Thanks for writing this post, I really enjoyed it! I too was abused in my childhood, enough to make me question things and look for alternatives rather than just pass down an inherited standard experience, so I’m quite grateful for that. I agree that it’s the loss of agency that is the greatest harm in your example, and results in many maladies in adults in our society. You can see many of the dehumanizing property justifications in the comments below, “children need rules to learn” “children can’t think for themselves” “you need coercion to enforce the rules” without anyone taking a step back and wondering if there’s a way to teach these things that works with their agency - or indeed if kids learn from being forced to do things vs modeling and observation.
I’ve studied many cultures and other kinds of societies around the world, and it turns out that our way of doing things is very weird and very recent in history. The species norm for 300,000 years has been treating children with autonomy and agency, with the current dominance based property mindset (also applying to women, animals, land, slaves, etc) being only a few isolated examples 10,000 years ago that spread, tumor-like.
This is why I practice attachment parenting with my own kids, and can happily say that they are advanced by every metric and I get constant compliments on their ‘good behavior’ (though I think of this more like good emotional regulation skills and modeling). I also can’t relate to half the issues parents complain about nowadays or I see them struggling with, because they never come up or we work through them early on without force or coercion. Modern parenting is hard without ancestral support networks, but a lot of it is self-induced I think. My kids are a lot of fun to be around and little bundles of joy, and I’m very grateful to have found alternatives to this culture’s way of doing things / churning out obedience office drones and traumatized consumers. Our culture lacks wisdom and skill when it comes to raising kids (and a lot of other things), but it can be relearned.
I love your description of how to love someone: to take joy in nurturing their ambitions.
I feel like I love my kids that way, and I also feel like public school is imperfect but the closest thing I have available to help me love them like you describe (nurturing their soul). But I am (and they) are also lucky that in Switzerland, school stops at 15 and apprenticeship starts. And there, society has a whole new opportunity to decide, "this new colleague may still be under 18, but they are a person, not property."
A bad apprenticeship can turn into slavery, of course. But there are structures in place to fight against treating them as property (not least of which labour and contract law: an apprentice has the same rights as any worker to give notice and go find another boss). I am an apprentice trainer and I'm proud of our program, when I think of it in terms of your essay.
I found this to be an interesting essay, with a lot of thought provoking examples. I think it raises some great points - for example, the overall thesis of "kids should have agency" I agree strongly with. A good example of this that I think today's parents are improving on the past is things like forcing kids to hug relatives - I don't do this, and I feel viscerally that forcing them to (as I was as a kid) would be wrong.
However, I found it very odd, and somewhat revealing, that you didn't really talk much about the default stance of most parents, which is "I'm trying to do what's best for my kids". I have two kids... And they're dumb, and when they're teenagers, I know they'll be dumber and have worse judgment. As toddlers, I had to force them to take medicine, physically. I used physical force only when absolutely necessary, like when it affected their health or safety, but it was the right thing to do. It is my responsibility as a parent. When they're older, I'm going to have no problem using forms of coercion like removing privileges etc. if they are behaving poorly (and generally, that means "doing behaviors that are going not overall good for them".
The whole reason most parents force their kids to do things, and remove their agency to some degree, is because (mostly) it's in the kids best interest, and the parents have the experience & knowledge to make that call.
Anyways, I liked the essay, but I felt the whole time I was waiting for this to be discussed, and it wasn't. It feels like an omission that detracts from the overall essay and leaves it incomplete imo. You don't have to be a parent to discuss, but to not understand & discuss that aspect of parenting is a huge miss.
"The whole reason most parents force their kids to do things, and remove their agency to some degree, is because (mostly) it's in the kids best interest, and the parents have the experience & knowledge to make that call."
That argument works just as well for forcing adults to do things that are in their best interests. Why should we only take away the agency of children and teenagers? Surely, if making people act in their best interests against their will is beneficial, we ought to extend that benefit to people of all ages!
most governments DO force people to act in their own best interests against their will and/or at the very least severely punish them for doing some things that are against their best interest or society's. All the laws against doing illegal drugs, VICE crimes, gambling, etc. are all designed to force people to do the right thing or not do the wrong thing.
They do occasionally, sure, but adults are allowed to make decisions that are against their best interests much more often than kids are.
If overriding people's agency to force them to "do the right thing" is beneficial, why are we only giving adults *some* of that benefit? Why not all of it?
Maybe because we expect kids to develop better judgment and decision making skills once they become adults, and we want to help them avoid making dumb mistakes they will regret soon.
A look at dysfunctional modern society with its hordes of clueless adults with poor judgement and emotional regulation skills *should* give you pause. Kids learn good judgment and all the rest through modeling, observation, and ability to practice these skills on their own in a safe environment - not coercion and lecturing. Your recommendation is the standard, the results are plainly visible around you.
Are you looking for a principled answer? Because I think that the real answer is that it is just too much work and trouble to carry that out with adults in the prime of their lives. To get them to behave you would basically have to treat them as slaves, with all of the violence (and risk of retaliatory violence) that is involved. My understanding is that is what marriage was for women for most of recorded history.
I think once people are adults, the argument is basically that now they get to screw they own life up, if they want.
I'm honestly curious... Do you think kids have good judgment? Do you think they know what will yield good outcomes for them down the road? Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?
"I think once people are adults, the argument is basically that now they get to screw they own life up, if they want."
That's not really an argument, it's just an assertion. The question is *why* should 18 year olds be allowed to screw up their own lives when 17 year olds aren't?
"Do you think kids have good judgment? Do you think they know what will yield good outcomes for them down the road?"
Do *adults* have good judgment? Do adults know what will yield good outcomes down the road?
Some do, some don't. Do you think that justifies denying agency to an entire group?
I can't speak for everyone, but personally, I *did* have good judgment. I knew what would yield good outcomes for me down the road, better than the people around me. Decades later, looking back at my teenage years, I can confidently say that ~every time I was forced to do something I didn't want to do, I was right and whoever forced me was wrong.
The classes I hated because I thought I'd never use what they were trying to teach me? Turns out I never used it. The times when everyone got mad because instead of doing homework, I messed around on the computer? That led directly to a lucrative career; it turns out writing code pays better than writing book reports.
"Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?"
As Aella said, "I don’t mean we should let kids do whatever they want - we don’t let adults do whatever they want".
If you had an adult cousin living with you, and all he ever wanted to do was get high and scroll on his phone, would you put up with that? I'm guessing not. But since you couldn't use force to make him do something else, you'd find another way to handle the situation.
"I knew what would yield good outcomes for me better than those around me"
If that's true, then that's a really sad commentary on those around you, or else you were an exceptional child. This is a rare case, and in that case, I'd agree, no coersion needed.
The things I was forced to do were no different from what other kids in the US are routinely forced to do. My objections were no different from the objections other kids make. I see no reason to think my ability to know what I wanted to do with my life was unique.
I think a lot of parents don't trust their kids to make good decisions for themselves, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because they never get an opportunity to practice. I got those opportunities by being stubborn and doing what I wanted regardless of what anyone else thought, and it worked out all right, but at the cost of a lot of anger and frustration. I think I, and a lot of other kids, would've been better off not having to fight for agency.
If you fail to pass your "better judgment" down to your kids - is it really their fault, are they the ones to bear the punishments? Memeplexes/ideas are selfish and reproduce just as genes do, if they don't - they are maladaptive and weak. It's either you're just dysgenic or that idea of "better judgement" isn't a complete, self-propellng meme, but a loose collection of subjective experiences strung together, experience doesn't get passed down. Should one force one's own subjectivity on the other– to what ends?
I really only understood the first sentence. And to that, yes, you try. With some kids you mostly succeed... With some, not as much. Either way, they really aren't a finished product and require help and guidance and correction until they're adults.
If my kids need constant correction and guidance right up until adulthood, I’ll consider myself a failure as a parent. But I’d also have taken a step back and a long look in the mirror well before that, and tried something else instead. Your mentality is the standard, the results are all around you - do most adults today seem like they have good judgment, emotional regulation skills, or critical thinking? Kids learn best from observation, modeling, and a chance to practice skills on their own in a safe environment.. not coercion and lectures.
> Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?
Probably not literally, but I come a lot closer to saying "yes" to this than most people would. One can protect one's kids by outright forbidding things that would/might be harmful to them, or one can protect one's kids by merely informing them of the risks/costs of potentially self-harmful actions they're considering taking and letting them do with that information as they will. In my opinion, most parents favor the former over the latter waaayyy too much, but I acknowledge that there is a place for the former, if the potential harm is particularly large and/or irreversible (I imagine the harm done by many/most recreational drugs would qualify as such, though I don't actually know that much about drugs).
I'd say a) yes I completely agree that it's better to try to explain & inform before coersion, but also b) this essay basically seems to ignore that coersion is entirely necessary in some scenarios, and depending on the kid & the situation, often
> That argument works just as well for forcing adults to do things that are in their best interests.
It doesn't. Adults are smarter than children and have more willpower. There's far less of a need to "parent" them.
"Don't force your kid to do things" is the kind of parenting advice only ivory tower elitists completely detached from reality would give. Like come on. Do you have any knowledge how stupid and undisciplined the average child is?
You commit the typical mind fallacy by citing yourself as an example. You were a smart child. The vast majority of other children are not.
Rules must be based on the norm not the exceptions.
>”Do you have any knowledge how stupid and undisciplined the average child is?”
And the average adult, because that’s what your advice results in. The results speak for themselves and all around you, do you think the average person today has good judgment, emotional regulation, or critical thinking skills? Kids learn best through observation, modeling, and practicing on their own in a safe environment, not coercion and lecturing.
I would say that for one, the dynamics between the state and its subjects are different from that of a parent and a child. Society is a laboratory, and its subjects the lab rats. With so many ppl, the state can afford to allow its subjects to try various things, many of which might end up being disastrous for individuals, but not necessarily for broader society. To propagate itself, the state need not concern itself with any particular gene.
Biological parents have a genetic interest in their children, and even in large families far fewer replicates with which to experiment. To survive, the parents must be concerned with their genes. Thus, rather than experimenting, they tend to use the methods that on net allowed their own existence, knowing that failure to do so may end up with the dissolution of their lineage in a way that would not likely occur with the state.
The idea is that you'd be trying to teach the kid to want what's best for them, rather than forcing them to do things they don't want to do. That stripping them of agency should be a last resort.
Greater happiness is possible in childhood than at any other point of life. It's a horrid shame to waste so much of it the way we do.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with "wasting childhood the way we do", but with respect to teaching kids to want what's best for them... That's a nice idea but in practice only goes so far. Some kids just explore the world, and try new things, and stay out of trouble... Some don't. Should I let my kids do drugs? Skip school? Drink? What about playing video games all day?
She drew the analogy to a dementia-adled parent. You might have to strip them of some agency for their own benefit. It might be very difficult to get them voluntarily engaged in something beneficial. So too with a child. But you would work very hard to do this before overiding their will entirely.
The central idea of the essay is that you should take this very seriously, and recoil from the idea of locking a child in a holding pen against their will for eight hours a day, or violently punishing them, etc. And to be looking relentlessly for better solutions to the problem. That it should be an issue of great moral concern.
Dementia addled parent is such a terrible comparison... They don't have to go build a life - compete for jobs - find their niche, their happiness. Our kids will. It's my responsibility to give them the best chance at that, balancing that against their autonomy.
An aside, describing schools as a holding pen is insane. I'm very on board that schools could be better, but that's crazy, and what's the alternative exactly? Homeschool?
The essay is less about practical realities and more about the way we as a society should view child rearing. To view the constriction of agency as a last resort, the same way you would any other person. If there are no other ways for a child to learn then resort to it. But only after you're absolutely sure there are no other ways.
I don't think holding pen is insane for a school. Forced to sit in rooms for eight hours against your will, having to ask permission even to use the bathroom. The unsolvable bullying problem. Most internment facilities have more freedom.
You have a point. Children start out with no idea of how to take care of themselves. The problem is, they're treated as non-agentic from the age of 1 to 18. We need some kind of system that acknowledges that a 3 year old and a 13 year old have different abilities. Of course, it doesn't help that kids have a strong habit of being confidently wrong.
I feel like modern, good parents do this - they give their kids as much agency as they deserve. Personally, I'm dying to give my kids agency if they show they can handle it.
I think past parenting practices are quite authoritarian and pretty much never consider letting up until they have to, but modern parenting has come a long way.
The world isn't as tough of a place, too. On the other hand, the rise of helicopter parenting is troubling. While they might not beat their kids, they wind up strangling their autonomy.
Yes. And her substitution of “child” for “negro” kind of elides the fact that most of what the racists said about the latter is actually true of the former.
"...but this time it actually IS true! The science says so!" has a pretty bad track record on that sort of claim. I mean, sure, past results, no guarantee of future performance. "This strain of dismissive apologetics sounds familiar. What if we're making that exact same terrible error again?" still seems like a hypothesis worthy of diligent scrutiny.
I dunno, they seem different in kind to me. Very obviously, children below a certain age threshold just don’t have the ability to make their own choices or take care of themselves. Then there’s a gradual transition to the point where they more or less do. You wouldn’t (presumably) think about “races below a certain [whatever your racialist metric might be] threshold” being incapable in a comparable way, or debate at what point and to what extent they should be free to exert agency in the world. In the first instance, we are talking price. In the second, the whole premise is no longer in play.
The main purpose of school as far as I can tell is childcare. Socialising second. Then education. My son complains every morning about going and I feel for him (and tell him so) but when the parents are out all day, what do you do? Thinking about lifestyle changes but we're not there yet.
Oh I don't know. They learn about emotional intelligence and resilience and put on plays and do "just dance" and other fun stuff these days. It's not a bad place to spend the day IMO...
How do you square "it's not a bad place to spend the day" with the fact that your son complains every morning? If I can ask, what is the topic of his complaint?
(not an attack, I don't have children, I'm just curious, and I am sure both can be true in different ways)
Well, as Aella mentions, getting up is a drag. He doesn't like being late but doesn't want to rush, says it's boring... But if he's home, he complains of boredom too, wants to spend all his time playing fortnite, and is difficult to motivate anyway. They're all different of course. My daughter is super active and not so into screens, but needs someone to play with her 100% of the time, which can be exhausting 😂. I think school does a better job than I would of offering them a variety of different activities. And hanging out with peers is valuable of course.
I'm not sure. He has plenty of friends and his teachers say he's adorable, so he seems to be thriving there. When we talk about going travelling for a few months he insists it shouldn't be until he finishes primary school…
It's simple, you don't ask a child to look after themselves nutritionally, why would you think they have any say in how they are reared? How would a child know what would be good for them?
Actually children are fully capable of eating nutritionally healthy food if given the opportunity, people back in the day didn't micromanage their children's eating habits. Children have eaten autonomously in all ages and in all cultures. Chris van Tulliken goes into this a little bit in his book. The reason you seemingly have to "look after your children nutritionally" is that the western food supply has largely been poisoned by food that isn't food.
Yeah schools evolve, contrary to popular belief. They're always bringing in specialists to talk to the kids about everything from sex to cyber security. It's not perfect but they're trying.
I agree that we should give kids agency when possible, and I too made a vow to remember what it was like to be a little kid, although I wasn’t as diligent about keeping it.
Having said that, I am now a parent, and I also have the experience of how kids are basically testing boundaries all the time. Giving them control over one choice often just leads to the next choice down the line - “thanks for letting me use the tablet for half an hour, now can I have another half an hour?” and so on. You typically have to set the boundary somewhere, and I’ve found it often works better for the kid if you are relatively strict rather than dragging out endless negotiations. You can’t just give them “all the agency” without poor results.
Yes, school could typically be much better. But also as one example kids really should learn to read, even if they don’t feel like it. One shouldn’t just kick the can down the road to when they’re an adult and say they can just learn it then. Not to say that everything is so simple.
Do you negotiate like this with other adults? Does the kid have a fun enjoyable environment outside of the tablet? With any modern overstimulating thing, it’s less about controlling access and more about abundance of alternatives and modeling good self-regulation. See the ‘Rat Park’ heroin water experiments.
Look, I totally connect with the sentiment about agency being the thing that matters. But I have no idea how to parent without very frequent resort to coercion. My kids want to know where’s the limit, and they treat that as an experimental question. When I choose not to resort to coercion, it’s often temporary because it just advances the experiment to the next stage. You can’t base the evaluation on if there is coercion or not, or the amount of coercion, because that entirely depends on what the child does with the agency that it has. The question must be where is coercion used, what is the child being coerced to do, and is it in his or her long term interest to do it. There’s no escaping that.
I’d say that they should evolutionary be primarily interested in society at large, but any figure of authority that is correlated with society at large serves as a valid proxy.
If they're hiking next to a ravine, and they've never fallen down into something like it, the only way they know it's dangerous is from other people. There's a limit to their real safety (the edge of the cliff), but it's not one they can directly learn about without severe consequence.
But you, the parent, know about that limit, so you can teach it. You can show them where the limit imposed by reality lies, without them having to suffer the consequences of testing that limit.
Kids, AFAIK, want to explore the world. They also (AFAIK) want to feel safe while doing so. You, the adult, can show them where the reality-imposed limits to their safety lie, and they can then play around exploring within that.
I bet you get better results when you feel (and show that feeling) how severe / important some limit is; or when you explain *why* that limit is; than when you just insist upon / impose one?
There is a difference between feeling safe and being safe. The ability to explain the difference to child varies a lot on the degree of disconnect there (some things are much more dangerous then they instinctively appear) and the age of the child. And even to the extent you can, kids are often, at least from the perspective of adults, including themselves at a later age, pretty poorly calibrated on risk/reward tradeoffs even into their teenage years (and in some cases beyond). There is no strict line between safe/unsafe, there are very few perfectly safe activities, so some measure of risk/reward has to be applied and kids are, in general, not great at that.
I have an uncle that when he was ~7-8 or so liked to bang his hand on the burners of the stove top whenever he came home. The reward here is pretty minimal, cool noise, some minor bravado, the risk fairly substantial. My grandma explained to him that this was dangerous, showed him that a stove can still be extremely hot even if it doesn't look it, told him not do it every time he did it, and one day the stove was very hot and he burned the shit out of his hand. Enough that he he still, to this day, has some (fairly minor, but real) disfigurement and disability in that hand. Of course it also was extremely painful and took months to fully heal. Perhaps a stronger level of coercion is justified here?
FWIW, I seemed to be one of the only people who wasn't horrified by your other post, mostly because you seem fine or even better than fine. But also, I also remember what it's like being a kid and am constantly dismayed/confused how no one else seems to ... I have no idea if that's connected.
And also, having to get up early for school ABSOLUTELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION is the single worst (I wouldn't say "traumatizing" but consistent every day misery making for years on end) thing about my childhood and it's not even a question. While no one cares about that, yet at the same time they are bothered that I am not at all bothered by other things that happened, that they consider abusive and I think weren't a big deal, or at least left no lasting impact.
Public school is mostly just fun in elementary. It's socializing and playing and singing songs and easy fun learning. Middle and high school IMO should go and are actively harmful to learning.
I feel you on the agency thing, but also I think you're either thinking of older kids or not realizing just how big of dumb asses a lot of kids are, because you really cannot allow a kid under 8 or so to do what they want without them probably dying. You are probably stronger willed and more agentic than most, as well. Which shows that the attempts to rob you of agency didn't work anyway, given you're still in possession of that faculty.
Yeah, a very common blind spot of intelligent, high agency people is a complete failure to conceptualize a "normie" theory of mind. Very common in Aella's (always interesting!) work.
"... not realizing just how big of dumb asses a lot of kids are..."
Yes, but no -- it depends. Nobody understands the huge range of capabilities of kids. A kindergarten class can have a bigger range than class to teacher. Average 5 y.o. would score *zero* adult IQ. There are 1 or 2 11 y.o. in most classes smarter than average adults.
Eveveryone against schools' child abuse needs to read this research you won't find anywhere else:
"Skipping Grades and Other Gifted Acceleration /
Tables showing when to skip grades or go to college early."
No, I think that’s pretty feminine - for many boys it’s realizing that their misbehavior can have lifelong consequences in late childhood or very early adolescence.
In general I don't think childless people should be advocating for child-rights or criticizing parents. Parenting is very difficult, and the more children you have, the more constraints are placed on your actions. In my experience the vast majority of child-rights advocates are themselves identifying with the children and have no experience being on the other side of that divide.
Well given that children can't really advocate for themselves, then if childless people identify with the child, aren't they exactly who should advocate for them? Otherwise it seems rather one-sided, parents are perfectly capable of advocating for themselves.
Parents were children once, so they have both sides, and are more than willing to share their opinions on the matter with other parents. It's hard to take anything a childless person has to say about this seriously.
ALL people were children once. And parents, by virtue of being parents, are liable to identify with themselves and with other parents more than with their children or with children in general. If someone advocating for children while having none of their own means they sometimes take the children's side too much, so what? Someone should! Parents advocating for themselves also sometimes take their own side too much; turnabout is fair play. And considering that parents are often the very people that children need advocating AGAINST, the fact that parents can advocate for children is not as much of a comfort as you seem to think it is. There's a conflict of interest there. And in any case, I don't actually see a lot of parents seriously advocating for children in a way that focuses on the fact that they're real actual people.
> It's hard to take anything a childless person has to say about this seriously.
Why? If they say something that's wrong, show how it's wrong. Don't just dismiss it out of hand because they don't have children.
Lots of things are difficult. That doesn't make it okay to do whatever you want in service of making them easier. Farming is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to mistreat the animals. Owning a business is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to overwork or underpay your employees. Parenting is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to mistreat your children.
I'm especially unsympathetic to the argument that parenting is harder the more children you have. Okay, so stop at one? Nobody is making you have more. Of course, parenting should be easier--we as a society make it harder than it needs to be in a multitude of ways--but ultimately, if you're a parent, you have a responsibility to your child. You owe it to them to treat them well, respect their rights, and advocate for their needs and their well-being, and if you're not willing or able to do that, then you should not have a child.
Lastly, of course advocates for children's rights are identifying with children! Why aren't you? If you're a parent, you should identify with your child, because you should want the best for them!
"I'm especially unsympathetic to the argument that parenting is harder the more children you have. Okay, so stop at one?" I'll categorize this as 'Please speak directly into this microphone."
I partially agree. It seems most people who advocate for youth rights are either still youth themselves or do not yet have children. But that makes sense: The closer one is to the time when one was denied rights, the more important the absence of those rights. As a long-time youth rights activist and a parent of an adult child, I see the need for youth rights and the obstacles to youth emancipation. Aella's not wrong for the most part, she just hasn't yet reckoned with the valid problems caused by treating youth as fully human. Any parent knows you can't give a 3 year old a "choice" in most things. However, I started working (my own choice) at 12 and would routinely travel 8 miles on my own at that age to get to work. Compare that with a modern 18 year old who can't even cook for themselves or do laundry and, well, I think we need a little more independence and youth rights and a little less "protecting the children" and dependence.
Oh, totally agree with that - all for free range parenting and giving children more responsibility. But this is a cultural thing - individual parents are not free to choose that even if they want it due to fear of child protective services. This is very real and I know multiple people who have had ACS called on them for 'neglect.' I'm glad to see more legal protections popping up in some states for leaving kids unsupervised.
Exactly. The problem with the current system is that all youth (under 18 in the USA) regardless of age, maturity or intelligence are treated as essentially mentally incompetent and there's no way for them to opt out of society's "protection". That's my personal solution to the "youth rights" problem: allow anyone who is informed, capable and who wants equality the opportunity to opt out of being protected like a child and opt into full citizenship with all the rights and duties associated therewith.
Yes, but in most (possibly all) US states youth/minor emancipation is so difficult that most 18 year olds and probably a sizable portion of 25 year olds would not qualify. They only achieve emancipation based solely on achieving 18 years of age.
Well, I would argue that the system's change should be more towards not giving them the automatic emancipation :D But, again, binarity is more of a problem than the specifics of switch.
This. Likewise, Thomas Paine, John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe should not speak about how Southerns should run their plantations, because they clearly lack the perspective of the other side.
Seriously, even with Dobbs, raising a kid is a choice parents make. Bringing a new person into this world without their consent -- just like removing a person from this world without their consent -- is a weighty choice which will have repercussions for decades, and sometimes shape the remainder of one's life. If there was no ethical way to raise kids, that does not that parents would get a free pass on using unethical ways, it simply would mean that they are monsters, just like the plantation owners. (This being said, I strongly suspect that it is possible for some people to raise kids in an ethical way.) Personally, I will likely not have kids because the one relationship I was in where this was an option had a lack of emotional stability which would have made having kids a clear ethics violation.
Your argument also follows a pattern where it is asserted that only $GROUP should be allowed to voice an opinion on $TOPIC which mostly affects them. Besides ($GROUP, $TOPIC) being (parents, child-rearing), other common pairs are (women, abortion laws), (Blacks, racism), (rape survivors, rape), (handicapped, inclusion) and so on. I will grant you that in each case, the group will likely be able to make contributions which other people could not, and we should listen to their points of view. But at the end of the day, policy discussions should be intellectual, not emotional discussions, and this means that anyone with the ability to make intelligent arguments can contribute.
I am not a bat, and do not have any idea what the subjective experience of being a bat would feel like. If we are discussion the conversation of bats, then we should certainly hear what the bats wanted to contribute (alas, they are not making any arguments which we can understand), but at the end of the day some non-bat academics can still debate this intellectually. If we let human biologists debate bat issues, then we should certainly let Aella discuss the parent-child-relationship.
If you want to hear the perspective of someone raising 5 children in this way, check out the Tim Ferris interview with Aaron Stupple. Or read his book The Sovereign Child. Fascinating stuff.
When raising our kids, I got a good look at the US educational system. Parents blame the teachers and teachers blame the parents. The primary purpose really is to keep the kids in school for long enough for the parents to maintain employment. The teachers are underpaid and overworked, being given just enough time to present the information, with little or none to help the kids understand it. We don't pay to get our kids educated or engaged, we just pay to give them an info dump.
We tried home schooling for a year. The issue with most parents home schooling is that they aren't home schooling to improve the kids' education, they're doing it to selectively reduce the information the kids receive. The home schooled families we interacted with were extremely maladjusted (parents and kids). The most extreme example was the woman who referred to Christmas ornaments as "Satan's balls." We now always hang our Xmas ornaments in pairs.
Yeah, homeschooling is highly dependent on the home environment - and the parents' skills. As a graduate of homeschooling myself, it did have some advantages, but the fact that it was nakedly indoctrination (literally threw out textbooks on sex and evolution) has lingered. And my very Christian family regards the fact that I think for myself as a failure on the school's part.
Oh, yes. Most people massively underestimate the effort involved in teaching. Although there are exceptions, we learned that the urge to homeschool is usually indicative of some Dunning-Krueger issues.
Simbari education doesn't sound too different from the Agoge system of ancient Sparta. Of course Sparta had an *enlightened* education system. Almost alone among Mediterranean cultures of its day it also educated girls. Not to be homemakers, but to sing, dance and compose poetry.
Most modern Western education systems are based on the Humboldtian model of 19th century Prussia. It was not only explicitly militarist but was deliberately designed to crush critical thinking in the young so as to nip out the rebellious tendencies that were then threatening regimes across Europe. To this day formal mass education is more about stifling than encouraging critical thinking.
A.S. Neill saw how abusive that is and how it destroyed the natural, playful curiosity of children, making it necessary to indoctrinate them under threat of punishment rather than educate them via their love of learning. So in the early 20th century he started Summerhill school for kids too intractable to be educated in the regular system.
Problem was, it soon became evident that these 'drop out' kids were getting better academic results than the ones in the formal system and soon the upper middle class parents of compliant kids wanted them to go to Summerhill too. Of course they immediately started applying financial and political pressure to ensure Summerhill was more 'normal' - especially in regard to compulsory class attendance and gender segregation - and though Summerhill continues today as an 'alternative' school its differences and freedoms are a shadow of those initiated by Neill.
I could go on for as long as you did about the oppressive abusiveness of our education systems but I'll just note what I consider to be one of the worst effects of this facsimile of 'learning'.
Many (most?) educated adults equate being educated with being able to uncritically swallow the narrow interpretations of 'knowledge' offered by 'appropriate' authorities and regurgitate a slightly paraphrased version on demand. They not only consider being able and willing to do so to be 'virtuous', they take it as a social 'merit' that gives them the right to dictate to others who don't do the same thing with virtuosity similar to their own. Despite being profoundly and apologetically authoritarian, such people often refer to themselves as 'liberals'.
The typical woman in Sparta was an uneducated slave. Sparta was about 75% slaves, much higher than its peers (Athens about 30%, Roman Italy about 20%, though all these numbers are very rough generalizations across centuries).
Spartiate girls had time to sing and dance because the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done by slave women.
True, but the reason the other Greek cities had fewer slaves (Rome was still a relatively primitive single city kingdom) is because unlike Sparta they executed their POWs.
But don't imagine I'm an apologist for a proto-fascist militaristic Greek city-state. When I called Sparta's education system 'enlightened' I was being ironic.
These were people who had been living in that land for generations, but were not members of the Spartan de-facto aristocracy, and were sometimes killed by Spartans for sport lest they got to numerous.
While PNG certainly has its horrors, I think Sparta is has been a league of its own as far as terrible places to live are concerned, at least up to the early modern period.
As context, every morning we had school assembly in which us kids had to stand in ranks for a long time in an asphalt and concrete courtyard under the Australian sun while the headmaster (and others) droned authoritarian garbage at us for ages, whereupon we all had to sing "God save the Queen" (the then national anthem) before filing off to class. It was considered a privilege to be selected for the daily flag raising ceremony, though you could be punished for errors carrying it out.
Children fainting in the 40C+ temperatures and loudly cracking their heads on the hard ground as they went down were a semi-regular occurrence (I only recall it happening to me once).
Corporal punishment for speaking in class was also routine. I got that *many* times, sometimes when someone else had talked while the teacher's back was turned. The example of the punishment in front of the whole class was clearly more important than determining the culprit.
Ahh, the old school. Those were the days. I still sometimes fantasise about returning there. With a flamethrower.
The primary reason adult me never went and burned down my elementary school as a favor to 10-year-old me is that the school no longer physically exists.
At my 40 year high school reunion I was horrified to learn one of my old classmates was now a teacher at the school. I thought we'd all escaped in 1978 but it turns out we left one comrade behind.
After inquiring as to what she'd done to get the longest detention in history I proposed that after everyone had a few more drinks we should go to a service station, fill some jerry-cans then head back to the old school to do what we should have done 40 years ago. Then she'd finally be free.
She thought it was a terrible idea. She always was the class crawler.
> The lowest rates of violent punishment are in north america, where 49% of kids under 10 had experienced it.
I got an error trying to view the link, but I'm skeptical that North America would have the lowest rates of violent punishment since there are about 60+ countries where it's completely illegal, while being legal in both America and Canada.
Laws don't enforce themselves. It an incredibly common fallacy to believe that passing a law will make everyone do what the law says. cf the War on Drugs.
Sure, but I live in Finland which is one of the countries where it's illegal and I can say that attitudes are completely different from they seem to be in the US. E.g. in one 2021 poll, only 1% of Finnish parents admitted to spanking their children, though a significantly higher percentage (22%) admitted to pulling hair.
Laws do not make everyone obey them but they do often reflect and shape general attitudes.
"62% of respondents said their parents had physically disciplined them as a child. This figure has remained very similar since 2006 (Fig.
15). This survey did not ask more specifically about the content of their own experiences, but in the 2019 online survey, of people with negative experiences of parenting 74% had experienced hair-pulling and 53% had been
hit with a finger (n=436). More than a third had experiences of being belittled, ignored, spanked, rough grabbing or lashing out. (Paasivirta et al. 2019, 8-9.)"
Spanking being grouped together with a lot of other things is compatible with there being very low rates of it, as well as my own anecdotal impression that pretty much nobody does it.
Actually, that seems to prove Aella's point... As you said, 62% report violent punishment ("physical discipline") during childhood in Finland vs. 49% in the USA. Pretty sure you couldn't get away with pulling your employee's hair in Finland as punishment for her showing up late for work. If an employer did that, they would be charged with assault or battery. Same in the USA. Yet they can assault children in both countries without being charged with a crime. It just happends slightly more often in Finland.
The number Aella cited is significantly lower than ones I can find with a quick search, e.g. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1565&context=lcp says that "By the time American children reach middle and high school, eighty-five percent have been physically punished by their parents."
Also, I don't think I can adequately express how huge the difference in attitudes with regard to spanking is. I was really shocked when I first ran into American parents casually mentioning that they'd spanked their kids. On the other hand, I've seen a Finnish parent I know asking her friends "how to explain it to her kids" when the cover of an old Donald Duck magazine showed Donald's nephews covering their behinds after being spanked. The whole concept of subjecting kids to that is so alien that just the thought of having to explain to children that this is a thing that used to happen makes some parents uncomfortable.
Pulling hair is still physical violence too, definitely, but I'd say it's pretty misleading to group all physical violence together without considering the severity.
Another source I found with a quick search (I'm not sure how sensitive Substack's spam filters are so I won't put a lot of links in this comment but you can probably find it yourself) said that in 2017, 35% of American parents reported spanking their kids. While I agree with the other commenter that you cannot take self-report numbers literally when talking about stigmatized topics, the fact that over a third of American parents are okay with admitting spanking (even if only on an anonymous survey) while only 2% of Finnish parents are, does also tell something about the attitudes. It doesn't seem plausible to me to claim that a difference that large in self-report wouldn't also reflect a significant real difference.
My absolute favorite dialogue, from any TV show or film, is the following from True Detective S1:
Detective Marty Hart: That girl's not 18. Sheriff know you got under age workin here?
Jan: What do you know about where that girl's been? Where she come from? You wanna know Beth's situation 'fore she ran out on her uncle?
Detective Marty Hart: There are other places she could go.
Jan: Such holy bullshit from you. It's a woman's body, ain't it? A woman's choice.
Detective Marty Hart: Well, she don't look like a woman to me. At that age she is not equipped to make those kinda choices. But I guess you don't give a shit what kind of damage she's doin' to herself as long as you're makin' your money.
Jan: Girls walk this Earth all the time screwin' for free. Why is it you add business to the mix and boys like you can't stand the thought? I'll tell you. It's 'cause suddenly you don't own it the way you thought you did.
It's reassuring how different parts of humanity are coming to similar ideas.
There is a small school of thought in Eastern Europe that stands on the very similar grounds. "Small" is 40-60k attendees, all adults and all voluntary, they actually have to pay to attend, as it is structured as a private academy focused on self-development.
And yet the foundation of that is exactly the same ideas that Aella is expressing here. The modern society is forcing humans from birth to conform and become amenable, compliant and convenient. And only by consciously undoing that conditioning you can become a human again and claw back your agency.
What Aella had to do alone, with LSD and a lot of self-contemplation - there are places where people are helped to go through the same journey.
There are probably more pockets of sanity like this in various societies all over the world. I hope they will grow, find each other and form a seed of a new culture.
"pocket of sanity" will have free and unrestricted exit for anyone, if you don't feel like it - don't show up, no questions asked, no pressure, no real or implied consequences.
A cult will always have some kind of exit penalty. It probably will not be monetary, it will be some kind of underhanded manipulation tactic, social pressure that will try to keep you in when you decided you don't want to be in anymore.
Wow, that's the most memorable, and thoughtful, thing I've read in an age. What a masterful exploration of the idea that the worst thing you can do with kids is to violate their agency.
The other worst thing you can do with them, to my mind, is to dehumanise them by ignoring or gaslighting them (as so many parents casually do). But that's implicit in your suggestion that the problem with your childhood is that you weren't treated as a person and covered in your previous post.
Thanks for writing so candidly and intelligently, Aella.
Same! In third grade I broke my collar bone and no one took me to the doctor for two weeks bc they thought I was just being whiney. Multiple broken bones and mouth surgeries. Having to wake up early was absolutely the worst part of childhood by far. It's the worst part of adulthood, too, the days I have to do it.
There's always going to be a few kids who want to sleep until noon. We don't structure the entire fucking school system around those few kids so they won't be "traumatized". Just like we don't structure all of society around people who don't want to work.
This whole entire discussion is so breathtakingly juvenile. It's a good thing the barbarians aren't (yet) at the gates...we'd all be properly fucked.
It's settled science that school for children and especially teenages should start around 10AM. Young people have late chronotypes by default.
You'll also have to structure society around people who not only don't want to, but cannot contribute anything with their work, within the next 10-15 years, so better start thinking about this one.
yes i sent a bad typo in the first line out to 120k inboxes im sorry, it is fixed
Thanks for writing this post, I really enjoyed it! I too was abused in my childhood, enough to make me question things and look for alternatives rather than just pass down an inherited standard experience, so I’m quite grateful for that. I agree that it’s the loss of agency that is the greatest harm in your example, and results in many maladies in adults in our society. You can see many of the dehumanizing property justifications in the comments below, “children need rules to learn” “children can’t think for themselves” “you need coercion to enforce the rules” without anyone taking a step back and wondering if there’s a way to teach these things that works with their agency - or indeed if kids learn from being forced to do things vs modeling and observation.
I’ve studied many cultures and other kinds of societies around the world, and it turns out that our way of doing things is very weird and very recent in history. The species norm for 300,000 years has been treating children with autonomy and agency, with the current dominance based property mindset (also applying to women, animals, land, slaves, etc) being only a few isolated examples 10,000 years ago that spread, tumor-like.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization
This is why I practice attachment parenting with my own kids, and can happily say that they are advanced by every metric and I get constant compliments on their ‘good behavior’ (though I think of this more like good emotional regulation skills and modeling). I also can’t relate to half the issues parents complain about nowadays or I see them struggling with, because they never come up or we work through them early on without force or coercion. Modern parenting is hard without ancestral support networks, but a lot of it is self-induced I think. My kids are a lot of fun to be around and little bundles of joy, and I’m very grateful to have found alternatives to this culture’s way of doing things / churning out obedience office drones and traumatized consumers. Our culture lacks wisdom and skill when it comes to raising kids (and a lot of other things), but it can be relearned.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-vi-hunter-gatherers-playful-parenting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_parenting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/971096059/hunt-gather-parent-offers-lessons-collected-around-the-world
https://www.reddit.com/r/AttachmentParenting/
I love your description of how to love someone: to take joy in nurturing their ambitions.
I feel like I love my kids that way, and I also feel like public school is imperfect but the closest thing I have available to help me love them like you describe (nurturing their soul). But I am (and they) are also lucky that in Switzerland, school stops at 15 and apprenticeship starts. And there, society has a whole new opportunity to decide, "this new colleague may still be under 18, but they are a person, not property."
A bad apprenticeship can turn into slavery, of course. But there are structures in place to fight against treating them as property (not least of which labour and contract law: an apprentice has the same rights as any worker to give notice and go find another boss). I am an apprentice trainer and I'm proud of our program, when I think of it in terms of your essay.
Thanks for the opportunity to reflect!
That description was amazing!
I found this to be an interesting essay, with a lot of thought provoking examples. I think it raises some great points - for example, the overall thesis of "kids should have agency" I agree strongly with. A good example of this that I think today's parents are improving on the past is things like forcing kids to hug relatives - I don't do this, and I feel viscerally that forcing them to (as I was as a kid) would be wrong.
However, I found it very odd, and somewhat revealing, that you didn't really talk much about the default stance of most parents, which is "I'm trying to do what's best for my kids". I have two kids... And they're dumb, and when they're teenagers, I know they'll be dumber and have worse judgment. As toddlers, I had to force them to take medicine, physically. I used physical force only when absolutely necessary, like when it affected their health or safety, but it was the right thing to do. It is my responsibility as a parent. When they're older, I'm going to have no problem using forms of coercion like removing privileges etc. if they are behaving poorly (and generally, that means "doing behaviors that are going not overall good for them".
The whole reason most parents force their kids to do things, and remove their agency to some degree, is because (mostly) it's in the kids best interest, and the parents have the experience & knowledge to make that call.
Anyways, I liked the essay, but I felt the whole time I was waiting for this to be discussed, and it wasn't. It feels like an omission that detracts from the overall essay and leaves it incomplete imo. You don't have to be a parent to discuss, but to not understand & discuss that aspect of parenting is a huge miss.
"The whole reason most parents force their kids to do things, and remove their agency to some degree, is because (mostly) it's in the kids best interest, and the parents have the experience & knowledge to make that call."
That argument works just as well for forcing adults to do things that are in their best interests. Why should we only take away the agency of children and teenagers? Surely, if making people act in their best interests against their will is beneficial, we ought to extend that benefit to people of all ages!
most governments DO force people to act in their own best interests against their will and/or at the very least severely punish them for doing some things that are against their best interest or society's. All the laws against doing illegal drugs, VICE crimes, gambling, etc. are all designed to force people to do the right thing or not do the wrong thing.
They do occasionally, sure, but adults are allowed to make decisions that are against their best interests much more often than kids are.
If overriding people's agency to force them to "do the right thing" is beneficial, why are we only giving adults *some* of that benefit? Why not all of it?
Maybe because we expect kids to develop better judgment and decision making skills once they become adults, and we want to help them avoid making dumb mistakes they will regret soon.
A look at dysfunctional modern society with its hordes of clueless adults with poor judgement and emotional regulation skills *should* give you pause. Kids learn good judgment and all the rest through modeling, observation, and ability to practice these skills on their own in a safe environment - not coercion and lecturing. Your recommendation is the standard, the results are plainly visible around you.
Are you looking for a principled answer? Because I think that the real answer is that it is just too much work and trouble to carry that out with adults in the prime of their lives. To get them to behave you would basically have to treat them as slaves, with all of the violence (and risk of retaliatory violence) that is involved. My understanding is that is what marriage was for women for most of recorded history.
Because everything is good *in moderation*?
I think once people are adults, the argument is basically that now they get to screw they own life up, if they want.
I'm honestly curious... Do you think kids have good judgment? Do you think they know what will yield good outcomes for them down the road? Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?
"I think once people are adults, the argument is basically that now they get to screw they own life up, if they want."
That's not really an argument, it's just an assertion. The question is *why* should 18 year olds be allowed to screw up their own lives when 17 year olds aren't?
"Do you think kids have good judgment? Do you think they know what will yield good outcomes for them down the road?"
Do *adults* have good judgment? Do adults know what will yield good outcomes down the road?
Some do, some don't. Do you think that justifies denying agency to an entire group?
I can't speak for everyone, but personally, I *did* have good judgment. I knew what would yield good outcomes for me down the road, better than the people around me. Decades later, looking back at my teenage years, I can confidently say that ~every time I was forced to do something I didn't want to do, I was right and whoever forced me was wrong.
The classes I hated because I thought I'd never use what they were trying to teach me? Turns out I never used it. The times when everyone got mad because instead of doing homework, I messed around on the computer? That led directly to a lucrative career; it turns out writing code pays better than writing book reports.
"Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?"
As Aella said, "I don’t mean we should let kids do whatever they want - we don’t let adults do whatever they want".
If you had an adult cousin living with you, and all he ever wanted to do was get high and scroll on his phone, would you put up with that? I'm guessing not. But since you couldn't use force to make him do something else, you'd find another way to handle the situation.
"I knew what would yield good outcomes for me better than those around me"
If that's true, then that's a really sad commentary on those around you, or else you were an exceptional child. This is a rare case, and in that case, I'd agree, no coersion needed.
The things I was forced to do were no different from what other kids in the US are routinely forced to do. My objections were no different from the objections other kids make. I see no reason to think my ability to know what I wanted to do with my life was unique.
I think a lot of parents don't trust their kids to make good decisions for themselves, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because they never get an opportunity to practice. I got those opportunities by being stubborn and doing what I wanted regardless of what anyone else thought, and it worked out all right, but at the cost of a lot of anger and frustration. I think I, and a lot of other kids, would've been better off not having to fight for agency.
Just to be clear, your argument is that kids should have the same agency as adults, right?
> I see no reason to think my ability to know what I wanted to do with my life was unique.
Well, you're definitely wrong about that. Your situation is in fact rare. The vast majority of kids are seriously clueless.
If you fail to pass your "better judgment" down to your kids - is it really their fault, are they the ones to bear the punishments? Memeplexes/ideas are selfish and reproduce just as genes do, if they don't - they are maladaptive and weak. It's either you're just dysgenic or that idea of "better judgement" isn't a complete, self-propellng meme, but a loose collection of subjective experiences strung together, experience doesn't get passed down. Should one force one's own subjectivity on the other– to what ends?
I really only understood the first sentence. And to that, yes, you try. With some kids you mostly succeed... With some, not as much. Either way, they really aren't a finished product and require help and guidance and correction until they're adults.
If my kids need constant correction and guidance right up until adulthood, I’ll consider myself a failure as a parent. But I’d also have taken a step back and a long look in the mirror well before that, and tried something else instead. Your mentality is the standard, the results are all around you - do most adults today seem like they have good judgment, emotional regulation skills, or critical thinking? Kids learn best from observation, modeling, and a chance to practice skills on their own in a safe environment.. not coercion and lectures.
You'll say that until you have a seriously challenging kid. Or maybe you won't, and you'll just that ignorance.
Also, never said constant.
> Should I just let my kid do drugs and scroll on their phone all day, if that's what they want?
Probably not literally, but I come a lot closer to saying "yes" to this than most people would. One can protect one's kids by outright forbidding things that would/might be harmful to them, or one can protect one's kids by merely informing them of the risks/costs of potentially self-harmful actions they're considering taking and letting them do with that information as they will. In my opinion, most parents favor the former over the latter waaayyy too much, but I acknowledge that there is a place for the former, if the potential harm is particularly large and/or irreversible (I imagine the harm done by many/most recreational drugs would qualify as such, though I don't actually know that much about drugs).
I'd say a) yes I completely agree that it's better to try to explain & inform before coersion, but also b) this essay basically seems to ignore that coersion is entirely necessary in some scenarios, and depending on the kid & the situation, often
> That argument works just as well for forcing adults to do things that are in their best interests.
It doesn't. Adults are smarter than children and have more willpower. There's far less of a need to "parent" them.
"Don't force your kid to do things" is the kind of parenting advice only ivory tower elitists completely detached from reality would give. Like come on. Do you have any knowledge how stupid and undisciplined the average child is?
You commit the typical mind fallacy by citing yourself as an example. You were a smart child. The vast majority of other children are not.
Rules must be based on the norm not the exceptions.
Smart and WEIRD
>”Do you have any knowledge how stupid and undisciplined the average child is?”
And the average adult, because that’s what your advice results in. The results speak for themselves and all around you, do you think the average person today has good judgment, emotional regulation, or critical thinking skills? Kids learn best through observation, modeling, and practicing on their own in a safe environment, not coercion and lecturing.
I would say that for one, the dynamics between the state and its subjects are different from that of a parent and a child. Society is a laboratory, and its subjects the lab rats. With so many ppl, the state can afford to allow its subjects to try various things, many of which might end up being disastrous for individuals, but not necessarily for broader society. To propagate itself, the state need not concern itself with any particular gene.
Biological parents have a genetic interest in their children, and even in large families far fewer replicates with which to experiment. To survive, the parents must be concerned with their genes. Thus, rather than experimenting, they tend to use the methods that on net allowed their own existence, knowing that failure to do so may end up with the dissolution of their lineage in a way that would not likely occur with the state.
The idea is that you'd be trying to teach the kid to want what's best for them, rather than forcing them to do things they don't want to do. That stripping them of agency should be a last resort.
Greater happiness is possible in childhood than at any other point of life. It's a horrid shame to waste so much of it the way we do.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with "wasting childhood the way we do", but with respect to teaching kids to want what's best for them... That's a nice idea but in practice only goes so far. Some kids just explore the world, and try new things, and stay out of trouble... Some don't. Should I let my kids do drugs? Skip school? Drink? What about playing video games all day?
She drew the analogy to a dementia-adled parent. You might have to strip them of some agency for their own benefit. It might be very difficult to get them voluntarily engaged in something beneficial. So too with a child. But you would work very hard to do this before overiding their will entirely.
The central idea of the essay is that you should take this very seriously, and recoil from the idea of locking a child in a holding pen against their will for eight hours a day, or violently punishing them, etc. And to be looking relentlessly for better solutions to the problem. That it should be an issue of great moral concern.
Dementia addled parent is such a terrible comparison... They don't have to go build a life - compete for jobs - find their niche, their happiness. Our kids will. It's my responsibility to give them the best chance at that, balancing that against their autonomy.
An aside, describing schools as a holding pen is insane. I'm very on board that schools could be better, but that's crazy, and what's the alternative exactly? Homeschool?
The essay is less about practical realities and more about the way we as a society should view child rearing. To view the constriction of agency as a last resort, the same way you would any other person. If there are no other ways for a child to learn then resort to it. But only after you're absolutely sure there are no other ways.
I don't think holding pen is insane for a school. Forced to sit in rooms for eight hours against your will, having to ask permission even to use the bathroom. The unsolvable bullying problem. Most internment facilities have more freedom.
What's so insane about calling them holding pens? I think saying that it's insane to call them that is itself insane.
And… yeah, home school is one of several alternatives. What was your point supposed to be?
You have a point. Children start out with no idea of how to take care of themselves. The problem is, they're treated as non-agentic from the age of 1 to 18. We need some kind of system that acknowledges that a 3 year old and a 13 year old have different abilities. Of course, it doesn't help that kids have a strong habit of being confidently wrong.
I feel like modern, good parents do this - they give their kids as much agency as they deserve. Personally, I'm dying to give my kids agency if they show they can handle it.
I think past parenting practices are quite authoritarian and pretty much never consider letting up until they have to, but modern parenting has come a long way.
The world isn't as tough of a place, too. On the other hand, the rise of helicopter parenting is troubling. While they might not beat their kids, they wind up strangling their autonomy.
Yes. And her substitution of “child” for “negro” kind of elides the fact that most of what the racists said about the latter is actually true of the former.
"...but this time it actually IS true! The science says so!" has a pretty bad track record on that sort of claim. I mean, sure, past results, no guarantee of future performance. "This strain of dismissive apologetics sounds familiar. What if we're making that exact same terrible error again?" still seems like a hypothesis worthy of diligent scrutiny.
I dunno, they seem different in kind to me. Very obviously, children below a certain age threshold just don’t have the ability to make their own choices or take care of themselves. Then there’s a gradual transition to the point where they more or less do. You wouldn’t (presumably) think about “races below a certain [whatever your racialist metric might be] threshold” being incapable in a comparable way, or debate at what point and to what extent they should be free to exert agency in the world. In the first instance, we are talking price. In the second, the whole premise is no longer in play.
The main purpose of school as far as I can tell is childcare. Socialising second. Then education. My son complains every morning about going and I feel for him (and tell him so) but when the parents are out all day, what do you do? Thinking about lifestyle changes but we're not there yet.
Depending on who's purposes we are talking about, the main purpose of school is indoctrination.
Oh I don't know. They learn about emotional intelligence and resilience and put on plays and do "just dance" and other fun stuff these days. It's not a bad place to spend the day IMO...
How do you square "it's not a bad place to spend the day" with the fact that your son complains every morning? If I can ask, what is the topic of his complaint?
(not an attack, I don't have children, I'm just curious, and I am sure both can be true in different ways)
Well, as Aella mentions, getting up is a drag. He doesn't like being late but doesn't want to rush, says it's boring... But if he's home, he complains of boredom too, wants to spend all his time playing fortnite, and is difficult to motivate anyway. They're all different of course. My daughter is super active and not so into screens, but needs someone to play with her 100% of the time, which can be exhausting 😂. I think school does a better job than I would of offering them a variety of different activities. And hanging out with peers is valuable of course.
So you're saying your son would be happier at a different kind of school?
I'm not sure. He has plenty of friends and his teachers say he's adorable, so he seems to be thriving there. When we talk about going travelling for a few months he insists it shouldn't be until he finishes primary school…
It's simple, you don't ask a child to look after themselves nutritionally, why would you think they have any say in how they are reared? How would a child know what would be good for them?
Actually children are fully capable of eating nutritionally healthy food if given the opportunity, people back in the day didn't micromanage their children's eating habits. Children have eaten autonomously in all ages and in all cultures. Chris van Tulliken goes into this a little bit in his book. The reason you seemingly have to "look after your children nutritionally" is that the western food supply has largely been poisoned by food that isn't food.
Right, so they can't then. As we both agree. I don't know why you are telling me they can elsewhere.
They learn about emotional intelligence? Since when? I definitely wasn't taught about that in school
Yeah schools evolve, contrary to popular belief. They're always bringing in specialists to talk to the kids about everything from sex to cyber security. It's not perfect but they're trying.
How do I get this teaching? Since I missed it and society is admitting that I missed it?
If you're an adult, you have the entire internet at your disposal! 😜 Just be curious and follow your interests?
I agree that we should give kids agency when possible, and I too made a vow to remember what it was like to be a little kid, although I wasn’t as diligent about keeping it.
Having said that, I am now a parent, and I also have the experience of how kids are basically testing boundaries all the time. Giving them control over one choice often just leads to the next choice down the line - “thanks for letting me use the tablet for half an hour, now can I have another half an hour?” and so on. You typically have to set the boundary somewhere, and I’ve found it often works better for the kid if you are relatively strict rather than dragging out endless negotiations. You can’t just give them “all the agency” without poor results.
Yes, school could typically be much better. But also as one example kids really should learn to read, even if they don’t feel like it. One shouldn’t just kick the can down the road to when they’re an adult and say they can just learn it then. Not to say that everything is so simple.
Aella appears to have learned to read at home (most home educated children do); it's a mistake to conflate schooling with education.
Yes, some kids do indeed learn to read at home.
Do you negotiate like this with other adults? Does the kid have a fun enjoyable environment outside of the tablet? With any modern overstimulating thing, it’s less about controlling access and more about abundance of alternatives and modeling good self-regulation. See the ‘Rat Park’ heroin water experiments.
Look, I totally connect with the sentiment about agency being the thing that matters. But I have no idea how to parent without very frequent resort to coercion. My kids want to know where’s the limit, and they treat that as an experimental question. When I choose not to resort to coercion, it’s often temporary because it just advances the experiment to the next stage. You can’t base the evaluation on if there is coercion or not, or the amount of coercion, because that entirely depends on what the child does with the agency that it has. The question must be where is coercion used, what is the child being coerced to do, and is it in his or her long term interest to do it. There’s no escaping that.
Hmmm.... Do kids want to know *your* limit, or are kids looking to you to show them where *reality's* limits lie?
I’d say that they should evolutionary be primarily interested in society at large, but any figure of authority that is correlated with society at large serves as a valid proxy.
That's not what I'm getting at. Hmm...
If they're hiking next to a ravine, and they've never fallen down into something like it, the only way they know it's dangerous is from other people. There's a limit to their real safety (the edge of the cliff), but it's not one they can directly learn about without severe consequence.
But you, the parent, know about that limit, so you can teach it. You can show them where the limit imposed by reality lies, without them having to suffer the consequences of testing that limit.
Kids, AFAIK, want to explore the world. They also (AFAIK) want to feel safe while doing so. You, the adult, can show them where the reality-imposed limits to their safety lie, and they can then play around exploring within that.
I bet you get better results when you feel (and show that feeling) how severe / important some limit is; or when you explain *why* that limit is; than when you just insist upon / impose one?
There is a difference between feeling safe and being safe. The ability to explain the difference to child varies a lot on the degree of disconnect there (some things are much more dangerous then they instinctively appear) and the age of the child. And even to the extent you can, kids are often, at least from the perspective of adults, including themselves at a later age, pretty poorly calibrated on risk/reward tradeoffs even into their teenage years (and in some cases beyond). There is no strict line between safe/unsafe, there are very few perfectly safe activities, so some measure of risk/reward has to be applied and kids are, in general, not great at that.
I have an uncle that when he was ~7-8 or so liked to bang his hand on the burners of the stove top whenever he came home. The reward here is pretty minimal, cool noise, some minor bravado, the risk fairly substantial. My grandma explained to him that this was dangerous, showed him that a stove can still be extremely hot even if it doesn't look it, told him not do it every time he did it, and one day the stove was very hot and he burned the shit out of his hand. Enough that he he still, to this day, has some (fairly minor, but real) disfigurement and disability in that hand. Of course it also was extremely painful and took months to fully heal. Perhaps a stronger level of coercion is justified here?
Attachment parenting is the answer you are looking for. Big comment above with sources.
FWIW, I seemed to be one of the only people who wasn't horrified by your other post, mostly because you seem fine or even better than fine. But also, I also remember what it's like being a kid and am constantly dismayed/confused how no one else seems to ... I have no idea if that's connected.
And also, having to get up early for school ABSOLUTELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION is the single worst (I wouldn't say "traumatizing" but consistent every day misery making for years on end) thing about my childhood and it's not even a question. While no one cares about that, yet at the same time they are bothered that I am not at all bothered by other things that happened, that they consider abusive and I think weren't a big deal, or at least left no lasting impact.
Public school is mostly just fun in elementary. It's socializing and playing and singing songs and easy fun learning. Middle and high school IMO should go and are actively harmful to learning.
I feel you on the agency thing, but also I think you're either thinking of older kids or not realizing just how big of dumb asses a lot of kids are, because you really cannot allow a kid under 8 or so to do what they want without them probably dying. You are probably stronger willed and more agentic than most, as well. Which shows that the attempts to rob you of agency didn't work anyway, given you're still in possession of that faculty.
Yeah, a very common blind spot of intelligent, high agency people is a complete failure to conceptualize a "normie" theory of mind. Very common in Aella's (always interesting!) work.
"... not realizing just how big of dumb asses a lot of kids are..."
Yes, but no -- it depends. Nobody understands the huge range of capabilities of kids. A kindergarten class can have a bigger range than class to teacher. Average 5 y.o. would score *zero* adult IQ. There are 1 or 2 11 y.o. in most classes smarter than average adults.
Eveveryone against schools' child abuse needs to read this research you won't find anywhere else:
"Skipping Grades and Other Gifted Acceleration /
Tables showing when to skip grades or go to college early."
https://substack.com/@enonh/p-151439641
a follow-up to: "Real measures of intelligence / Rasch measures vs. IQ - How much smarter are you than a kid?"
https://substack.com/@enonh/p-149185059
No, I think that’s pretty feminine - for many boys it’s realizing that their misbehavior can have lifelong consequences in late childhood or very early adolescence.
In general I don't think childless people should be advocating for child-rights or criticizing parents. Parenting is very difficult, and the more children you have, the more constraints are placed on your actions. In my experience the vast majority of child-rights advocates are themselves identifying with the children and have no experience being on the other side of that divide.
Well given that children can't really advocate for themselves, then if childless people identify with the child, aren't they exactly who should advocate for them? Otherwise it seems rather one-sided, parents are perfectly capable of advocating for themselves.
Parents were children once, so they have both sides, and are more than willing to share their opinions on the matter with other parents. It's hard to take anything a childless person has to say about this seriously.
ALL people were children once. And parents, by virtue of being parents, are liable to identify with themselves and with other parents more than with their children or with children in general. If someone advocating for children while having none of their own means they sometimes take the children's side too much, so what? Someone should! Parents advocating for themselves also sometimes take their own side too much; turnabout is fair play. And considering that parents are often the very people that children need advocating AGAINST, the fact that parents can advocate for children is not as much of a comfort as you seem to think it is. There's a conflict of interest there. And in any case, I don't actually see a lot of parents seriously advocating for children in a way that focuses on the fact that they're real actual people.
> It's hard to take anything a childless person has to say about this seriously.
Why? If they say something that's wrong, show how it's wrong. Don't just dismiss it out of hand because they don't have children.
I couldn't disagree more.
Lots of things are difficult. That doesn't make it okay to do whatever you want in service of making them easier. Farming is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to mistreat the animals. Owning a business is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to overwork or underpay your employees. Parenting is difficult, but that doesn't make it okay to mistreat your children.
I'm especially unsympathetic to the argument that parenting is harder the more children you have. Okay, so stop at one? Nobody is making you have more. Of course, parenting should be easier--we as a society make it harder than it needs to be in a multitude of ways--but ultimately, if you're a parent, you have a responsibility to your child. You owe it to them to treat them well, respect their rights, and advocate for their needs and their well-being, and if you're not willing or able to do that, then you should not have a child.
Lastly, of course advocates for children's rights are identifying with children! Why aren't you? If you're a parent, you should identify with your child, because you should want the best for them!
"I'm especially unsympathetic to the argument that parenting is harder the more children you have. Okay, so stop at one?" I'll categorize this as 'Please speak directly into this microphone."
What?
I partially agree. It seems most people who advocate for youth rights are either still youth themselves or do not yet have children. But that makes sense: The closer one is to the time when one was denied rights, the more important the absence of those rights. As a long-time youth rights activist and a parent of an adult child, I see the need for youth rights and the obstacles to youth emancipation. Aella's not wrong for the most part, she just hasn't yet reckoned with the valid problems caused by treating youth as fully human. Any parent knows you can't give a 3 year old a "choice" in most things. However, I started working (my own choice) at 12 and would routinely travel 8 miles on my own at that age to get to work. Compare that with a modern 18 year old who can't even cook for themselves or do laundry and, well, I think we need a little more independence and youth rights and a little less "protecting the children" and dependence.
Oh, totally agree with that - all for free range parenting and giving children more responsibility. But this is a cultural thing - individual parents are not free to choose that even if they want it due to fear of child protective services. This is very real and I know multiple people who have had ACS called on them for 'neglect.' I'm glad to see more legal protections popping up in some states for leaving kids unsupervised.
Exactly. The problem with the current system is that all youth (under 18 in the USA) regardless of age, maturity or intelligence are treated as essentially mentally incompetent and there's no way for them to opt out of society's "protection". That's my personal solution to the "youth rights" problem: allow anyone who is informed, capable and who wants equality the opportunity to opt out of being protected like a child and opt into full citizenship with all the rights and duties associated therewith.
Emancipation exists, including in US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors#United_States
Still, part of the problem is the binarity of that switch.
Yes, but in most (possibly all) US states youth/minor emancipation is so difficult that most 18 year olds and probably a sizable portion of 25 year olds would not qualify. They only achieve emancipation based solely on achieving 18 years of age.
Well, I would argue that the system's change should be more towards not giving them the automatic emancipation :D But, again, binarity is more of a problem than the specifics of switch.
This. Likewise, Thomas Paine, John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe should not speak about how Southerns should run their plantations, because they clearly lack the perspective of the other side.
Seriously, even with Dobbs, raising a kid is a choice parents make. Bringing a new person into this world without their consent -- just like removing a person from this world without their consent -- is a weighty choice which will have repercussions for decades, and sometimes shape the remainder of one's life. If there was no ethical way to raise kids, that does not that parents would get a free pass on using unethical ways, it simply would mean that they are monsters, just like the plantation owners. (This being said, I strongly suspect that it is possible for some people to raise kids in an ethical way.) Personally, I will likely not have kids because the one relationship I was in where this was an option had a lack of emotional stability which would have made having kids a clear ethics violation.
Your argument also follows a pattern where it is asserted that only $GROUP should be allowed to voice an opinion on $TOPIC which mostly affects them. Besides ($GROUP, $TOPIC) being (parents, child-rearing), other common pairs are (women, abortion laws), (Blacks, racism), (rape survivors, rape), (handicapped, inclusion) and so on. I will grant you that in each case, the group will likely be able to make contributions which other people could not, and we should listen to their points of view. But at the end of the day, policy discussions should be intellectual, not emotional discussions, and this means that anyone with the ability to make intelligent arguments can contribute.
I am not a bat, and do not have any idea what the subjective experience of being a bat would feel like. If we are discussion the conversation of bats, then we should certainly hear what the bats wanted to contribute (alas, they are not making any arguments which we can understand), but at the end of the day some non-bat academics can still debate this intellectually. If we let human biologists debate bat issues, then we should certainly let Aella discuss the parent-child-relationship.
If you want to hear the perspective of someone raising 5 children in this way, check out the Tim Ferris interview with Aaron Stupple. Or read his book The Sovereign Child. Fascinating stuff.
Someone will chime in a say it wouldn’t possibly work with 6 kids, and everyone will nod along unthinkingly despite having 2-4.
When raising our kids, I got a good look at the US educational system. Parents blame the teachers and teachers blame the parents. The primary purpose really is to keep the kids in school for long enough for the parents to maintain employment. The teachers are underpaid and overworked, being given just enough time to present the information, with little or none to help the kids understand it. We don't pay to get our kids educated or engaged, we just pay to give them an info dump.
We tried home schooling for a year. The issue with most parents home schooling is that they aren't home schooling to improve the kids' education, they're doing it to selectively reduce the information the kids receive. The home schooled families we interacted with were extremely maladjusted (parents and kids). The most extreme example was the woman who referred to Christmas ornaments as "Satan's balls." We now always hang our Xmas ornaments in pairs.
Yeah, homeschooling is highly dependent on the home environment - and the parents' skills. As a graduate of homeschooling myself, it did have some advantages, but the fact that it was nakedly indoctrination (literally threw out textbooks on sex and evolution) has lingered. And my very Christian family regards the fact that I think for myself as a failure on the school's part.
Oh, yes. Most people massively underestimate the effort involved in teaching. Although there are exceptions, we learned that the urge to homeschool is usually indicative of some Dunning-Krueger issues.
Another corker Aella.
Simbari education doesn't sound too different from the Agoge system of ancient Sparta. Of course Sparta had an *enlightened* education system. Almost alone among Mediterranean cultures of its day it also educated girls. Not to be homemakers, but to sing, dance and compose poetry.
Most modern Western education systems are based on the Humboldtian model of 19th century Prussia. It was not only explicitly militarist but was deliberately designed to crush critical thinking in the young so as to nip out the rebellious tendencies that were then threatening regimes across Europe. To this day formal mass education is more about stifling than encouraging critical thinking.
A.S. Neill saw how abusive that is and how it destroyed the natural, playful curiosity of children, making it necessary to indoctrinate them under threat of punishment rather than educate them via their love of learning. So in the early 20th century he started Summerhill school for kids too intractable to be educated in the regular system.
Problem was, it soon became evident that these 'drop out' kids were getting better academic results than the ones in the formal system and soon the upper middle class parents of compliant kids wanted them to go to Summerhill too. Of course they immediately started applying financial and political pressure to ensure Summerhill was more 'normal' - especially in regard to compulsory class attendance and gender segregation - and though Summerhill continues today as an 'alternative' school its differences and freedoms are a shadow of those initiated by Neill.
I could go on for as long as you did about the oppressive abusiveness of our education systems but I'll just note what I consider to be one of the worst effects of this facsimile of 'learning'.
Many (most?) educated adults equate being educated with being able to uncritically swallow the narrow interpretations of 'knowledge' offered by 'appropriate' authorities and regurgitate a slightly paraphrased version on demand. They not only consider being able and willing to do so to be 'virtuous', they take it as a social 'merit' that gives them the right to dictate to others who don't do the same thing with virtuosity similar to their own. Despite being profoundly and apologetically authoritarian, such people often refer to themselves as 'liberals'.
The typical woman in Sparta was an uneducated slave. Sparta was about 75% slaves, much higher than its peers (Athens about 30%, Roman Italy about 20%, though all these numbers are very rough generalizations across centuries).
Spartiate girls had time to sing and dance because the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done by slave women.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-ii-spartan-equality/
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iii-spartan-women/
True, but the reason the other Greek cities had fewer slaves (Rome was still a relatively primitive single city kingdom) is because unlike Sparta they executed their POWs.
But don't imagine I'm an apologist for a proto-fascist militaristic Greek city-state. When I called Sparta's education system 'enlightened' I was being ironic.
Oh, but the slaves of the Spartans were not -- primarily -- PoWs.
The bulk of the slaves were Helots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots
These were people who had been living in that land for generations, but were not members of the Spartan de-facto aristocracy, and were sometimes killed by Spartans for sport lest they got to numerous.
While PNG certainly has its horrors, I think Sparta is has been a league of its own as far as terrible places to live are concerned, at least up to the early modern period.
Yeah, that's true too.
When I said POWs I was probably inappropriately using it as shorthand for both soldiers and civilians captured during Sparta's wars.
And yeah, Sparta sounded like a horrible place to live, even for the Spartiates.
When I was in primary school (i.e. 6 or 7 years old) our teacher told us this story as if the boy was a moral exemplar for us.
https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=shaw&book=greeks&story=fox
As context, every morning we had school assembly in which us kids had to stand in ranks for a long time in an asphalt and concrete courtyard under the Australian sun while the headmaster (and others) droned authoritarian garbage at us for ages, whereupon we all had to sing "God save the Queen" (the then national anthem) before filing off to class. It was considered a privilege to be selected for the daily flag raising ceremony, though you could be punished for errors carrying it out.
Children fainting in the 40C+ temperatures and loudly cracking their heads on the hard ground as they went down were a semi-regular occurrence (I only recall it happening to me once).
Corporal punishment for speaking in class was also routine. I got that *many* times, sometimes when someone else had talked while the teacher's back was turned. The example of the punishment in front of the whole class was clearly more important than determining the culprit.
Ahh, the old school. Those were the days. I still sometimes fantasise about returning there. With a flamethrower.
The primary reason adult me never went and burned down my elementary school as a favor to 10-year-old me is that the school no longer physically exists.
At my 40 year high school reunion I was horrified to learn one of my old classmates was now a teacher at the school. I thought we'd all escaped in 1978 but it turns out we left one comrade behind.
After inquiring as to what she'd done to get the longest detention in history I proposed that after everyone had a few more drinks we should go to a service station, fill some jerry-cans then head back to the old school to do what we should have done 40 years ago. Then she'd finally be free.
She thought it was a terrible idea. She always was the class crawler.
Appreciate the links! Ended up spending quite a few hours reading his work
> The lowest rates of violent punishment are in north america, where 49% of kids under 10 had experienced it.
I got an error trying to view the link, but I'm skeptical that North America would have the lowest rates of violent punishment since there are about 60+ countries where it's completely illegal, while being legal in both America and Canada.
Laws don't enforce themselves. It an incredibly common fallacy to believe that passing a law will make everyone do what the law says. cf the War on Drugs.
Sure, but I live in Finland which is one of the countries where it's illegal and I can say that attitudes are completely different from they seem to be in the US. E.g. in one 2021 poll, only 1% of Finnish parents admitted to spanking their children, though a significantly higher percentage (22%) admitted to pulling hair.
Laws do not make everyone obey them but they do often reflect and shape general attitudes.
In this context it's much better to look at surveys that ask people about their childhood instead of current parents.
From the same survey (translated):
"62% of respondents said their parents had physically disciplined them as a child. This figure has remained very similar since 2006 (Fig.
15). This survey did not ask more specifically about the content of their own experiences, but in the 2019 online survey, of people with negative experiences of parenting 74% had experienced hair-pulling and 53% had been
hit with a finger (n=436). More than a third had experiences of being belittled, ignored, spanked, rough grabbing or lashing out. (Paasivirta et al. 2019, 8-9.)"
Spanking being grouped together with a lot of other things is compatible with there being very low rates of it, as well as my own anecdotal impression that pretty much nobody does it.
Actually, that seems to prove Aella's point... As you said, 62% report violent punishment ("physical discipline") during childhood in Finland vs. 49% in the USA. Pretty sure you couldn't get away with pulling your employee's hair in Finland as punishment for her showing up late for work. If an employer did that, they would be charged with assault or battery. Same in the USA. Yet they can assault children in both countries without being charged with a crime. It just happends slightly more often in Finland.
The number Aella cited is significantly lower than ones I can find with a quick search, e.g. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1565&context=lcp says that "By the time American children reach middle and high school, eighty-five percent have been physically punished by their parents."
Also, I don't think I can adequately express how huge the difference in attitudes with regard to spanking is. I was really shocked when I first ran into American parents casually mentioning that they'd spanked their kids. On the other hand, I've seen a Finnish parent I know asking her friends "how to explain it to her kids" when the cover of an old Donald Duck magazine showed Donald's nephews covering their behinds after being spanked. The whole concept of subjecting kids to that is so alien that just the thought of having to explain to children that this is a thing that used to happen makes some parents uncomfortable.
Pulling hair is still physical violence too, definitely, but I'd say it's pretty misleading to group all physical violence together without considering the severity.
Another source I found with a quick search (I'm not sure how sensitive Substack's spam filters are so I won't put a lot of links in this comment but you can probably find it yourself) said that in 2017, 35% of American parents reported spanking their kids. While I agree with the other commenter that you cannot take self-report numbers literally when talking about stigmatized topics, the fact that over a third of American parents are okay with admitting spanking (even if only on an anonymous survey) while only 2% of Finnish parents are, does also tell something about the attitudes. It doesn't seem plausible to me to claim that a difference that large in self-report wouldn't also reflect a significant real difference.
My absolute favorite dialogue, from any TV show or film, is the following from True Detective S1:
Detective Marty Hart: That girl's not 18. Sheriff know you got under age workin here?
Jan: What do you know about where that girl's been? Where she come from? You wanna know Beth's situation 'fore she ran out on her uncle?
Detective Marty Hart: There are other places she could go.
Jan: Such holy bullshit from you. It's a woman's body, ain't it? A woman's choice.
Detective Marty Hart: Well, she don't look like a woman to me. At that age she is not equipped to make those kinda choices. But I guess you don't give a shit what kind of damage she's doin' to herself as long as you're makin' your money.
Jan: Girls walk this Earth all the time screwin' for free. Why is it you add business to the mix and boys like you can't stand the thought? I'll tell you. It's 'cause suddenly you don't own it the way you thought you did.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2704380/quotes/
I am sure you are a great person in real life, but that is one of the worst excerpts from a script that I have ever heard.
What?
Given what later happens regarding the character in question, I'd say both interlocutors are terrible people.
It's reassuring how different parts of humanity are coming to similar ideas.
There is a small school of thought in Eastern Europe that stands on the very similar grounds. "Small" is 40-60k attendees, all adults and all voluntary, they actually have to pay to attend, as it is structured as a private academy focused on self-development.
And yet the foundation of that is exactly the same ideas that Aella is expressing here. The modern society is forcing humans from birth to conform and become amenable, compliant and convenient. And only by consciously undoing that conditioning you can become a human again and claw back your agency.
What Aella had to do alone, with LSD and a lot of self-contemplation - there are places where people are helped to go through the same journey.
There are probably more pockets of sanity like this in various societies all over the world. I hope they will grow, find each other and form a seed of a new culture.
How would you differentiate counterculture "pockets of sanity" from a cult?
Difference will be in the exit policy.
"pocket of sanity" will have free and unrestricted exit for anyone, if you don't feel like it - don't show up, no questions asked, no pressure, no real or implied consequences.
A cult will always have some kind of exit penalty. It probably will not be monetary, it will be some kind of underhanded manipulation tactic, social pressure that will try to keep you in when you decided you don't want to be in anymore.
> a cult will always have some kind of exit penalty
AFAIK, this is a brilliant summary; thank you.
A friend of mine has suggested for years ...
Force is the issue:
Sex by (mutual) choice is often phenomenal, and sometimes not so good.
Sex by force is considered one of the worst things in our society.
Learning by choice is similarly often amazing
And with force -- it's as similar as lovemaking is to rape.
Wow, that's the most memorable, and thoughtful, thing I've read in an age. What a masterful exploration of the idea that the worst thing you can do with kids is to violate their agency.
The other worst thing you can do with them, to my mind, is to dehumanise them by ignoring or gaslighting them (as so many parents casually do). But that's implicit in your suggestion that the problem with your childhood is that you weren't treated as a person and covered in your previous post.
Thanks for writing so candidly and intelligently, Aella.
I am from the same alien planet as Aella.
I can confirm that the most traumatic part of my youth was waking up early.
I had multiple operations to my mouth, several broken bones, and knew from the age of six that my father did not care about me.
None of that compares to the suffering I experienced from going to school early every morning.
Same! In third grade I broke my collar bone and no one took me to the doctor for two weeks bc they thought I was just being whiney. Multiple broken bones and mouth surgeries. Having to wake up early was absolutely the worst part of childhood by far. It's the worst part of adulthood, too, the days I have to do it.
Yes, it would be the worst part of my adulthood if Covid hadn’t gifted me work-from-home ….
Exactly!
There's always going to be a few kids who want to sleep until noon. We don't structure the entire fucking school system around those few kids so they won't be "traumatized". Just like we don't structure all of society around people who don't want to work.
This whole entire discussion is so breathtakingly juvenile. It's a good thing the barbarians aren't (yet) at the gates...we'd all be properly fucked.
It's settled science that school for children and especially teenages should start around 10AM. Young people have late chronotypes by default.
You'll also have to structure society around people who not only don't want to, but cannot contribute anything with their work, within the next 10-15 years, so better start thinking about this one.