From Farewell to Alms; Asia:

In Asia, as Malthus knew, the norm for women was early and nearly universal marriage. Recent studies of family lineages and local population registers suggest that first marriage for Chinese women around 1800 took place on average at age 19. A full 99 percent of women in the general population married.9 Men also married young, first marriage occurring on average at 21. But the share of men marrying was much lower, perhaps as low as 84 percent. Chinese males were no more likely to marry than their northwestern European counterparts. This was because female infanticide created a surplus of males, and men were more likely than women to remarry after the death of a spouse.10

Egypt:

The one even earlier society for which we have demographic data is Roman Egypt in the first three centuries AD. As in preindustrial China and Japan female marriage was early and universal. The estimated mean age at first marriage for Egyptian women was even lower, at 17.5.15 Marital fertility rates, however, were lower than in northwestern Europe, but higher than in China and Japan: about two-thirds the Hutterite standard. This early and universal marriage, and relatively high fertility rates within marriage, would seem to imply high overall fertility rates. After all, at these rates Egyptian women married from 17.5 until 50 would give birth to 8 or more children. But in fact birth rates were 40–44 per thousand, implying a life expectancy at birth of 23–25 years. In comparison French birth rates in 1750 were about 40 per thousand. So Roman Egypt, despite early marriage, had fertility levels only slightly higher than those in eighteenth-century France.16 The intervening factor that kept Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8.

Europe:

Yet despite the apparent absence of contraceptive practices, the birth rate in most preindustrial western European populations was low, at only thirty to forty births per thousand, because of the other features of the European marriage pattern. These were as follows:

1. A late average age of first marriage for women: typically 24–26.
2. A decision by many women to never marry: typically 10–25 percent.

To put these averages in perspective; from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

I've seen claims that ancient Greece & Rome may have been very different from the later medieval patterns; from http://community.feministing.com/2010/02/14/misogyny-and-relationship-inequality/comment-page-1/

Men in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually 30ish at the time of marriage, while women were actually girls-- they were between twelve and fifteen at the time of their first marriage. They would usually have several marriages, as their husbands died, but after the first they were firmly "mothers." They would still usually be younger than their husband by a significant amount, even in their later marriages-- by the time they surpassed the age of the pool of potential suitors, their sons or sons-in-law would have taken up their care.

(Quotes extracted from searching my Evernotes: http://www.evernote.com/pub/gwern/gwern )

In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).

I know right?

Guess the best part. Go on.

(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they're only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)

Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it's on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.

To adress your second point: The point isn't in justification. The difference I'm pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren't accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.

Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or "should" be used.

Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.

Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the "private life" of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.

Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).

Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn't behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee's phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.

Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.

Can you give an example of how one might apply the tactic generally, outside of the context of having been asked for a true taboo statement? I don't doubt you, but I find myself unable to work it out. After all, the whole problem with statements like "children enjoy genital stimulation" is the implications of having brought the subject up.

I mean, I understand that "People claim children enjoy genital stimulation; I'm not sure myself but I think they might be right" is safer than "Children enjoy genital stimulation." alone, by virtue of multiple levels of indirection and hedge phrases and whatnot, but it doesn't seem possible to say either one in response to, say, "My child cries all night long, I wish there were some way to quiet them down!" (or, more generally though less entertainingly, to volunteer either of them) without triggering taboo penalties.

No, sorry, that was what I meant to imply by "holodeck".

As for the actual mechanics of it, maybe it pulls data from parallel universes, maybe they're the puppets of a (sentient) AI (zombie-master hypothesis) or maybe consciousness is easier to fake than you might expect, so they run sophisticated chatbots certified by a nonperson predicate. Damned if I know.

It's basically an experience machine / catgirl volcano lair, is the idea. Only, y'know, icky.

If children masturbating makes them feel good, and pedophiles feeling good about having sex with them isn't inherently bad, then pedophiles helping kids masturbate is just efficient use of labor. Goes the logic.