Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz’s line lands like a trap door: it pretends to grant children grown-up status, then reveals that the grant is a con. The sting is in the double bookkeeping. “Permissiveness” sounds liberating, a modern corrective to authoritarian parenting. Szasz reframes it as a rhetorical costume adults wear to avoid the harder work of actually raising an adult.

The intent is to puncture the feel-good ideology that equates fewer rules with more respect. By defining permissiveness as “treating children as if they were adults,” he’s mocking the way adults offload responsibility under the banner of freedom: no boundaries, no demands, no discomfort. But the second clause flips the knife. If you never insist on self-control, accountability, or delayed gratification, you preserve the child’s dependence while congratulating yourself for being enlightened. The “tactic” language is pointed; it implies design, not accident. Permissiveness becomes a way for adults to maintain power without looking like they’re wielding it.

Context matters because Szasz spent his career attacking paternalism in psychiatry and the broader culture of “help” that can function as coercion. Read that way, the quote isn’t only about parenting. It’s a diagnosis of a society that confuses non-interference with respect, then acts surprised when people are left unprepared for consequences. The aphorism works because it exposes a paradox: indulgence can be control by other means, keeping maturity permanently postponed under the guise of autonomy.