Jesper Juul, Your Competent Child: Toward New Basic Values for the Family, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001
The child is born 'competent' and already has notions, values and evaluation criteria that concretely orient his experience. Commonly, on the other hand, one behaves with him as if he were a kind of tabula rasa on which parents have to imprint the knowledge necessary for regular human and social development.
Juul invites us to a careful observation of the child, of every child, considering him no longer as a passive subject but, on the contrary, as an 'active centre of competence'.