Why "No" is Good for Children

The word "no" has a bad reputation in parenting - Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner even recommends ways to avoid it. The charge is that the word can be used up 400 times per day, eventually causing children to overreact to it by flying into a tantrum, or otherwise ignore it altogether.

But the Popperian style of parenting not only loosens restrictions on using the word, it sees "no" as a crucial word in children's development. To see why, we need to take a pretty large step back and consider the purpose of parenting. 

For Popperians, the job of the parent is to help the child understand the world. By developing explanations for how the world works, including how the child's own mind and psychology works, the child becomes a healthy adult. Interestingly, this process doesn't stop in adulthood, because no explanation is ever known to be the final, best explanation. In fact, adulthood is an arbitrary designation that has more to do with cultural norms and the need to designate responsibility than it does with any objective status, such as being all grown up.

This last point may sound like semantics, but it has profound consequences: any being that is capable of developing explanations is a complete person, deserving of all the dignity and rights of any other person. Children are not partial people, they are simply ignorant. Therefore, to deny a child his or her desires carries the same moral weight as doing so to a 20 year old or a senior citizen.

Seen in this way, using the word "no" is a pretty big deal. 

Before bringing this back to the word "no," we need to establish two more points about explanations. 

1) Children, as well as everyone else, develop explanations the same way - by guessing and testing. This is one of Popper's signature discoveries, that all knowledge comes from the learner producing a guess about how the world works, and then testing that guess against the evidence. Children are particularly good at this, as evidenced by their imaginative, and creative, minds.

2) All explanations are attempts to solve problems. In Popper's view, problems are the lifeblood of explanations and knowledge. Not only that, but growth and progress as well. You start to see how this relatively simple philosophy gets rather profound rather fast. Problems are actually desirable, because without them clearly identified, we cannot make progress, either as individuals or as a society. 

Now we can bring this to a close. The purpose of parenting is to help children grow by the child creating explanations (consciously and unconsciously) about the world (including themselves.) Children (like everyone) create explanations by conjectures that are tested against reality. Fortunately, the conjectures come on their own, naturally, from the child's brain. The word "no" is critical for the second phase of developing good explanations - the criticism of reality testing, or what Popperians call error correction.

A clear and simple no shows a child that his or her idea about the world is wrong, paving the way for him or her to keep trying new ideas, eventually finding some that are better.

This point comes with a kicker - the word "no" is also crucial for the child. In the early years, it is very hard for parents to know what a child wants, leading to distress and difficult behavior on all sides. As above, the only way a parent can learn what the child wants is by conjecture and refutation. The parent must guess an explanation for what the child wants, and then see if the child rejects it. Therefore, the first word a Popperian parent wants their child to learn is "no," so that parents can perform error correction on their guesses. (And the second word a Popperian parent hopes their child learns is "I want.")