So what does this look life in real life?
How old are you suggesting? 16? 14? 12? 10? 8? 6? 4? 2? (or the odd years)
What do you specifically mean by “making their vote known without their parents’ interpretation”?
This was a big mental exercise for me when I was a kid, and needless to say my opinion changed a bit more as I got older.
Obviously not in favor of ten-year-olds getting their drivers’ licences or enlisting, but these days my tendencies towards more rights for minors lean more int he direction of voting.
This was especialy true about Brexit. When you saw the breakdown in how age groups voted in 2015, the huge majority of young folks wanted to stay in, while the oldest cohorts were most in favor of leaving the EU. Especially now that the hardest no-deal Brexit was enacted and Britain managed to shoot itself in the face economically, I feel worst for the teens who had to watch it unfold as their grandparents voted to take away their ability to easily travel for work and education. It sound horrible, but the fact that anyone not expected actuarily to live more than a few years (who knows how many Leave voters died between the referendum and Britain’s official departure) got a say in the future of the country while a 17 year old with big plans for experiencing life outside of their island got screwed with their pants on is utterly insane. Polls in Britain show a majority of the opinion that the referendum should have gone the other way; a generation of young people have to deal with the economic hit along with everything else, and could do bugger-all about it.
For those urging greater “rights” to minors, what is your thinking of the (AIUI) pretty established evidence of brain development and maturation during adolescence (approx ages 10-25)? Sure, there are several factors such as environment, an individuals’s hormonal development, etc - but age seems to be a pretty consistent overarching factor. And the ages of maturity for most actions - drive 16, consent to sex 17, vote/join military 18, drink 21… - seem right in the middle of that range.
When I was 10 I thought I should be allowed to vote, and to drive a car. I mean, I was okay with there being a test, not only “do you know the rules” and “do you have the skill” but also tests of my emotional maturity. But I thought I should have the chance, and I expected I would pass.
If our brains are different than adults, that doesn’t make them inferior. Maybe you adults have brains that are already wearing out or something.
Schools should not have rules that we didn’t have input on. All PTAs should be reformulated as PTSAs. There should be students on the school board.
Rules based on a person’s age are lazy rules.
Haven’t had much reason to change my mind since then.
I disagree. I would say that - on average - adolescent and pre-adolescent brains ARE inferior for making many decisions requiring maturity.
Sure, old people can be incompetent. No argument here. Off the top of my head, after a certain age drivers need to take more frequent tests.
Perhaps. But you wish to keep this discussion independent of any discussion of how society is ordered. Any society requires some sorts of rules, and age is pretty good for some situations. And expecting more precise rules is extremely costly - and not guaranteed to be significantly “better.”
Sure - YOU thought yourself competent to vote and drive at age 10. Maybe you were (tho if you were, I suspect you were exceptional.) How much more do we want to spend to vet how many applications from 10-15 year-olds? And what societal benefit justifies those additional expenses? Heck, at 10, can you even obtain insurance?
Well, what I was trying to keep from becoming mired in was a lot of “we have this law in place that says this. what do you propose should replace it?”
I do think the existing way of doing things has fundamental problems and we could accommodate children’s rights (to some meaningful extent if not necessarily in their entirety). I don’t have such a proposal to lay down for us to critique on a policy-by-policy basis but I thought we should have a discussion on a more general level.
The school district in my town converted to PTSA over 40 years ago. Didn’t change a whole heck of a lot.
Lots of 10-year-olds think they should be allowed to do things they aren’t allowed to do (eat ice cream for dinner, play video games 24/7, have access to explosives, etc.). So? In many cases, adults can understand why it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to be allowed those things.
We have a combination of PTAs, PTSAs and nothing in our district, depending on the school. There was a semi active PTA at my kids’ elementary school, nothing at their middle school (parents not having time to be involved), and an extremely active PTSA at their high school. I’m not sure of the make-up of anything for the other schools in the district.
As for school board, a couple years ago the district opened two student positions on the school board - one going to a Senior, the other going to a Junior. The next year, the former Junior keeps their seat and a new Junior is chosen. I’m not sure what kind of voting power they have or if they’re just defacto members with in poor but no power, but it is a good start.
Nowadays parents are being arrested for letting their children walk to school or to the park. Even if that sort of pearl-clutching were to stop, kids can’t walk or bike to the park when it’s been moved five miles away and specifically designed not to connect to nearby neighborhoods by anything other than a lengthy highway with no sidewalks or bike paths.
This is a big part of the problem IMO. It’s difficult to be liberated and have agency if you must be chauffeured around because every destination is accessible only by automobile. Scheduling becomes much more necessary since two friends getting together means coordinating not only their schedules but their parents’ as well. The same goes for the elderly, who are infantilized in dormitories with ersatz town centers, they get shuttled to the “real” mall once a week after they’re no longer able to drive a car. This is less a factor in European and Asian cities, but I posit that it’s significant part of the situation in North America.
If kids can’t get around on their own just to see their friends or to buy a candy bar at the 7-Eleven they’re not getting any of the experience that’s necessary to be a thoughtful family member, voter, or school board member. Instead they have to do pretty much all their growing up between age 16 and 18, which is too fast. Allow them to actually participate in their world and the liberation will follow from that.
I understand that is the case in many places - but not in my neighborhood/city. As my wife and I walk our dog, we pass plenty of schools/parks/stores… And when I bike with my sister, there are convenient routes past every busy street/highway/train track several suburbs in every direction.
I am appalled at the laws prohibiting kids from doing various things alone. Kids are not supposed to be left alone until well after the age our kids gave up babysitting. One of the things I am most proud of about my daughter is the extent to which she practices “free range” parenting. I’m sure many folk think her 7 yr old ought not walk/bike by herself to see if her friends want to play…
Not in mine either . I let my kids be independent but if we had lived in the suburbs where my nieces and nephews live - well, I would have been driving them , too
I’m not suggesting how old-- That’s the whole point. If a three-year-old goes to the polling place and says they want to vote, they can vote. They might need assistance from a volunteer at the polling place, because they’re probably illiterate, but then, that’s true of some adults, too. The assistance just can’t come from their parents.
Cite please?
When I was a kid, we would go to my maternal grandmother’s house almost every weekend, which meant (among other things) that my sibs and I could not participate in outside activities. When I was 11, she sold her house and moved to our city, to a senior living complex where she lived until the day she died 15 years later.
I’m sure that someone, probably my dad, sat my mom down and said something like, “NWH is going into junior high pretty soon, and she is NOT going to put up with this. I know we’re in charge, she isn’t, but think about it.”
No insult intended, but that strikes me as a ridiculous idea, and I can’t think of any societal advantage to such a system.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you propose.
I think that the societal drawbacks of setting an age limit to vote are worse than the drawbacks of not setting an age limit to vote.
The current political system strongly favors older people. Given current age demographics and voting patterns, allowing anyone who asks to vote to actually vote won’t make much of a difference in election outcomes. But would help instill a habit of voting.
One major drawback is that a child’s understanding of how a functioning municipality works mostly comes from watching the Paw Patrol protect Adventure Bay.
If I treated my children simply by what they considered “fair”, they would never go to school, never do homework, sit on their ass all day watching TV or playing with Lego, eat candy for breakfast lunch and dinner, so on and so forth.
If explaining things to my kids is more expedient to get them to comply with their obligations and responsibilities, that’s great. But “because I say so” is a perfectly valid reason. Sometimes they have to do stuff or not do stuff because it’s good for them in the long run.
Treating children like adults isn’t really “fair” to them anyway. That’s why we have child labor laws, statutory rape laws, limitations on minors entering into contracts, fighting in the military, so on and so forth.
Do we coddle our children these days a bit too much? Perhaps. I walked a half mile back and forth to school every day (both ways, through six feet of snow, on one leg) when I was my kid’s age. You can’t do that now. Even if I wanted to, the school wouldn’t release them without a care giver.
Is that better? I don’t know. Everyone romanticizes how kids “learned responsibility and risk management” from being sent our all day into the neighborhood to peddle around on their bikes until the streetlights came on. But in my day kids would also get bored and throw rocks through windows at a construction site or have to deal with bullies and other troublemakers. And if the old drug awareness promos were to be believed, there were these guys who just used to hand out free drugs on the playground.
Those of y’all who think that if children could choose, they would choose to eat candy, stay home from school, and so forth should really make a stronger effort to remember being ten.
And I’m with Chronos on the voting. But I’d definitely start with including the kids on matters that directly affect them. Hiring decisions regarding the teachers. Curriculum choices. Rules of conduct on campus and in the classroom.