You believe that ten year olds—even those with no behavioral issues—are competent to be granted complete autonomy and independence? I’m always entertained by and sometimes sympathetic to the hardline libertarian/anarchist argument for personal liberties, but I don’t think even Ayn Rand would get behind this one.
Stranger
It’s totally what I wanted at that age. Not to be expected to have skill sets and knowledge matching that of a 30 year old but that me being a child should not determine the responses to my behavior. If I’m behaving in an immature fashion, yes, that’s relevant, but lots of adults act immature, and here I was, at 10, quite capable of behaving like a responsible, mature citizen.
I can agree that some people don’t need interventions, even at young ages. I’m happy for you that you were one of them.
I don’t have suicidal thoughts or hallucinations or drug/alcohol problems, etc. I agree that intervention doesn’t make sense for me, either.
Your OP was about nobody, 10 and older, needing interventions (outside of some limited situations). So, a kid killing small animals, or cutting himself, or having suicidal thoughts, or refusing to put on a seatbelt or bike helmet, or trying to use an umbrella to jump off a roof or whatever – all fine with you.
I had to be way too responsible for my own health needs at age 10.
Heck, a good bit earlier. Age 6 or 7.
At some point I was made to understand my blood glucose had to be monitored and controlled. I had to learn to cut myself and check my glucose many times a day. I had to give myself insulin injections several times a day. Or die. I had to control my eating, as much as I wanted sweets and treats like other kids. Too bad. I lived in a house full of siblings who had their kid needs, wants and frivolous goofy decisions met. But beck had to be careful. She had to control her baser desires. Or die.
That’s a very hard thing, trust me. I wanted to trick or treat on Halloween and dive into a bag of candy. I wanted candy canes, Christmas cookies and hot chocolate w/marshmallows. The school parties when Moms brought cupcakes were particularly difficult.
I hated it. Hated it.
I also have speech impairment.
My anxiety is over the top.
This all created an adult with fears and self esteem in the dump and, yes a bit of self loathing. Unsure.
That’s a very heavy burden to place on the tiny shoulders of a skinny 10yo., stuttering little girl.
I would’ve done just about anything to keep my own kids from having to go through that. I wanted them to play, have fun holiday traditions. Free, happy with no responsibility for themselves much less others. I worked at creating a soft, easy and protected childhood for them.
Guess what?
As adults they tell me they felt a lot of burden worrying about me, as kids.
They are now all responsible, caring adults.
I lament I couldn’t stop them worrying as kids.
My older child had a lot of anxiety over vaccines and those were a hard no for her up until age… I think 12. (She is on the spectrum, so social-emotional milestones have taken longer for her than for most kids.)
Sorry, kid. In our house, vaccines are not negotiable. Especially given that there was literally a measles outbreak in our area not that long ago.
And now that she’s 14, she is fine with them and is glad that I made her take them when she was younger.
Younger child has some sort of anxiety about trying new things and that’s always a NO from him. I make him go anyway. Then he loves it and is all “yay this is the best thing ever!” But he’s not yet 10. I guess we’ll see what he’s like next year.
On the other hand! something that has really changed the way I interact with my kids is reading about collaborative problem-solving. So, when someone says “no” to something, I don’t just say “you have to do it,” but I try to figure out what the underlying problem is and what we can do to solve it. For example, last year YC didn’t want to go to skating camp. Instead of just saying “you have to go,” we talked about why he didn’t want to go. Turns out that he felt that he was a failure because he was the only one who couldn’t skate. So we talked about how a potential solution could be to ask the counselors about it and maybe move him to another group. We did that, and although skating may still not be his favorite thing in the world he moved to a lower group with more kids that also couldn’t skate, learned a lot more about how to skate instead of being frustrated, and had a much better time.
(With the vaccines, that took longer and was more fraught – there I outright bribed/tried to induce a Pavolvian response by bringing chocolate and popping it in OC’s mouth when she got a shot. Seems to have worked OK but took a while.)
In fact, this kind of technique can be useful with the mentally ill – one of the major places I’ve read about it is the book I am not sick! I don’t need help! book by Amador. (The other major place is The Explosive Child, though be sure to read the revised version.)
If we’re talking about minors, those under 18, this is outrageously wrong. Kids, you pull out all the stops to protect them from the world and from themselves until they’re mature enough to truly take care of themselves.
A few years back I attended the funeral of a 13 year old who was found hanging from a tree in his backyard. No, you don’t knowingly let that sort of thing happen, you intervene if you can, give that kid a chance to grow up.
I think for normal non crazy people, that’s fine. But once you start getting into mental illness and their refusal to take their mental health medications starts becoming an issue of them not being able to behave like a functioning person and starts costing public money, that’s where their autonomy ought to end.
It’s absurd to think that public money ought to be paid for people who are refusing to take legitimate medications to control their mentally ill state. That’s not their choice at that point- they shouldn’t get to decide that they don’t like their crazy meds and that everyone else should foot the bill for their poor choices and behavior. Especially when those same choices and behavior are actually a result of the refusal.
That’s the problem with a lot of our homeless; they’re effectively unmedicated and/or untreated mentally ill people that we can’t generally compel to take their meds. But it’s a catch-22 type situation in that they’re mentally ill. Their ability to make the right choice is impaired by their illness; it’s not even close to the same thing as a mentally healthy person choosing not to take an antibiotic; the refusal to take the medication affects their decision-making capacity.
Ten is way too low, speaking as the father of a 10 year old and a soon-to-be 13 year old. There’s just not enough life experience or education there for them to make a lot of decisions on their own. Ten year old logic isn’t really very logical most of the time. Granted, ten year olds can do a lot more stuff than a lot of people give them credit for, but they’re not quite there as far as autonomy is concerned.
As someone who has been involuntarily held more than once due to a history of suicide attempts, I was at least sympathetic to where you were coming from. But not at this point.
There are plenty of reasons not to give certain people complete autonomy and this is a great example. I don’t care how mature a 10-year old is, they simply don’t have the cognitive abilities or maturity to make their own decisions. My parents considered me responsible enough at 10 to be by myself for limited amounts of time, typically only a few hours. But they would have been terrible parents if they just let me make all of my own choices, because I was still just a kid.
My best friend’s son recently ended his life at 16. We were all devastated, and still are.
We would absolutely have intervened if we had known what he was going through. Unfortunately up until the end it didn’t seem like he was struggling and he didn’t leave a note, so we will never know why he did it.
Killing small animals ==> destructive and hurtful, intervention is appropriate; juvenile detention for criminal behavior
Suicidal thoughts ==> everyone has suicidal thoughts now and then unless there’s something really wrong with you; not actionable, leave kid the hell alone
Cutting himself ==> people cut for two primary reasons, usually overlapping: something really horrible has (or is continuing to) happen to them, such as sexual abuse or ongoing cruelty of other sorts that they can’t escape from; and/or as a way to cry out for help and draw attention to their misery. So you intervene by tuning in, being a good listener, asking how you can help, showing that you will intervene on their behalf. But you don’t intervene in a way that is coercive towards the cutter.
Refusing to put on a seatbelt or helmet ==> same problem you got with teenagers. Yeah, no. No coercive intervention. Parent might opt to show the kid some really vivid splatty photos.
I’m familiar with the argument. I’m dissenting with it. It is precise the allegation of mental illness that accounts for the majority of intrusive force labeled “help”. I was once diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. No one — not you, not the shrink in question, or anyone else — has any business overriding my judgment about what medications to take or not take. I also have the right to not match your idea of “how a functioning person behaves” unless my behavior constitutes a crime, in which case you do not have any business referencing my so-called mental health history, you just reference what I did. (And yes, threats of violence are against the law, so if I have made threats, that’s actionable).
Convicted criminals should have the unmitigated right to be free from unwanted mood-altering medications too; they forfeit the right to go running free and doing as they please, but should still retain the right to their thoughts and feelings.
The other major intruded-upon category is the elderly, where large swaths of people who are fragile enough physically to require an institutional care setting are put on the same drugs they like to use on us mental patients. (And for the same reason: these medications exist for control purposes, they make the person docile and incapable of being resistant. There’s no “chemical imbalance”, that’s unmitigated bullshit. These medications have no demonstrable therapeutic action at the biological level. At best, they may calm down an agitated person long enough to get a better grip on themselves. But that’s not how its prescribed, they try to put you on the stuff permanently and it does permanent brain damage, creating a biological dependency at the neurochemical level).
Why are you acting like you have some special insight into childhood? Every single one of us here was 10 years old once, we all remember what it was like, and none of us agree with you that 10-year-olds should have full autonomy. Take a hint.
This isn’t close to true. I think you’re again extrapolating from your own experience.
We’re just never going to agree here, so I’ll leave you to it. Thanks for the interesting conversation.
We’d be inviting all the world’s pedophiles to migrate over here if public policy matched the OP’s vision, so that’s a hard no for me, dawg.
That’s a good point: it sure sounds like AHunter3 is proposing setting the age of consent to 10.
Even though they’re breaking the law? Even though there is a societal cost to their injuries or death?
Citation needed.
Here’s a sort of opposite take on the situation, what I thought was going to be the premise coming into the thread. What if someone is going into surgery where there’s a risk of coma or brain damage, and they state that they don’t ever want the plug pulled on them. Feeding tube, heart bypass machine, breathing apparatus, whatever, keep them all going. If they do end up braindead in a coma, is there actually an obligation to maintain those support systems? Does autonomy end with brain death?
I feel like this is the classic “Your right to swing your arm ends when it intersects my face” argument.
The problem is, when some mentally ill person is clearly not making good choices and (this is the important part) the consequences of those choices are being borne by others, be they individuals or the public at large, that’s the point at which they abrogate their choice to be as nutty as they choose. That’s their choice not to take their meds intersecting with acceptable public behavior and societal expectations.
If you’re mentally ill, not taking your meds, and you’re holding down a job, paying your taxes, and you want to wrap your junk in tin foil to protect it from the Thetans, that’s your business. You’re the one bearing the consequences of your mentally ill decisions.
But when you’re not taking your meds, and you’re living in a dumpster, begging on the street corner, and having to be taken by ambulance to the ER when you get sick/injured, that’s the point where the decisions to not take your medication is causing the consequences of your actions to be borne by others, and that’s the point where your autonomy needs to be curtailed.
Hell, if you’re mentally ill and being homeless and not bothering anyone or requiring public help, then I’m fine with that as well.
You’re right, I’m wrong. Yeah, duh, it’s illegal to not wear a seat belt. In most states, I think, same with helmets. I bollixed that one up.
See, I don’t think so. You didn’t take a legal position, you took a moral one. If 10 year olds should be allowed to ride around without helmets if they so desire, and adults in their lives should have no say in it, then the consitent position is not to shrug and say “you’re right about the law”; it sounds like you do not agree that this should be the law?
Start with Whitaker. All of his statements are tied to referenced studies.
The short version:
• The theories about psychiatric pathologies being the result of something neurologically or chemically amiss in the brain were a reasonable premise when formulated but embraced before any reseach supported them;
• The specifics were derived backwards: they were using pharmaceuticals such as Thorazine to control the patient population and decided the resulting patient condition was an improvement, so the drug must be doing something good; they investigated what the actual action of the pharmaceutical was and theorized that the underlying mental condition must be the opposite and the drug was “fixing it”. i.e., “chemical imbalance”.
• All studies indicating that they do people good are based on short-term efficacy. But what happens is that the brain adjusts: if the prescribed pharmaceutical interferes with neurotransmitter reuptake, the patient’s brain reduces the number of receptor sites to compensate; if the prescribed pharmaceutical blocks the reception of certain neurotransmitters, the body compensates by producing them in higher quantities, and so forth. This makes a physical dependency.
• The “antipsychotic” pharmaceuticals in particular are regularly used in prisons, assisted living facilities, and so on specifically to control disruptive behaviors, where “disruptive” is defined as “anything whatsoever that staff doesn’t want to deal with”; they used to be called “major tranquilizers”. If you don’t have a huge cynical skeptical reaction to the claim that these same chemicals are somehow “just like insulin for diabetes” and that schizophrenics (etc) “need them to function normally”, especially in the context that they’re administered on an involuntary basis, you should examine your own credulity quotient.