Harm is Human

Like all people, children need a degree of harm in their lives to sustain them. It is an essential function of living in a physical world that they should fall. It is part of their right to life, if any such thing can be said to exist, and an essential fact of their humanity. Whenever adults intervene to prevent this essential fact of life, they are doing so on the very same faulty intuitions that put the child into harm's way to begin with. A child jumps from a high branch without thinking and breaks a leg upon hitting the ground. An adult speeds his vehicle on the straightaways only to loose control around a sharp bend. If it can be argued that children need to be forcefully withheld from getting themselves into situations that entail risk, then the same could also be argued for adults. That, or we could just accept that harm is a fact of life, prevent it when we see it, but otherwise not let the little things bring so much trouble.

Both children and adults have systems of repression to deter them from harming themselves or others, with one crucial difference. The actions of adults in the world are governed by laws, in this example, speed limits, but the freedom to exceed such limitations still remains with them. Until vehicles are built such that they can not exceed 20 miles per hour, for instance, the ability to step on the gas and place oneself into a situation entailing risk at higher speeds is entirely within the adult's control. And as much as the adult seems to make such accommodations to such freedom on their own behalf, they seem to want to deny children the same. They want to manually enforce that children can not even by force of will place themselves into situations that entail risk, and therefore, induce the ease of knowing their children are safe.

But are they? We all know feeling a child is safe carries more weight than a child's actual physical proximity to safety, but that is a separate issue.

The point being made here is that all interactions between children and adults are governed by a battle of wills, sometimes they cooperate and other times no, but every interaction of either consent or dissent takes place between two separate wills. The adult's will, in this case the caretaker's, expresses itself through the repression of the child's (whether the child's will is legitimate or not) on the excuse that it is doing so for the celhild's wl being--only superficially attempting to justify itself in the terms of the child, entailing repression. The child's will finds self expression through resisting the adult's repression--regardless of whether the repression is legitimate or not. Likewise, it doesn't care to be justified by the laws of adults, entailing jeopardy.

The ambiguity regarding the legitimacy of these opposing worldviews (between jeopardy and repression...both alternate forms of each other) allows for objectivity to reign once the rationales between either perspective have been given time to play themselves out. In this universe, children can not be right all the time, and adults can not be right all the time, just as if we were talking about the relationship between any two people. However intuitively this may lend itself, adults tend to presuppose that their will carries automatic legitimacy on the grounds that it is older, and therefore, anything an adult attempts, in this case, for the purpose of protecting children from harm, inevitably accomplishes its goal. In actuality, the adult exercises its faulty judgment about the care of another human being that has fallen as children for themselves when deciding about which branch to fall from.

All is a function of their natures.