it can be very frustrating to see the debates on this site about autonomy for children
as someone who vividly remembers how fucking awful it was to be a child
in multiple ways, including:
1.
the ways that childhood (as it presently exists, in all real-life societies we can currently build) is just inherently awful for everyone.
-due to lack of any way to assure a right to autonomy, in a world where children are required to do certain things whether they want to or not
-(some of which may be truly awful for them… and some of which would be awful for pretty much anyone. Including the adults who claim they remember childhood as a good time… but would still fight you like hell, if you actually tried to make them live through all that same stuff again.)
but also
2.
in ways specific to being a child with certain uncommonly bad behavior problems… and certain extremely severe aversions and fears and challenges… in regard to many things I had to face in life.
-challenges which did not have any clear, provable cause. Because “what makes individual people the way they are?” is a vastly complex thing, and is simply beyond any attempts at deducing clear provable causes.
-challenges which were handled about as well as they could be, by my most involved caregivers
-but not by everyone (because that would have been impossible to ensure)
-and even the best efforts, from the most respectful people in my life, couldn’t convince me to willingly to do all the things I had to do (for reasons of health, safety, legality, etc.) within the timeframe I had to do them in.
anyway.
when i see this whole type of problem discussed, I see a bunch of disagreeing viewpoints
and the closest ones to my own viewpoint, tend to be the ones that argue for full respect of children’s autonomy.
and yet.
those ones always go further than my own mind is capable of going, when rationally analyzing my own experiences.
because those ones always say things like, “You NEVER have to force a child to do something the child doesn’t want to. If a thing is really necessary, there is ALWAYS a way to convince the child to understand why the thing is necessary, and get them to be okay with it.”
…And that clashes with my own experience for a bunch of reasons.
because it implies that my mind, my motivations, my will, as a child, were a lot more possible to control and manipulate from outside than they ever really were, in my experience.
as I said. There is not a simple, provable explanation for why people are the way they are.
There are complex webs of factors, all influencing it– but no universal rule.
Any time you say something like “People who have (this) experience will end up acting like (this)”… there will be exceptions.
Lots of exceptions. So many that the rule becomes almost useless, in practice.
Because the factors involved are always more complex than any description you can ever put into words.
to take one example I’ve seen:
“Children have to be forced to go to the doctor and get vaccines, because they’d NEVER agree to that willingly”
…and the counterpoint… closer to my own beliefs, but overshooting them by quite a bit:
“if you properly explain the reasons for needing vaccines, and give the child the right resources to manage the fear of it, they will ALWAYS agree to it willingly.”
At best, this implies that all children are born innately perfect logicians– that the things they’re required to consent to are supported by flawless logic, and that it is 100% possible to convince every child of that, through the correct application of reasoned arguments.
At worst, it implies that the feelings, convictions and motivations of every child are so malleable that any adult, with the right manipulation, can shape them into whatever is convenient in the moment.
In either case, it implies that it’s always possible to get a kid to do the necessary thing without a fight.
Would you say that about antivaxxer adults?
And if you won’t, but you will say it about children… then you’re just saying that children are all, in every case, perfectly controllable, if you know the right hacks.
How the fuck is that “autonomy”?
I suppose this all ties into a wider problem I see in online discourse.
The “dealing in absolutes” one.
Where general statements (about what is right or wrong; what works; what is the best way to handle things) tend to be expressed as universals, even when a more accurate expression of the speaker’s beliefs would use a modifier, like “most” or “usually.”
Sometimes this is a conscious choice (people phrase things as universals even when they know they aren’t, because they think that adding those modifiers weakens the statement and brings it less respect)
And other times it’s unconscious (people phrase things as universals because they genuinely haven’t considered the exceptions, or they’re stuck in a sort of “no true Scotsman” fallacy where anything that would qualify as an exception is something their mind can’t actually see as fitting within the meaning of the thought).
So maybe the best way to approach this sort of absolute statement, sometimes, is to think of it as a generalization with the modifiers silently implied.
…Except sometimes, when you do that, it turns out your idea of what that generalization covers is very much NOT what the speaker felt it was.
And then there’s a fight. The kind that goes nowhere, because right from the start there was no agreement on what the terms actually mean.
but you know what…. I think there are a lot of people who genuinely do think– or feel that they morally should think– in these sort of absolutes.
Not everyone! I do believe that a lot of the people who speak up for child autonomy just mean “it is generally more possible to allow kids autonomy more often than many parents realize.”
But there are also some who truly seem to feel an obligation to follow the sort of thought processes that lead to absolute, zero-exceptions proclamations.
Like: “Allowing children full freedom to make their own choices is always possible, and always the best option.”
A conclusion reached by the kind of thought process that approaches definitions as hard-walled boxes– “good,” “evil,” “captivity,” “freedom,” etc…
and believes that for every defined box, every action fits either clearly inside or clearly outside it. No room for fuzzy spectra of any kind.
Because that kind of thought process will have reached this conclusion, in the first place, by analyzing definitions.
For example, trying to figure out what makes the definable difference between childhood and the forms of captivity we agree are unacceptable– such as slavery.
And if “being made to do things against one’s will,” “being paid in nothing but food and shelter,” and “not being allowed to leave by one’s own choice” are defining characteristics of slavery
(which, I admit, in the world of hard-walled definitions, is a pretty inevitable conclusion)…
…then, the only difference between slavery and a childhood that includes those features is “children generally tend to be treated better.”
(Well, that and the issue of whether children can be bought and sold, and whether they automatically gain freedom after eighteen years of captivity. But I’m not gonna open up that debate– largely because, if those parts were changed from any recognized form of slavery, most people would still consider it slavery).
So anyway, if the thought process is restricted to hard-walled definitions, this would restrict the mind to three options about the ethics of childraising.
Two of which are automatically rejected, due to the associations they have, in that world of strict definitions:
And the only remaining option:
…Which isn’t any more logical than the other two possibilities.
But it’s where the ethical, inflexible mind ends up getting trapped.
And, I get it. Nuance is hard. Fuzzy logic, and defining things by spectrum instead of in hard-walled boxes, isn’t intuitive or easy.
And we learn from the people we respect. And a lot of them are already talking in universals, a lot, and fighting anyone who tries to mention an exception.
And… when you’ve heard an ethical pronouncement stated enough times, in wording that implies an exceptionless absolute… you are gonna feel like a bad person, if you allow that thought to translate into anything less hard-walled inside your own brain.
…But the thing is, you have to, if you’re ever gonna form anything resembling a realistic view of the world.