I'd like to see an adult child hold a grudge and use the "my house, my rules" tactic against visiting parents.
"Dad, I appreciate you and Mom coming to visit all the way from Houston. But you weren't home by 10:30 as per the rules of this house, which I paid for. You're grounded for two days. I've taken your car keys. Also, Mom, if you want to live under this roof, even for a week, you'll stop using that Lady Grecian formula. No mother of mine is going out looking like a blonde harlot. And I don't care if your other 64-year-old friends are doing it."
I don't think I'd ever quite pull this, but I am looking forward to the day when I can end an argument with my dad by kicking him out of my house.
My father used to do this. Taught me libertarianism, and then, as soon as I tried to use the principles to argue my own case, swung right around and tried to use the same principles to justify his absolute authority because he was feeding me.
My hatred of rationalization and distrust of authority... I can't say it was born at that moment, but it was certainly a watershed moment. It probably did more to make me libertarian than a hundred political arguments - seeing how easily power corrupted (humans), even ones who espoused libertarianism.
I'm serious.
People who are under a certain age have the most restricted set of rights of any group in the United States, with the possible exception of convicted felons.
They can't vote.
They can't sign contracts.
They can't serve on a jury.
They are restricted in the ways they can earn an income. Even if they do earn an income, it is rarely enough to be self-sufficient, and they have limited ability to control how the money is spent.
They can't consent to sexual relations.
They can't purchase certain legal substances.
They can't hold political office.
They can't drive cars.
They can't travel freely, instead needing permission from someone else.
They can't direct their own education.
They can be forced to attend religious services against their will.
They can't control their own medical treatment, and can be forced to take psychoactive medications against their will.
They can't choose where to live.
They can have their genitals modified without their consent.
Do I really need to continue?
The worst is probably the social environment they're forced to be in. The rest aren't that bad, in comparison.
In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.
I more or less agree with you. But just for the sake of the exercise:
They can't vote.
I'd let them vote. It isn't going to make the decision making process all that much less rational.
They can't sign contracts.
An interesting one. I'd almost appreciate paternalism on that one. Contracts are more useful for the party with the power to see them enforced.
They can't serve on a jury.
Innocent until the jury finds out they're missing the Simpsons by dragging things out! (Just how different is that to current practice?)
They are restricted in the ways they can earn an income. Even if they do earn an income, it is rarely enough to be self-sufficient
Being incapable of producing significant economic value isn't 'oppression'. The obligation of parents to support the economically weak is more credibly a violation of liberties here.
The most obvious restriction on the ways children can earn an income, the one cutting the most value from their income earning potential is of course child prostitution prohibitions.
and they have limited ability to control how the money is spent.
Yeah, that sucks.
They can't consent to sexual relations.
That's seriously harsh. Not just the parent...
they can't consent to sexual relations.
That's seriously harsh. Not just the parents but the law deciding when you're allowed to have sex? No surprise that teenager's gain a reputation for rebelliousness.
Yes, the US is one of the more puritan "Christian" countries. In the US, two teenagers cannot have consensual sex together, by law. If they do have sex, they are both punished. (Some states have recently passed exceptions that tend to start at age 16-17, for couples that are of the same age. Even then, two 17 year old can have sex but an 18 year old can't have sex with a 17 year old because one's a major and the other one's a minor. Choose your mate's birthday carefully.)
As an aside, many US teens who took nude photos of themselves and gave them to their boy- or girlfriend have been charged with the high crime of distribution of child porn. Here is a report on one such Florida couple, aged 16 and 17, who were convicted (on the appeal, too). They kept the photos for themselves, but someone tipped off the police, the court record doesn't say who - possibly the parents. The appeal judge wrote in his opinion that one reason he wanted to punish them was that if left alon...
As an aside, many US teens who took nude photos of themselves and gave them to their boy- or girlfriend have been charged with the high crime of distribution of child porn.
It is scary that that judge is allowed to vote, let alone pass sentences.
It may be worthwhile to separate general goods and evils from specific opportunities. The protections you list make children safer from things that are bad for everyone - violence, poor health, inability to get educated. These are, arguably, things that everyone should be more protected from. Saying that children have more of these protections than adults says something about the inadequacy of protection for adults - this sort of intuition drives the affection many people have for universal health care, for instance. Meanwhile, what adults have that children don't are opportunities to pursue things that they specifically find good and desirable. A child gets an education, but can't choose its content except in fairly trivial ways - apart from picking a foreign language and a music class, and testing into certain higher-level academic courses, I didn't get real course selection until college, where I was treated as an adult and had much more loose requirements to fill. As adults, we might or might not have access to education, but if we do, we can pick what kind.
So basically, the protections children get are nice and well-motivated, but they're one-size-fits-all and poorly suited as a substitute for adult freedom to children with personalities.
You assume that age is the correct parameter. There are others that are perhaps more relevant.
Nope, a degeneration into politics would be marked by one or the other of us switching to "arguments are soldiers". I don't think we have.
I'll put my cards on the table here. I have a lot of respect for libertarian abstract pure capitalism. Its particular advantages that I don't think are equaled elsewhere are: a local update rule (making it embarrassingly parallel), by agents who are self-motivated (without external force) by monotonically increasing expected utility, producing coordinated activity without coordinated preferences, and typically producing compounding reinvestment that grows the technological and wealth base for everyone. I think capitalism is the fixed-point an economy will fall into if you have scarcity, enforce property, and don't do much else. It's the only system that can operate in the presence of scarcity without needing coercion.
I just don't necessarily think those advantages mean it's nice.
"But people are sometimes authoritarian and cruel! Just for fun! And the only people who you can be consistently cruel to without them slugging you, shunning you, suing you, or calling the police on you are your children. This is a reason for more than the usual amount of skepticism of arguments that say that strict parenting is necessary."
That's a very good point. But there may be a parallel counterpoint: "Sometimes parents are indulgent and too lazy or exhausted or undisciplined to enforce an appropriate degree of discipline in their own children. And the one relationship in the world that is probably most often characterized by unquestioning, adoring love is that from parents to their children. This is a reason for more than the usual amount of skepticism of arguments that say that liberal parenting is necessary." Nothing makes most (... or at least many?) parents happier than making their children happy — so shouldn't we expect a bias toward indulgence too?
Perhaps it would be better to weight our arguments about appropriate parenting styles based on the personalities of particular parents.
By the way, I did know a kid who would threaten to hit his mother. What a brat he was, he's probably why I'd rather have a bit too much disciplin than not enough.
"That's right kiddo. And I'll keep hitting you until you realise that threatening violence isn't the right way to get what you want!"
Overall, I'm dubious about the idea that negative reinforcement (a.k.a. punishment) is fundamentally ineffective, since fines and jail sentences do seem to work as a deterrant.
I think the general notion is that negative reinforcement teaches you to avoid being caught, while positive reinforcement is more likely to make "being good" part of your self-image. The difference between wanting to be good, and wanting to appear good when others happen to be watching.
But what we actually have is a world with lots and lots of cruelty lurking just under the surface, which cannot help but show up in the form of pro-strictness arguments in parenting debates.
Conversely, people also want to signal that they are kind and caring (and, in certain social circles, corporal punishment of children is considered a serious taboo), and being able to say you don't use harsh discipline suggests that you're an effective parent. Also, just as some people enjoy being cruel, some people enjoy being kind, generous, and indulgent, particularly towards their own offspring. It's also a phenomenally well established fact that people think other people should (or do) share their values and act like them, even if their actual values or situations are quite different. So, by the exact same reasoning, disingenuous arguments against cruelty should also abound, and arguments against cruelty should be discounted to some degree as well.
In my experience, children are cruel, immoral, egotistical, and utterly selfish. The last thing they need is to have their inflated sense of self worth and entitlement stroked by the sort of parenting you seem to be advocating. Children ought to have fundamentally lower status, not just because they're children per se, but because they're stupid and useless. They should indeed be grateful that anyone would take the trouble to feed and care for someone as stupid and useless as they, and repay the favor by becoming stronger.
Children ought to have fundamentally lower status, not just because they're children per se, but because they're stupid and useless.
So then the legal system should award status based on usefulness and intelligence, not age as in the present system.
David, yes supposedly altruistic "paternalism" by parents is often a mask for other less admirable motives. But since you and I debated government paternalism, I presume you think that more justified because in that case we are in fact more altruistic. But you should consider: how can you be so sure? As a parent I can tell you we sure feel like we are altruistic, just as pundits and wonks do when promoting government paternalism. Do you have more evidence besides your feeling of altruism?
I don't know what Balan would say, but our evolutionary history required parents to have instincts toward genuinely beneficial things for their children, not simply behavior that gives a fake altruism signal while hurting them.
Strictly speaking, this is just an instinct toward doing things that help your children spread their genes, but this largely coincides with what we would consider helpful, at least in the long term.
Worse, it's a relatively minor manifestation of the broader notion that the child has a fundamentally lower status in the family just for being a child, that they deserve less weight in the family's utility function.
Are you sure those two are the same ?
In Chinese traditional culture, children are explicitely of lower status (they need to be respectful and obedient etc.), yet families will make great sacrifices to be able to afford a good education for the kids. So it's possible to be both at low status and have a big share in the "utility function&...
I think part of the problem is that the term "low status" is too laden with multiple meanings. Having low status might mean that you need to obey your superiors, OR it might mean your superiors consider you expendable, OR it might mean both.
I'm not very familiar with Chinese culture, but I could imagine a situation that fits your description but where children aren't actually of a lower status in the sense implied in the original post. If children are highly valued and their parents sacrifice a lot for them, then it makes sense to assume that children are expected to be respectful and obedient in return. If somebody's making a lot of sacrifices for you, then it's only proper that you show them respect for it and aren't too bothersome. That can be read to mean that you're of a roughly equal status, as you are participating in a fair exchange - be respectful and obedient, and the others will benefit you in return.
"But you wouldn't be hearing this "I'm higher than you in the pecking order and don't you dare forget it" attitude that is so very common."
The human race is, essentially, a species of upgraded monkeys, and there is (so far as I can see) no way to have two large groups of people, one of which strictly dominates the other, without this particular monkey behavior being ubiquitous. This holds true even when the child, in some sense, has higher utility (eg., when the parents would sacrifice their lives for their child's life, as parents often do). The only real alternative is to give children as a whole higher status, by, say, rewriting the laws so that children are not essentially their parent's property.
I don't think this would have much of an effect. Even abused children will typically cling to their parents and try to avoid outcomes where they'd become permanently separated. Theoretically, a child might choose to swap or eject a parent if they came into contact with a new adult and grew to like them far more than the previous parents, but that sounds like it'd introduce an incentive for parents to prevent children from growing close with other adults. Also, it creates a possibility for manipulative adults to pressure children into making decisions about their parental figures that they wouldn't actually make otherwise.
Wow, I'm surprised by the number of comments supporting this baby-swapping opt-out-of-mommy nonsense using self-reference as evidence. First of all- we were NOT like most children in our intelligence or rational abilities. Developmental psychology clearly demonstrates that there are many concepts most children are incapable of grasping until reaching certain ages. Do you really think an entity without basic object permenance can decide who its mommy is going to be? OOH That mommy has CANDY!
Also, we might NOT correctly remember how we reasoned things out as children. My mother tells me how I would make up ridiculous stories (once saying my father ran me over with the car) that I actually believed. I have no memory of this.
Finally, in a somewhat Burkian argument, there are many cultures with different ideas of child-rearing, but all of them privilege the parent-child relationship. Over all the irrationality surrounding feelings and human relationships, this seems to work and to last. The implementation of any of these thought experiments would involve massive government intervention into something very personal and natural. And I know no one here really wants that.
There is clearly a lot of bitterness here about having been both rational and powerless as children. However, I would guess that more damage is done in our society from its extended adolescence, keeping twenty- and thirty-somethings financially dependent on mom and dad than from children not being able to 'swap up.'
It's extremely hard to sacrifice yourself for someone else. There just aren't many situations where making yourself dead is the best and only way to make someone else stay alive.
In my experience at least:
Are these similar to dying for a child? I don't know. It's possible that the sum of the financial equivalent of the above is comparable to a statistical life, but I'm just giving rough estimates.
A point:
"My House, My Rules" certainly makes parents feel good about themselves. They have a nice CAPITALISTIC excuse for their behavior.
So let's ask the question, what happens if child-animal bucks?
What happens if child-animal wants to move out? Get a job?
Well, child-animal is REQUIRED to attend school, and if child-animal escapes, the full force of the state will be brought to bear to drag child-animal back. Child-animal will do exactly as it's told, or child-animal will pay.
http://www.violentacres.com/archives/158/diary-of-a-teenage-runaway/ S...
There is a movement called Taking Children Seriously that advocates that a parent should never deploy arbitrary authority, but always reason a child into doing what they ought to do. I think they are nuts, but some people I respect respect them, and it might appeal to rationalists. They are somehow based on Popperian epistemology.
In a related vein I just made a Facebook page for the Association of Anarchist Parents, an organization that I have envisioned ever since my own kids were old enough to have wills of their own.
arguments work on us without us ever being able to fully evaluate their merit.
I think the is a better reason to down-weight arguments that go along with a likely bias. The bias calls into question the rationality of the arguer.
If Omega tells me I should route a train towards one child and not another, then that's almost certainly the case.
If you tell me, then well you could be wrong, but If I think you're rational and have more information than I do, then I should treat that as evidence.
If I know that the child you want me to turn the train away from is yours, then your advice doesn't really bring me much information.
I think discussions like this are useless unless "child" is qualified by the age of child you are talking about. Children of different ages have vastly different cognitive capacities and what is suitable for one age is not for another. Think about children at ages 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 (to take arbitrary ranges). The line about "my house that I allow you to live in" is something I might conceivably use in an argument with a surly 15-year-old, who is at the point where they need to start thinking about leading an independent life, but it would seem like an incredibly cruel thing to say to a 10-year-old, and would probably just be meaningless noise to a 5-year-old.
For most kinds of persuasive argumentation, especially in complicated and emotionally laden subjects like child rearing, arguments work on us without us ever being able to fully evaluate their merit. And in that world, it does make sense to down-weight arguments that have some bias built into them.
When we are dealing in such topics, we presumably have our own bias on the subject, and in making some assessment of the degree to which another's argument might need discounting due to their bias, we may bring our own bias into play. Are we then risking just ...
A utilitarian will evaluate the parents' happiness along with the child's. In this view, a parent may be right in applying rules to their child that increase their own well-being to a greater extent than their child's situation is worsened, so long as overall happiness is increased.
People debate all the time about how strictly children should be disciplined. Obviously, this is a worthwhile debate to have, as there must be some optimal amount of discipline that is greater than zero. The debate's nominal focus is usually on what's best for the child, with even the advocates for greater strictness arguing that it's "for their own good." It might also touch on what's good for other family members or for society at large. What I think is missing from the usual debate is that it assumes nothing but honorable motives on the part of the arguers. That is, it assumes that the arguments in favor of greater strictness are completely untainted by any element of authoritarianism or cruelty. But people are sometimes authoritarian and cruel! Just for fun! And the only people who you can be consistently cruel to without them slugging you, shunning you, suing you, or calling the police on you are your children. This is a reason for more than the usual amount of skepticism of arguments that say that strict parenting is necessary. If there were no such thing as cruelty in the world, people would still argue about the optimal level of strictness, and sometimes the more strict position would be the correct one, and parents would chose the optimal level of strictness on the basis of these arguments. But what we actually have is a world with lots and lots of cruelty lurking just under the surface, which cannot help but show up in the form of pro-strictness arguments in parenting debates. This should cause us to place less weight on pro-strictness arguments than we otherwise would.* Note that this is basically the same idea as Bertrand Russell's argument against the idea of sin: its true function is to allow people to exercise their natural cruelty while at the same time maintaining their opinion of themselves as moral.
One example of authoritarianism masquerading as sound discipline (even among otherwise good parents) is the idea of "My House, My Rules." I've even heard parents go so far as to say things like: "it's not your room, it's the room in my house that I allow you to live in." This attitude makes little sense on its own terms, as it suggests that parents would have no legitimate authority over, say, a famous child actor whose earnings paid for the house. Worse, it's a relatively minor manifestation of the broader notion that the child has a fundamentally lower status in the family just for being a child, that they deserve less weight in the family's utility function. I don't think this is what parents would be saying if recreational authoritarianism really were not a factor. They would still say that they, by virtue of their superior experience and judgment, get to make the rules (i.e., decide how to go about maximizing the family's utility function, though even this might be done with more authoritarianism than is necessary). But you wouldn't be hearing this "I'm higher than you in the pecking order and don't you dare forget it" attitude that is so very common.
*Some might argue that arguments should be evaluated solely on their merit, and not on the motives with which they were offered. This is correct when the validity of the arguments can be finally determined. For most kinds of persuasive argumentation, especially in complicated and emotionally laden subjects like child rearing, arguments work on us without us ever being able to fully evaluate their merit. And in that world, it does make sense to down-weight arguments that have some bias built into them.