parenting and learning which says:

* The main goal of parenting is to help children learn.  
* Punishing doesn’t help with learning.  
* Reason helps everyone win.  
* Ignorance isn’t stupidity.  
* Children aren’t fragile.  
* Obedience and rules are bad.

Looks like a great rational framework for parenting. Many ‘enable everything’ or ‘obedience is the only way’ ways of parenting just don’t sit well with me, this one does. It also underscores my existing belief that parenting is hard.

For the sake of history, my current argument against having children goes like this:
raising children requires a lot of time and this time commitment is at least for 18.75 years. Anecdotal it's worth it from the parents I know can really be some sort of Stockholm syndrome. I mean, if you have a child already and you don’t like it, you have the choice of suffering (bad for you and the child) or learning how to love it and make the best of the situation. Leaving a child looks like a heavy conscience penalty so it’s out of the consideration.

Please tell me if you have a counter to this line of thinking. It does look shaky and I definitely will need to do a full analysis of this question later.

P.S. Here are some stats on life satisfaction depending on number of children from SSC (spoiler: more children - more satisfaction).