Chattel Childhood

and the way we treat children as property

Imagine you are a boy, born to parents with very different ideas about how to raise you than most people you know today. They arrange for some friends to snatch you off the street one day when you’re eight years old. They tell you you can’t see your mom again for a long time - years. You cry, and fight, but they hit you and tell you they will kill you if you don’t do what they say.

These people torture you, shove sticks in your nose until you bleed. You’re then dressed in ritualistic clothes and brought to an older boy - in his late teens, probably - and told to give him a blowjob and make sure you swallow. You do not want to, but they hit you again, and yell at you. You try to be strong and do what they say.

You can’t go home. They keep making you do this. You see your father around and he nods approvingly. Your mother isn’t there, but that part isn’t weird; your mother and father never go outside of the house together. When in public you’ve never seen them touch each other, look at each other, say each other’s names. Your father tells you it would be very shameful for him to acknowledge your mother in front of other people. Real men don’t do such things. Real men got to be that way by giving other men blowjobs when they were children.

---

If this happened, you might grow up and do pretty well writing a book about your weird, fucked-up childhood. You might need to spend ages in therapy undoing the tangles of your sexual assault. Nobody would be surprised if you got a drug addiction; “Well what did you expect? Did you hear what he went through?” they might say, shaking their heads. “He must be so emotionally damaged, he’s clearly acting out from trauma.”

But what I described once happened to every single boy in the Simbari culture in Papua New Guinea. Pre-modernization, this was standard issue in their society. If you were born in this culture, you wouldn’t have known any man who hadn’t gone through this. And if you got on a plane and then hired a jeep and then hiked the rest of the way into the highlands and sat one of them down and said, “oh my gosh, don’t you need therapy?” he would laugh at you. Or rather, he’d probably ask “what’s therapy?”

But - would he need therapy? In Simbari culture, ingesting semen was important for life force, and he’s been taught this from birth as matter-of-factly as he’d been taught which plants were poisonous. Are you saying you wish he’d been deprived of life force? Everyone he knows went through the same thing. He views it as good and meaningful and will happily force his own son to endure the same.

I’m not sure it would make sense to conceive of him as ‘traumatized’ in the way we use the word, which is by typing it out grievously from computer keyboards. But ok - even if he doesn’t have the conception of trauma, there’s probably other signs. Like, physical torture is still a real and bad thing, so maybe he has a flinch reaction to sharp sticks coming near his nose? Maybe, except there’s no sign of it. You ask this to the Simbari man, and he laughs. “We bleed all the time, any time women menstruate, to purge ourselves of exposure to corruption.” He pulls out one of the commonly used nose-stabbing sticks and inserts it into a nostril. “See? Like this. And then you just tap on the other end of it with a rock. Want me to do it to you?”

Trauma - or at least the type of trauma people invented BetterHelp to solve - isn’t linked to the experience itself, but rather the meaning we make of that experience.

---

I recently wrote about my childhood, which most people consider to be rather unfortunate.

But was it more unfortunate than the childhood of every single Simbari child? Probably not. If you went to a Simbari eight-year-old getting pointed sticks hammered into his nostrils shortly before getting his head shoved onto a penis, and said “hey, do you wanna swap places with Aella, who gets normal beatings that don’t make you bleed and never has to swallow any semen”, that kid might very well take the deal. If you then told this child, “well, actually Aella was very upset about her childhood for a while, and wrote a blog post about it and people were very sorry for her and said wow that was torture”, the Simbari eight year old might be extremely confused.

As in: imagine that someone from a futuristic, alien society comes to you today and says “you get to swap childhoods with a kid who never experienced bullying at school, had parents much more attuned to his needs, and had to do only half as much schoolwork, and basically everything in your life is a little better,” you might be like “hell yeah.”

The alien nods sagely. “Indeed, this is an improvement. But in our advanced culture, that kid is considered deeply unlucky. People are horrified at what he had to endure, and in fact he was on a talk show last week to discuss how he’s been emotionally coping. If you somehow visited our planet, you would be elevated as one of the worst cases of torture we’ve ever witnessed.”

You might think of this advanced culture as comprised of a bunch of pathetic wusses. You weren’t tortured, you’re fine. Not perfect, obviously some parts of your childhood were hard, but wasn’t everybody’s? It’s really not a big deal.

“Are you sure? Don’t you have nightmares about having to wake up early?”

“…no? What? Like in the morning?”

“Yeah, like for school. Didn’t you have to wake up at like 8am?”

“7am actually, but uh no. Waking up early isn’t even a bad thing. I’m not traumatized by it at all.”

The alien nods, and appears to be choosing his words carefully “But… all right. Let’s start here - you would agree that waking up early is… unpleasant, right? Like you’d rather not?”

“Sure, but lots of stuff about life is unpleasant. I don’t know why you’re singling out that specific thing.”

“I understand, of course. But uh, to clarify, you were forced into doing this by adults, yes?”

“Yes, but it was for our own good. You have to get to school on time, if they didn’t make me wake up so early I’d have gotten to school late.”

The alien takes some notes. “Right. Your culture… decides to start school early on purpose? Knowing this will require the mass waking up of children?”

“Yeah. I mean - there’s been some arguments over it, some studies show kids learn better if you start later - but that’s besides the point. Really dude, this isn’t something bad enough to go on talk shows over. On this planet everyone would laugh at you. Everyone spent their childhoods waking up this early, and a ton of people still do-”

“I understand everyone on your planet thinks this is normal,” the alien says, who had just taken a spaceship and then a planetary shuttle and then public transit to talk to you. “It’s just fascinating to talk to someone who really believes it, who views themselves as untraumatized.”

“I’m not traumatized by waking up at seven,” you say, voice squeaking.

The alien furrows his brow and flips through some papers. “I see here that you… experience a flush of physical anxiety when you hear specific alarm sounds go off even in places unrelated to your bedroom, such as in a movie. Is that correct?”

“I mean, yeah, but-”

“and last week someone’s alarm went off when you were at a party. You physically flinched and said, and I quote, ‘that just triggered my fight or flight response’.”

“Okay. I can see how maybe you’d be confused here, but you’ve gotta take my word for it. That’s just not the sort of thing you get traumatized over. I don’t need therapy. In fact, I still wake up at 7am for work! It’s not that bad, maybe you should try it?”

---

I don’t like philosophies of harm that are so relative. This conception of trauma is just the magic wand of culture designating which painful things are necessary and meaningful, and which painful things are terrible and abusive. The wand is fickle; much as we are horrified by the decisions of civilizations past, so too will the civilizations in the future feel about our system.

My parents would say “oh no, forcing a child to give blowjobs is bad”, and our culture would say “oh no, forcing Aella to act happy for her punishments is bad”, and the aliens would say “oh no, being forced to wake up at 7am is bad”. I am made uneasy by philosophies of childrearing that involve pointing to the slightly meaner guy down the line and going “well I treat my property better than he does.”

Because in this world, children are seen as property. Parents enact protocols to break children into submission to their dominant culture under whatever torturous means necessary. It’s for their own good, after all! It’s necessary!

Let’s compare these two quotes:

“…the child is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. A father has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to the rod of godly compulsion.”

“These first years have, among other things, the advantage that one can use force and compulsion. With age children forget everything they encountered in their early childhood. Thus if one can take away children's will, they will not remember afterward that they had had a will."

One of these is a German handbook on childrearing. The other is from an old pro-slavery tract; I just swapped out ‘negro’ for ‘child’ and ‘society’ for ‘father’, but you wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you.

Maybe this isn’t surprising. We know what happens if you give people the legal right to own other people as slaves; at best it’s dehumanizing, at worst it’s torture and death.

The system of chattel childhood happens over a much wider scale. It involves ownership over people who are physically much smaller than you, who are effectively mentally disabled, and who will experience some amnesia about what you do to them. You get the privacy of your own home to do what you like, your ownership is legally enforced; if your property runs away, your taxpayer money funds the police to forcibly hunt them down and bring them back. If you hit them, it’s to “prevent them from becoming a burden to society.”

This is the default perspective on children for much of civilization. Let’s take a quick foray into the results of the ‘children as property’ model:

---

Angel’s Trumpet is not a great plant to eat. In addition to being really unpleasant, effects include “paralysis of smooth muscles, confusion, tachycardia, dry mouth, constipation, tremors, migraine headaches, poor coordination, delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, mydriasis, rapid onset cycloplegia, and death.” We have a case of one guy who drank a cup of Angel Trumpet tea, calmly went into the garden, and then amputated his own tongue and penis with pruning shears.

Some South American indigenous cultures had this plant lying around and went “hey, you know what this would be great for? Punishing our children!” When kids misbehaved, they would make them drink Angel’s Trumpet so they could go get scolded by their dead ancestors.

In Mauritania, under threat of physical punishment, they force feed young girls about 15,000 calories per day (roughly ~27 big macs, or ~7 gallons of milk, or ~200 eggs) until they become obese. If the girls vomit the food, they are forced to eat their own vomit.

In much of the world, beating children - typically boys - was commonplace. You’ve got birching, caning, sometimes so badly that they died. In the 1800’s a schoolmaster beat a pupil to death. He wasn’t charged with murder though, because he was a schoolmaster and had “parental authority.” Really, killing kids just wasn’t that unusual.

Today is better, but not by much. Two thirds of kids on earth experience violent punishment as a matter of routine. In Africa, 43% of kids have experienced severe physical abuse. In many regions, torture by schools is legal and default.

The lowest rates of violent punishment are in north america, where 49% of kids under 10 had experienced it.

---

My childhood was about an average childhood experience as far as historical childrearing goes, and an extremely bad one according to modern standards. But for me, the bad thing about my childhood isn’t the pain so much as I wasn’t treated like a person. Pain itself was fine - I endured toys breaking, fights with friends, ending things with a crush - many of those were sometimes comparable in pain to what my parents doled out. But at least in my own pains I had agency; the pain was mine to choose, or the will of nature against mine. The actual awful thing about my childhood was the constant subjugation of my will to theirs.

My core point here is that agency violation is a more sustainable and consistent framework for looking at this than 'trauma'.

My grandpa got a case of the molesties when I was a kid, and I am horrified that people’s objection to this is that it was sexual and not that he was forcing me to do something I didn’t want to do. Eight year olds don’t want to french kiss their grandpa! They don’t want to get sticks shoved up their nose or wake up at 7am either. If us children had our agency respected, none of that stuff would have happened.

The problem with sexual assault is the assault part. It’s so confusing to me that when I talk about my childhood, people single that out above and beyond all the other consistent ways I had my agency violated. But nobody cares about that part, just boring ol’ routine violation of personal autonomy. I was a child, and children are property. The property part is fine. It’s that now the property has been made less innocent that squicks people out. Your property is supposed to be cherubic and carefree. In liberal culture, we don’t want your property to scream in pain because that makes us feel bad. Keep your property happy, keep them in line.

---

I don’t approve of the Simbari childrearing, not because I think the pain and disgust of what the children are forced to do is inherently bad, but because they are forced.

To love someone skillfully is to pour fuel on their soul. It’s to see the world through their desire, to delight in it, and go “I desire you to get what you want.” It is the amplification of their will.

The Simbari people are destroying the will of their children. My parents destroyed my will. And I think, quite seriously, that our current culture is likewise destroying the will of its children en masse. That’s what you do to property.

I have a friend who, as a teen, decided he didn’t want to attend school. He just stopped going. Things escalated, and the police ended up forcibly taking him to school, but he would just walk out as soon as they left. They threatened that they’d get his parents in legal trouble for failing to get him to go to school, so he finally complied by going to school, but sat in protest out in the hallway. They ended up sending him to a detention center for bad kids.

If done to an adult, that would be a serious violation of human rights. It’s the kind of thing you do to a slave or a prisoner at a reeducation camp.

(My friend ended up entering into one of the top philosophy PhD programs at Rutgers.)

---

I don’t mean we should let kids do whatever they want - we don’t let adults do whatever they want; if they smashed your property we’d put them in a locked room until they calmed down, if they hit you you’d hit back in self defense. Failing to have boundaries against children much as you would adults is also dehumanizing!

But good treatment of children should likely be closer to how you would treat a parent with dementia. Sometimes forcibly controlling their body is necessary to prevent damage to themselves or others, and you definitely don’t let them go outside alone, and there will certainly be many grey areas where you’re conflicted about how much to override their agency. But at least you’re starting from a baseline of treating them as a whole person!

---

In response to my childhood post, many people responded by saying homeschooling should be illegal.

But homeschooling was probably the best part about my childhood, because it allowed me freedom. I had to do a few hours of schoolwork in the morning from various books, at my own pace - and then I had the rest of the time to do whatever I wanted (so long as it wasn’t sinful and I wasn’t at the ass end of the funnel).

I consider my childhood to be, in many ways, obviously better than most other kids’ childhoods - they had to go to school. I only had my agency violated some of the time, but they had theirs systemically violated for a minimum of seven hours of the day, and realistically probably more than that. Sure - mine hurt worse physically, but that was temporary - theirs did much more permanent damage to their relationship with learning.

When I was fourteen, I was extremely well behaved, and so my parents tried (briefly) sending me to public school. I had massive culture shock. The kids’ humor felt regressive, I was horrified by everyone using bad words - but most of all, I was shocked by the amount of time wasted.

I would spend all day at school and learn as much as I would have learned in an hour at home. It was tedious. I had to be at certain rooms at certain times, I had to sit in a single spot and stare at a teacher who took a while to get going with the lesson, and then delivered the lesson slowly, and then we were made to leave. Rinse and repeat. And after I got home, I had to do more homework, most of which I wasn’t interested in. I couldn’t believe it, it felt like I was watching a TV show made out of entirely filler episodes.

I had much less life in me during my time at public school, because they had taken my time away from me. I had less attention and energy to devote to stuff I cared about.

When I first got out of being homeschooled, I ended up in a group house with open, smart people who’d gone to public school. It was an amusing point of difference between us that I didn’t “think learning was uncool”. They explained to me that in the normal world, trying to learn stuff about the world was actually pretty low status. This was mindblowing to me. It felt like someone was telling me that listening to music or enjoying a beautiful sunset was embarrassing.

I feel like I’m in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. You’re pouring the most vivid years of someone’s life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them don’t care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.

I am extremely triggered by the way everyone treats kids. It’s upsetting to me that people get mad at my childhood, but aren’t near equally as mad at everyone else’s. You’re mad at the wrong thing!

Every culture throughout history has justified the abuse of treating their children as property by arguing this is good for them and good for civilization. Kids need to learn this stuff to be functioning members of society! It’s good to learn discipline! You can’t have kids just sitting around playing video games all day! Not everyone is self-directed autodidacts!

Sure, I know that argument. But hopefully if my parents had said to you “do you expect her to learn good morals if we spare the rod?” you would have said “have you even tried other methods?”

If you were trying to get an adult to learn how to do something without being able to resort to using physical force, how would you do it? Maybe you would find something they’re interested in and show how learning a specific skill would let them accomplish what they wanted. Maybe you’d point out how their coolest friends who they respect are pretty good this skill. Or maybe you wouldn’t try at all - do they actually need to learn how to do that thing? I personally failed to learn a bunch of stuff as a homeschooler, but simply went and learned it as an adult when I needed to know it in order to achieve a goal.

I’m not sure many people have ever figured out what it means to learn at all, because the thing they’re doing in school is very rarely it. Everyone seems to have fooled themselves into thinking that school is about learning. But half of the skill of learning is knowing how to be curious! Schools force facts down incurious throats; if you grow up in a world where the thing they call “learning” is enacted upon you under the implicit threat of violence, completely independent of your will, then you will never learn how to weaponize your own will into the true Learning.

I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.

---

When I was very young, I remember adults treating me like I wasn’t a person, but this didn’t upset me quite as much as the fact that no adult seemed to remember what it was like to be a kid, or else they certainly would have taken my feelings much more seriously, like they did for other adults.

I was terrified that I, too, would one day grow up and forget what it was like to be a child, and would also stop taking other children seriously. So I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget - I chose the phrase “Don’t forget, I’m a person!” and deliberately sent it up the chain across my older selves by regularly meditating on the phrase and the importance with which it was carried. I’m an adult now, but I have not forgotten what it was like to be a child.