Sunday, August 28, 2011

Hating Kids

It is a fact that some people don't deal well with kids, but do those same people genuinely hate the existence of kids? That is what I hear when someone says they "don't like kids"--that they would rather kids not exist. It is plausible someone could be so scared of kids, (viewing them as fragile beings physically and or emotionally) that they fear contact with them, but that isn't "hating" kids. The phenomenon of hating kids probably just comes from thinking they have no tangible value or worth (to them). Its akin to hating the neighbors obnoxious ugly puppy that just yaps all day.

My general thought is that society divorces harm and safety from love and hate. It's almost like, loving a child puts you in the "potential for harm" category, and hating a child puts you in the "no potential for harm" group. The rationale is that loving kids puts you in their path, and hating kids causes you to stay away. Therefore, it becomes more advisable to make like you hate kids than to express any kind of love for them, because then society views you as too distant from them to be a threat.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Childhood as Disability?

People who would equate children with adults often make the observation that the adult world is full of people who display little qualitative difference from children (such as people with various developmental disabilities). On this basis, they make the case that children shouldn't be guaranteed any special provisions that adults with mental impairments aren't already able to receive, and that furthermore, to enforce these special provisions for children above adults creates its own form of ageism. It is the case made for equivocation between the disabled adult and the growing child.

What this viewpoint ignores is the very real biological differences between children and adults that further differentiate a child from a disabled adult. A child should not be considered disabled because they fail to perform at adult capacity. Children perform to the capacity that their developing physiology determine on the whole. They benefit from a comparison to others of their age group because it assists caretakers in identifying those who are under performing. Equating an adult's capacities to a child's is an inherently unfair comparison. If a comparison is drawn between children and adults, suddenly every child is considered disabled--their under performance is attributed to their "childhood disability" even if they are in fact very gifted for their age, and it takes the importance off those who are having difficulty even keeping up with their own age level.

If childhood were a disability, it would be a very strange one:


  • One hundred percent of the population has it at least once in their life (for the first 12 years). In all healthily maturing individuals who have this disability, its chance of complete remittance is extremely high, if not one hundred percent, within specified and fairly predictable time lines (for example: normally developing children usually begin thinking logically during the "concrete-observational stage" of the disability...etc.).
  • Its symptoms reveal themselves in almost all areas of functioning, from the physical to the cognitive, from behaviors to personality (for example: magical thinking, egotistical thinking, lack of awareness of mental states, false beliefs, failing conservation tasks, centration in problem solving, lack of numerical thinking, lack of hypothetical reasoning, lack of adequate physical mobility due to small stature, incomplete perceptions of the physical properties of objects, cause and effect, physiological growth factors influencing drug tolerance and susceptibility to disease, incomplete recognition of the self, incomplete understanding of morality...etc.) 
  • This "disability" can gather other real disabilities around it to confound a child even more, which can be very common over time but not all at once, (for example: learning disabilities, motor skills disorders, conduct disorders, ADHD, ODD, Autism, Aspergers, Separation Anxiety, pica, tic disorders, elimination disorders, attachment issues, mutism...etc.).

In all seriousness, owing to the widespread and universal nature of "childhood," it seems fairly obvious that it shouldn't be considered a disability in the same way that a physical or mental handicap could, whether the individual is a child or an adult. There are many qualitative and quantitative differences between children and adults that have to be respected and attended to in separate but equal ways. Furthermore, a child needs special provisions in our society so that they can physically and mentally participate in the context of the larger adult-centric environment to an equal degree. Adults with mental deficits need another set of supports to accomplish the same ends.

It is true that adults can have all these conditions ascribed to childhood, and it's my thinking that all adults maintain these impairments into adulthood, reappearing in different forms and contexts relative to their cognitive and physiological spheres in society, but to equate the two seems completely ignorant to their mutual uniqueness.

Adult-centrism is far more ageist than attending to a child's developmental differences.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Under My Thumb

I wasn't cut out to work with kids. I'm no good in the female-dominated world of childcare. It was rather disheartening to see how they treat the kids, but what do I know? They're the professionals, I'm just the caring young man. The children would have eaten me alive.

I'm too nice. I can't yell at kids. That's the personality issue that can not be undone. I am too patient to work with kids, too passive. I can't adequately take out my personal frustrations on a kid. Therefore, I'm no good in that line of work.

Adults thrive on keeping children living under their thumb, which is probably why I was so unsuccessful at passing myself off as an adult.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Flash Mob Generation

The youth street riots in England show us what happens when government flat out ignores the needs of young people for too long. When government no longer seems to work for the people, regardless of age or social class, the people become disillusioned with it, and angry with it, and angry with the society that embraces it. The behavior of the rioters is reprehensible and by no means do I wish to endorse it, as there is no doubt it has nothing to do with legitimate protest. There's been a lot of speculation about the cause though, and a lot of accusations against indirect cultural influences, but no inciting incident or clear motivation can be tagged. This is simply because the uprisings are instead the inevitable product of years and years of pent-up social frustration with a civil society that has continuously sidelined the millennial generation.

It comes with great shame to me, being a member of that generation, that they have resorted to this, but while I can't endorse their unbridled destructiveness, I can at least sympathize with the spark of frustration that caused it. I seem to remember a year or so prior to this unrest, the UK government unequivocally shouting down mass youth protests--legitimate, non-violent protests--against the government's insistence on shutting down student loans and increasing interest rates on them, all while tuition in the UK is set to double by next year, and all while youth unemployment is up to 20% in the UK.

The old guard in government, who rode through college in the age of state-paid, free tuition, effectively see nothing wrong with sending young people out into the world with debts reaching up to six figures--and while that is good news for the same "old guard" special interests (who never have to share any of the fiscal burden), it is bad news for young people who would have to make the sacrifice. So the young people fought, and the government refused to listen, and when the government no longer listens, the young people got frustrated.

And they have a right to be frustrated. They've been given no reason to think the government actually works for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, and it's because it hasn't worked for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, for decades. It hasn't because it has surrendered its duties to the wealthy and the corporations, who have done nothing but pocket the benefits for themselves. With average citizens being unable to affect change against massive special interests who pay their way into politician's pockets, they lose faith in the system, they lose faith in democracy, and they lose faith in civil society. Once that happens, they constitute for themselves a civil disorder--and it may very well be a psychological release of pent-up energies, a joy ride of smashing and looting--but it has its roots with the unresponsiveness of society.

What shames me about the riots is the indiscriminate path of their destructiveness, affecting small business owners and other private property in particular. These local merchants and residents did not deserve being so much as touched, as they had nothing to do with the government being unresponsive to the needs of young people. The young should have been using their social media to a call for non-violent resistance and organize walk-outs and sit down strikes. All they accomplished in pursuing violence was to throw their oppressive government into overdrive. Thousands of arrests have been made, and youth curfews have spread all over the world (Philadelphia for example). Instead of dismantling civil society, young people should stop it from being able to function. The government has to be starved by its disaffected until it realizes why it needs them.

If government no longer works for you, you ought to no longer work for it. It's called the social contract.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Gendered Corruption

If indeed we believe that culture corrupts our kids, why does the biggest, most evil influence always lay at the feet of what we find unacceptable? Would not acceptable things, such as free market consumerism, also be corrupting them? Is corruption only tolerable when a child is corrupted by something we like, or does a child truly cease being corrupted by certain things, and where is that line drawn?

We wonder why the path to manhood is fraught with so much difficulty and lack of assurance. Parents fret about the outcomes for their sons. Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with how men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the standard for manhood, would it? We've left boys of the world at the hands of a commercial culture that would sooner take him by the hand, cut a fart in his face, physically abuse him and verbally demean him and tell him to "tough it," sell him beer and breasts to weaken his resistance and thoroughly derail his ambitions by calling him "simple-minded," teach him to value his life by the number of sperm he can eventually squeeze out of himself, and be there for him to provide an array of products intended only to help him achieve that most carnal goal before he's to slip into domestic "uselessness" to have all his manufactured desires catered to on call. "Men are stupid" indeed.

We wonder why girls are so depressed or sell themselves short despite our best efforts to lift them up. Parents fret about the outcomes for their daughters. Surely it's not because men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the new standard for womanhood, is it? We've all left girls in the hands of a so-called "empowering" commercial culture that would sooner take a girl by the hand, tell her she's smarter and better, inflate her self worth to unattainable heights, starve her of encountering any real adversity to her confidence or resistance, spoil her into submission so that she may become reliant on an array of beauty and "self-care" products to maintain that weakened state, and then tell her a superficial relationship in the service of a carnally-minded "useless man-child" with children in tow is all she needs to be happy. "Am I right fellas?" indeed.

"Why?" is not a good question to ask. "Isn't it obvious?" is a better one. If you wouldn't leave your child in the hands of someone you don't trust, who is only going to preach distortion and trickery, why would you leave your child in the hands of western culture? In twenty years the children we fret about today will be what we consider normal, well adjusted adults, most of them at least--adjusted in the sense that they've just spent their last twenty years being adjusted, by passing through the corruptible influence of culture in all its forms, positive and negative, and normal because they are still breathing at the other end of it.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Life's Not Fair

You may have caught yourself dropping "Life's not fair!" as the final word when it comes to any pronouncement on social injustice, and thought that such is always going to be the final word. But "life's" quality of being unfair does not mean we should be actively trying to make it unfair. There is enough injustice in the world already without needing to justify it with the excuse that that "unfairness exists, therefore, it is justified to be unfair." Life is indeed unfair, but we either choose to respond fairly within it, or we don't. We can't solve injustice as a thing, but we have a choice to rectify all that we cause to be unjust by our own actions and beliefs.

We have a Scorpion and the Frog situation--where a scorpion rides across a river on a frog's back, assuring him that he won't be stung in exchange. Half way across, the frog is fatally stung and asks why the scorpion would go back on his word--why this injustice has been carried out--and the scorpion simply replies, "it's my nature." This condemns both the frog and the scorpion to drowning. No matter how you slice it, this defeatist line of reasoning should not pardon or justify the voluntary action of the scorpion, and neither should the response "Life's not fair!" pardon or justify voluntary, purposeful, unfairness and injustice.

So often this slur is thrown at young people when they complain about unfairness--sometimes they are in the wrong, sometimes their expectations are too high and need to be brought down to a realistic plane--other times though, the slur is overused. When teens and children are unfairly treated due to their age alone, and nothing else, it's the repressive adults that need a crash course in reality.

For instance, youth are recipients of voluntary injustice under the pretext that such age limits and "line in the sand" laws are in place for their own protection. The most notable is the age of consent law, not only because it rewrites the facts of nature and human development (or just flat out ignores them), but because it often criminalizes children and youth for infringing on the sanctity of their own bodies (even natural and non-harmful sexual exploration) while seeking to criminalize external violation.

The juvenile justice system just as often encourages us to look the other way on the unjust sentences between consensual, "close-in-age" children and teens. And those sentences are unjust, because if they weren't, there'd be no such thing as "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions in the first place. Those exceptions in the law for close-in-age sexual conduct exist because it has been determined that the law is unfair in those areas--one can only wait for every other jurisdiction to catch on.

The same reasoning could be applied to the drinking age or age-based curfews in particular. One doesn't have to favor a total rebuild of society to simply voice concerns about laws that just don't do what they are supposed to be doing to protect minors, one only has to stop endorsing such laws. The first step is to stop concluding that just because we feel we have the last word when we inform our youth that "life is unfair," that we, the adult population, have to purposefully make it unfair for them. What we voluntarily give rise to, we can voluntarily starve to death.