I remember being ten. I definitely wanted to eat candy and stay home from school.
In the 1968 presidential election I would have voted for Nixon because he had a neat name, with an “x” in the middle. I remember that clearly.
We’re about the same age. I favored McGovern because my father hated Nixon, and i respected my father.
I don’t think i was tall enough to drive at age 10, but i think lots of teen year olds could safely drive. Probably more safely than hormone-addled 16 year olds.
I’m not in the “children need more rights” camp, but this thread is making me reconsider. The arguments against it seem very weak.
Rather than “children need more rights”, I see the arguments presented as closer to favoring “we need to be better parents and a better society”. But I don’t see how we get there, either
Once you try to formulate a set of rules or laws, you’ve already lost. There’s no set of principles, rules, or laws that will perfectly encapsulate every individual experience. But at the same time, the majority of parents and communities aren’t going to be able to create a bespoke development plan for every individual child that does every child justice.
So, we muddle along the best we can as we have for tens of thousands of years. Many children are going to be able to handle increasing levels of community involvement, responsibility, and decision making at younger ages than we currently allow, but the only way to tailor when/how/what that looks almost has to be done at the parental level. But that way still lies madness. We’re just shifting the thresholds (age or maturity or whatever) and responsibility and costs around - just as we have for tens of thousands of years. It’s going to work wonderfully for some and fail miserably for others and work out ok for most others - just as every child rearing scheme has for tens of thousands of years.
In essence, the thesis comes down to “which” children we tailor our society towards, because we’re practically guaranteed to fail many children no matter what we do. So we’re choosing who we fail and by how much. Naturally, many in this thread seem to default to what would have worked for themselves or their own children (or at least what they think would have worked), but there’s not going to be any one size fits all solutions. There just can’t be.
The OP’s poll is somewhat inadequate because it offers no middle ground between “all inequalities between adults and children are natural and not a problem” and “children get a raw deal by how society treats children”. False dichotomy much?
I picked the former because there certainly are a lot of very important natural inequalities between adults and children, and it would be misleading not to recognize that. There are some ways in which children are indeed unfairly treated by society, but I don’t think the fact that three-year-olds can’t legally vote is an illustration of that.
In fact, I can’t think of a single problem with the way that children are treated in society that I think could usefully be approached by removing a legal minimum-age requirement, except perhaps some fairly recent and rather draconian laws about how old kids need to be to walk down the block without adult accompaniment, or stay home alone for half an hour, etc.
Maybe in the future cultural and social changes in the treatment of children will be reflected in changed legislation, but I see zero value in starting the process at the legislative end.
That said, I do agree with the OP that personal independence and responsibility within the family/community circle are very valuable for kids even at surprisingly young ages. And that kids in traditional societies tend to get more of them, accelerating skill development and mental resilience.
Somebody earlier said something to the effect of people who think 10 year olds would eat candy for dinner and stay home from school should work harder to remember being 10. I think that person should work a little harder on realizing that people are not all the same. Maybe he would have gone to school and eaten a sensible dinner. I know I would. So would my daughter - but my son? Part of the reason I sent him to Catholic school was because if he didn’t show up and I didn’t call , they would call me. Otherwise , he would be roaming the streets all day long before I knew he didn’t show up. Even when j was 7 or 8 unless I literally stood next to him as he walked in the door - and even then, he might have slipped out later.
My son liked Donald Trump when he was six. Granted as a white male with an elementary school education, he is the target MAGA demographic.
Even as a child, I realized I was being treated like a Disney princess. Along with that, though, was a recognition of my parents’ authority and the expectations they had.
Children are not the equal of adults for a number of reasons. If I had a child who suddenly decided he wanted to be “liberated”, then his first task would be to pack a suitcase and leave.
The fact that some adults would ditch work to stay out and party and would eat McDonalds food instead of food that’s good for you is not a viable argument for not letting us as adults make our own decisions. The fact that some teenagers form violence-prone mobs isn’t a viable argument for keeping all of them on leashes either. I agree: we’re not all the same at 10. Hence there shouldn’t be across-the-board rules and regs treating ten-year-olds like we’re all impulsive and prone to bad judgment and don’t care about anyone but ourselves.
But the vast majority of 10 year old ARE impulsive and prone to bad judgement and selfish on a level that requires adult supervision. And I don’t mean that in a negative way, that’s just part of the normal development of humans at that age. I think the Dope demographic skews towards people who may have been considered “precocious” or “mature for their age” during their pre-teen and teenage years, but that’s not the population mean.
I don’t think so, no.
I think at least 70% of the behavior of that ilk that we observe is precisely due to the childhood status — how they’re treated.
There’s a lot of what in any other outgroup would be labeled “horizontal oppression” — taking anger and frustration out on your peers because it isn’t safe to take it out on the people who are mistreating you.
There’s a lot of what gets tagged as immature lack of interest in productive activities that’s actually “voting with their feet” — to the extent that they can — of expressing disinterest in what a bunch of adults think are productive activities but often really really aren’t.
There’s a lot of apathy about things that’s very much parallel to apathy among adults about social concerns, and in both cases it’s because hey, if nobody consults you and nobody cares what you think, why should you?
And there are a lot of adults wandering around who hit 18 or 23 or whatever and realized they were never going to figure stuff out or make sense of the world, so instead of continuing to parse it all out for themselves, they just looked around to see who seemed to be getting by okay and then they copied them, hoping nobody would notice that they weren’t real adults in a way that mattered. And none of them realize they aren’t in the minority in doing this! What’s unfortunate is the extent to which children at younger and younger ages are doing the exact same thing. Putting on a front of having it together.
You should read (or reread) Summerhill and other testimonials to what children are actually like when they largely get to run their own show, and go burn your copies of Lord of the Flies which was written by a child-hating curmudgeon.
I haven’t seen much discussion of the understanding that people under 18 - as a whole - are not as mature as people 25 and over. That seems to me to be a significant factor supporting some distinction.
Also, when a person is 16 or older, they are more likely to be more active participants in society - in terms of working, paying taxes, renting/owning property, driving… It impresses me as reasonable that voting age reflects such factors.
Speaking of Lord Of The Flies, there was actually a real world situation that closely matched its set up
Six boys, age 13-16, stole a fishing boat, got lost at sea, and were stranded on a tropical island for 15 months. They survived by working together. When they fought they imposed a time out on themselves. They took turns tending their fire, gardening, and other important chores. When one boy broke his leg, the others rescued him from where he’d fallen, set the leg, and cared for him until he healed.
The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.
That’s a nice thought, and the 70% figure is very specific. How did you arrive at this conclusion? Where is your evidence for this claim?
I remember being 10 years old; I strongly clung to unexamined preheld beliefs, and would continue to do so for nearly another decade, until my experience of the wider world started poking holes in my preheld beliefs and some college philosophy classes taught me thay refusing to question things was ignorant, not admirable.
I think you’ve got quite a skewed perception of what childhood is like for the majority of people if you truly believe that 70% of impulsive, selfish, and ignorant childhood behavior is simply a backlash to unfair adult rules.
As I noted above, most people very understandably take their own experience (as a child or as the parent of a child) and extrapolate to everybody else.
But just as arbitrary age limits don’t work for everybody, a more laissez-faire system will also not work, albeit for different folks.
So, it comes down to the question of what will work ‘best’ (and there’s not even agreement on what ‘best’ even means) both for individual children as they grow up and for society as a whole and how to balance between them. Until/unless we narrow down what our objective is, finding a solution will be elusive. If the goal is to simply maximize individual freedom, the OP works. But many of us, perhaps a majority, think there needs to be a balance against the rest of society.
I suppose that smacks of Locke, personal liberty, and the social contract, but the issues raised are ones we’ve been debating with no clear resolution for centuries.
I don’t think that’s an unfair premise (@Great_Antibob) and I could work from it.
Things I think would be steps in the right direction — more opportunities for children to take on responsibilities, without them necessarily being imposed on them, but available to them, with the assumed appreciation for their contributions; many more opportunities for them to participate in discussions of policy and rule and law, especially whenever it directly affects them, even if not necessarily giving them an equal vote, assuming “vote” is how the grownups are deciding on the policies anyhow; methods of stepping past absolute restrictions and “testing out” of the legal assumption that people their age should not do such-and-such, even if adults don’t have to face the same tests — in much the same way that 90 year olds may be asked to take extra tests if they intend to keep on driving.
I think there’s room for options other than “we leave things exactly as they are because children really are different” or “we get rid of any and all age-based legal differentiation because children are equal people”.
Yeah, and I certainly agree with the goal.
I do think many children are ready to have some of the the ‘rights, privileges, and responsibilities’ that come with adulthood at an earlier age than we currently allow.
At the moment in history, however, a good point came up earlier in the thread - a lot of that work needs to start from the front end - from parents and the communities we live in - rather than on the legislative end. The latter will come if the former is in place.
Simply relax or remove age restrictions right now, and we’re at risk coming full circle to a modern aristocracy of the upper class and/or well educated on one end and child labor/exploitation on the other. For many of us who would probably have been on the better end of that stick, that’s great. For the kids who would have been ‘allowed’ or ‘encouraged’ to drop out of school and make their own money, that’s maybe less optimal. The checks and balances need to be well defined.
If we’re discussing changing the way we treat children, the freedoms we allow, etc., shouldn’t such a discussion be informed by actual science—what we know about child psychology, brain development, etc.—rather than just what we personally remember about being a kid?
It seems to me that some of what @AHunter3 is asking for just comes down to good parenting, good teaching and administration of schools, etc.
Yes, I absolutely agree! I was using my personal anecdote to demonstrate that @AHunter3’s own reported experience is by no means universal, but this doesn’t mean that we should listen to my anecdote either. Like you say, we should avoid anecdotes entirely and examine what the science says.
As was asked by @Babale above, this is a very specific number and I am really interested in how you arrived at that.
Or is this just something pulled out of thin air?
I’m both a parent and a teacher, currently in junor high although I’ve taught from kindergarten through high school, and to go on an extremet side, I’m not convinced that kindergarten kids should have the right to vote.
Straight out of my butt, I’m afraid. No intent to deceive, it was the equivalent of “I think something like 3/4 of the behavior…” but I expressed it in a way that made it sound like something precise was being measured and stated. A more accurate rendition would be “I think a whole bunch of the behavior of that ilk that we observe is precisely due to the childhood status — how they’re treated”. And it’s all drawn from personal experience and observation while growing up, nothing more.