Children are Sexual

Puberty is not the beginning. The sexual life of the human being begins in the womb. It is expressed, enjoyed, shared, and felt in childhood. It is then repressed by those who fail to regard its existence. It is punished by those who fail to recognize its humanity. Children are instead fed fabrications about what their sexual feelings mean, and even adults begin to believe what they preach. We are told that child sexuality not only doesn't exist, but that any expression of it is deviance, and any discussion about it is the promotion of child rape. This has not always been the case, as any cursory glance will reveal from such academic works as Loving Boys (1986) by Dr. Edward Brongersma, or Paedophilia: A Factual Report (1985), by Dr. Frits Bernard, or The Sexual Life of Children (1994), by Floyd Martinson, or even The Sexual Life of the Child, from 1912, by Albert Moll, among hundreds of others lost to history.

In decades past, discussion about the sexual life of children was alive and well in fact. It was accepted as repeatedly observable in the wide breadth of scientific inquiry into human development, and discussion about it didn't lead anyone to think that by investigating child sexuality anyone was in fact promoting child rape. Times have changed though, and all progress has not only stalled, but reversed itself. The very fact of a child's sexuality has been run over by the preponderance of research dealing with child sex abuse, and now all child sexuality has become subjugated to the adult fear of child sex abuse first and foremost, rather than remain liberated as the legitimate form of inquiry it is.

The inquiry determining the difference between mental and physical sexual maturation for the purpose of procreation, and the preexisting sexual feelings that children are born with and grow up experiencing and acting upon, has been left behind with the sexual revolution of the 20th century. All other aspects of human sexuality have been greeted with toleration and eventual acceptance (and even many of the earlier sexual "perversions"), but children are not extended such courtesy, and it has everything to do with the maintenance of adult illusions. Having no conception of breathing does not stop an infant from breathing as an act of self-preservation, and neither does having no conception of sexuality stop a young child from masturbating, even at the age of seven months, for boys in particular, no matter what we tell ourselves.

But no amount of adult illusion can change the fact that children are sexual, engage in sex play, feel every bit of sexual tension and pleasure that adults do, and that all of it is denied to their understanding. No amount of telling ourselves it isn't true is going to erase the fact that decades of research has repeatedly shown children engaging in genital stimulation, auto-erotica, and even sexual activities with one another at what we in the twenty-first century have concluded are "unnaturally low" ages. On the contrary, they knew something in the 19th and 20th centuries that seems lost to us now: that the "unnaturally high" ages of sexual activity we promote in our modern "progressive" age are indeed what is more abnormal, if anything. For procreative purposes, the older ages are in fact divorced from nature, rather than any representational paradigm of it. The inability for adults to accept aging out of sexual activity in recent decades has caused them to criminalize and pathologize all youth expression of it instead, despite youth sexuality being the natural paradigm.

So we celebrate the birth of a new century where childhood sexual activity is not only stricken from all public discourse, but so is the very fact of its existence. It has been erased from both the academic landscape as well as popular opinion. Demonstrable facts have been lost and replaced by adult illusions--the illusion of the child as a wholy innocent creature devoid of feeling and depth, who is merely here to be a repository of adult services. This is the "predator panic" illusion that our society calls progress.

There is so much lack of understanding on this issue that actual child sexuality, existing as a fact of nature, has been conflated with pedophilia, and pedophilia with child sexual abuse, done through its constant repetition in research and popular culture to scare our sensitivities away from where they naturally would've been. In this way, all discussion of child sexuality as a part of a child's physical being, manifesting a great deal of their humanity, has been equated inextricably with child sexual abuse instead. "If a child is a sexual being," so goes the popular opinion, "whether sexually active or not, the child is beyond help, and more likely to be raped or sexually exploited." But since every child is sexual by nature, expressing it to varying degrees, and child sex abuse is still a relative rarity by comparison, this is hardly an appropriate conclusion.

Adults attempt to eradicate the existence of a child's sexuality so as to protect them from themselves as well as predators, and make deviant a child's natural sexual exploratory behavior all as the price for protection against those who are truly deviant. So the only image we are fed is that of the child as a porcelain doll who feels not, thinks not, and perhaps only breathes so that in life they may give adults something to protect. In this way, a child's humanity has been taken away every time their human drives are equated with deviance. It seems the western world has no problem with stripping the humanity off a child though, just so long as the boy or girl keeps their clothes on for it. 

On Pedophilia

Pedo-erotic urges exist in everyone to varying degrees, often subconscious or not strong enough to elicit our attention, but existing nonetheless. It's pretty clear there may even be an evolutionary basis for pedophilia--that men have it in abundance because they need to be attracted to "younger" females who are more fertile for child-rearing--and that we've understood this for a long time without calling it what it is. It's highly likely that if women have a pedophilia strain in them, it's in regards to child-rearing itself. And since there is very little outward distinction in sex physicality between boys and girls, pedophilia may even express itself in contrast to the traditional Kinsey scale of sexual orientation. In any case, we need not feel dirty for this underlying desire so long as we understand the difference between attraction and self control.

Self control may not be something our modern society expects from us as it constantly seeks to cripple our sexual resolve for profit, but it is important for all of us to maintain, pedophile or not. Pedophilia is as human as anything else, for better or for worse, so we need to understand that people only become child molesters when they break the law, regardless of whether they were pedophiles or not. After all, any child who has ever had a crush or an infatuation or attraction to another child below the legal limit is a "pedophile" too, perhaps not clinically, but socially. And that goes for everyone, of every sexuality.

Much of what we call pedophilia in a "clinical" sense though might simply be an untimely pairing of biological directives and modern cultural norms. In the modern world, artificial age limitations have no relation to the biological time clocks we used to observe, when puberty was the final hurdle for procreation. Times may have changed, but kids are still biologically capable of reproducing after puberty. It's a fact of nature, no matter how inconvenient it may be to our modern sensibilities. Wait a while and our sensibilities may change again.

But while the scathing vitriol regarding pedophilia is allowed to rage unmitigated, how rational are the sensibilities we actually defend? That old-time "final hurdle" of sexual cognizance is creeping toward the middle-aged and upwards, where people often have to resort to costly medications to even achieve arousal. And as if to compensate, we add further insult to nature by denying even the existence of child and adolescent sexuality when it is biologically in its prime. Youth can't participate legally because we keep them from knowing the rules socially, so this creates an ecological situation perfect for child sexual exploitation to thrive.

It's simply unnatural to bear children as relatively late in life as we do, but we do it because that time period tends to be more stable and secure for child-rearing in our middle-class culture. It's also simply unnatural to deny all children and adolescents their sexual cognizance, but we do it because we want to maintain their ignorance and prolong their potential victimization, which serves us as adults. We subjugate youth by forcing their abstinence and dehumanize them by re-classing their biological drives as dangerous promiscuity, and we do it because we want to punish the rapists among us--the adults. And since "no punishment is enough" for the adults who commit these crimes, the only ones who end up adequately paying the price for the adult evils are the children themselves, once they too step over the line with other kids. There are just as many 5 year old sex offenders as there are 55 year old sex offenders*. There is no distinction.

And our sentiments remain intact, and so does every child's ignorance. Rape and biology go together better than rape and morality, and we let morality dictate what is biological now. We seem to think that because the worst among us might rape children, all children must be subject to forcible abstinence under penalty of law. So once suppressed in our youth, our immoral biology then continues to ride under the surface of our so-called "civilized" appetites. I'd even take it a step further and say that so much of what we consider to be female sexual objectification is actually very childish in appearance. The modern idealized female form, with its emphasis on smooth skin, thin limbs, and wide eyes, is an attempt to transplant the features of a child into those of a legally and culturally acceptable adult.

And as to the sexual preference for youth and its appropriateness by itself (outside its connection to molestation), where do those standards originate anyways? The same society that actively encourages our sexual attraction to automobiles, food, alcohol, and any object that can be bought and sold, is then going to tell us what sexual attractions are "unnatural?" Just compare one unnatural urge with another one. Our culture is still youth-based, otherwise our economy would hinge on the attractiveness of saggy, middle-aged adults. Even as much as the middle-aged, middle-class adults would like to think this is the case, it is not.

How many times in suggestive advertising have you seen a woman with batted eyes and a finger to her lips in that "opps, silly me" stance? Is that not childish in appearance  Is that not what Nabokov might have called, the "nymphet" amok in the eye? In general, the whole "cute kid" gimmick in films and advertising speaks to these underlying desires en mass. "Cute" and "sexy" stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain biochemically, as do psychoactive substances and food. The whole practice of schoolmasters flogging kids on the ass was a highly sexually charged release of the adult's pent up aggression, and many still swear by it, so is that not clinical pleasure seeking? Afterall, is not rape more concerned with conquest than sexuality? Do typical adults not dream of child conquest as they go about their business with children in tow?

Of course they do, they just don't realize that it is a desire one and the same with that of child molesters--the only difference being that child molesters actually do what the typical adult only dreams of doing. One doesn't have to be a pedophile to harm children or to dream of doing it, but anyone who actually does harm a child sexually is automatically branded one. Rape is an atrocity no matter where it crops up and who the victim or perpetrator is or what their sexuality is, but rape can and does exist contrary to sexuality, and outside of pedophilia people understand this. Pedophilia is an attraction, rape is a loss of self control. Child molestation exists whether pedophilia does or not, and likewise. Child molestation is solely a product of  a weak resolve, and still pedophilia exists whether or not self control is present.

This is also true when speaking about the popular assumption of a pedophile's weak self control, and where that expectation actually originates. Heterosexuals have the luxury of being able to express their sexuality freely and openly. They grow accustomed to doing it and assume it is the same for everyone, but it isn't. They make the conclusion that repressed sexual feelings will inevitably lead to harmful consequences, but it isn't necessarily so. Fringe sexualities with a sound mind actually have to learn self control in more constant, realistic terms, so they may actually have a higher degree of it than their "normal" peers, who are accustomed to building erections at the sight of beer bottles and automobiles. If most straight men don't rape feminine-shaped cars or curvy bottles, then it's possible even fewer "pedophiles" rape children.

Those who do though, are deserving of the worst.

* United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. 8 (Figure 6). Retrieved July 19, 2012.

How to Grow Up

I find the science of human development fascinating because we all have our own experience growing up, and understandably have our own ideas about how that happens. What the science of human development does is it shines a light on all the illusions about who we are that we may have convinced ourselves of along the way. It either validates our experience or broadens that highly personal and anecdotal series of fading memories toward a frame of reference beyond ourselves and reflected by humanity.

What it teaches us is not just that we are so unique in how we specifically came to be the person we are from the person we were a relatively short time ago, but also that our experience of that maturation was not all that unique. We are constantly reinventing our own history. With the science of human development, we have to confront the fact that our successes may not have been as special or tied to own abilities as our ego may direct us to think at times, but to circumstances beyond ourselves instead. At the same time, we also have to confront the fact that our circumstance was not always solely responsible for our personal failings, but to our own doings.

The science of human development forces us to concede that there is more to humanity than ourselves, and that we are not merely products of our environment or products of nature's indifference, but that we are products of both to varying degrees that we may not even realize. No other science is as innately personal, perhaps with the exclusion of modern health, and likewise, in no other science does nearly everyone alive consider themselves an expert.

For this reason, adults (parents) are often inaccurate when making assumptions about the behaviors and interests of children living today (often interpreting the worst), for they compare the real actions of their children today with the invention they created around their own childhood, and they understandably don't like what they see. What they don't remember is that children themselves have never changed, just the various hang-ups of the society around them. Human developmental science works to remind us of what changes and what doesn't, so we don't go drugging our children out of existence so as to pair their experience with the perfect or imperfect childhood invention of our memories.

It could be said that we are not truly grown up until we recognize the fact of our existence is a constant maturation, a constant imperceptible development, rather than being confined strictly to the condensation of time behind us. The notion that we are all on a flat-line towards death in the present could be considered implicit immaturity. Maturity, in contrast comes not with age or experience, but with the understanding of the transient nature of our mental state in a constant flux of development.

Asking Questions

Somewhere between the sixth and 18th year of life, the mind goes from asking the big questions about nature and the universe, to asking questions about "which facts are important to know for the test." After 12 years of schooling, the brain becomes accustomed to simply "channeling" a wide range of information with no clear context, meaning, or significance, from one piece of paper to another. It becomes adept at spitting back information that has been dictated to it and dumped into it, on request. Children slowly lose their curiosity as "learners" the better they become at being "students."

It is not until college and graduate school that "students" are encouraged to once again revisit the natural curiosity that so captivated them in those early years of life, but by that time so many have chosen to give up on their studies and many don't have the resources to go on in it anyways. They essentially grow never "wondering about things" outside of the context of daily living and survival, and just as well know little about how to go about learning things to begin with even if they wanted to. It surprises me how often children will ask "why is the sky blue," only to get an "I don't know" response from an adult 20-30 years the child's senior. It's as if adults just stop wondering about the basics of the world they live in after a while. "How to learn" was just never taught to them in all those years of being fed facts they soon forgot.

Good teachers know all of this to be true, and work to make it work, even given the enormous constraints placed on them by the prevailing 20th-century industrial methodologies. A few observations from human development can go a long way towards actually tapping into that youth's natural desire to "know things" rather than simply "putting that on hold for 12 years." The first observation would be that children, and people in general, don't learn anything by being taught (or told), they learn by learning (which is doing). The second: that people don't learn by retaining random bits of information, they learn by drawing their own connections between information. The third: that people don't learn from accessing tomes secluded away from daily life, but learn best when information has meaning they can relate to issues and themes in daily life that they care about. The fourth: that people don't learn unless they've been shown how to learn.

The young child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The old child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The "person" learns by asking questions and seeking answers. At no point does a person learn anything by having questions asked of them, unless the question is, "How will you go about solving/learning this?"  or  "What do you think will happen because of this?" Good teachers are asking, but culture isn't.

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

If you want to learn more about the man and his work, how would you go about finding out? What did you find out when you did that?

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.

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. 

So-Called Adulthood

We don't become adults out of biological inevitability, but on the basis of social expectation. In order to get around in society, we're expected to assume the qualities and characteristics of adulthood--the seriousness, the possessions, the decadence, the so-called sophistication. I say "so-called" because everything in adulthood can be prefaced by "so-called," as there is no law of biology stating that because one has become sexually mature, one must adopt an air of "sophistication" and suddenly be standing around at cocktail parties and sipping liquor out of tiny glasses, or whatever adults consider to be fun. Just like childhood, "adult" is a heuristic invented by adults, a product of culture that is informed by culture. It an illusion, and believing adulthood is intrinsically better than childhood is delusional.

Adults exist so that they can parade around their excesses and decadence as they desire. For instance, why should an adult prefer to stand around drinking liquor out of a tiny glass at a party? What purpose does it serve? It's not going to get them drunk, nor refresh them, nor even taste good. They are only drinking it so they can prop it at certain angles in their hands, feel the "ting ting" of the smooth glass (something so fragile in such capable adult hands, no less), and sip it so elegantly for something known to be so bitter (adults love irony like that), and all to project the image of some hallowed "experience." The projection of "life experience" accounts for nearly everything an adult does in the world, from the miniscule reflexes such as this to the creation of life itself. This projection becomes decadent when done in self-aggrandizing revelry beside a child, who is meant to be deprived of it.

To picture an adult expressing their self-aggrandizing decadence before a child is to see the non-verbal expression of the childish--particularly the taunt, the old "I know something you don't know!" or "I can do what you can't do!"  It is when an adult gets an ego boost or a feeling of superiority simply for being as nature made them to be, so that they may engage in certain behaviors to show off their superiority. During their self-aggrandizing revelry, they begin feeling superlative simply for being older--not for any particular reason (such as a special accomplishment), but simply for the fact of being older than someone else, as if that were its own accomplishment. If being older is a virtue, what other routine bodily functions we all share equally besides "growing up" can we make hallowed then? Breathing maybe? The point being, there is no such thing as emotional maturity, simply larger means of expressing the same old childish "one-up" behaviors.

Adults implicitly know this, or are at some level cognizant that they present the same behaviors as children, just with increasing intricacy. This is taken as granted, considering the writer of this piece is an adult and has concluded these things. Much of art and philosophy is an expression of mankind from a larger and more transcendental vantage, and the conclusion drawn most often is that mankind's own hallowed perspective is merely childish in comparison to this universe and the laws that fill it, or don't fill it. If adults are cognizant of the fallibility of their reasoning, on some level, and adult thoughts and behaviors are merely "larger" representations of  childhood ones, then we should expect that children are also cognizant about their own fallibility to a certain degree appropriate to their developmental capability. Nevertheless, both children and adults, including this one, fall prey to making inaccurate assumptions about this universe as if they were universal truths.

Just as a child may create and maintain fanciful scenarios to describe the workings of nature even as they are schooled in the sciences, that superstitious behavior does not stop at the artificial threshold of childhood. One inaccurate assumption is that adulthood is superior to childhood due to its experience, and childhood is superior to adulthood due to its innocence. This is pervasive, but that doesn't make it true.

When Prophecy Fails

Often when adults make conclusions about a child's "fantastical beliefs" it is usually to belittle the child's grasp on "reality" and reaffirm the adult in their ability to "perceive," as if perception was in their nature as adults. Clearly though, with the number of unverifiable beliefs that adults hold at any one time, adults are no better "perceivers" than children, it's just adults have a larger "sphere" in which they can draw resources from when perceiving and practicing meta-cognition. Nowhere was the fallibility of adult perception more dramatic than in the Festinger research into cognitive dissonance.

It's 1956. A story in the local Chicago news reports: "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." Apparently a housewife came to the conclusion that she had received a message from the planet "Clarion" about how the world was to end due to a massive flood, and that how on December 21st, all of human civilization would be wiped out.

In the analysis of the apparent similarities between childhood behavior and adult behavior, invariably the subject of "prophecy" comes up, and likewise, what happens to individuals when their beliefs about the world and their activities are incompatible. This tale of the housewife and her message from Clarion became the subject of a landmark study headed by Leon Festinger.

This housewife was successful in amassing a close-knit collection of believers from the community and surrounding areas, and they founded an encampment, where through their various stages of shedding selfishness (giving up jobs, families, all their money and possessions), they would be deemed worthy and be spared the devastation by the interception of a flying saucer. All of this was revealed through the "automatic" writings of the housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech.

More skeptical minds saw this event as an opportunity to gain some anecdotal insight into how human beings adjust when their beliefs and their behaviors come into conflict, for surely the the scientific community assumed the prophecy would fail. The idea, as carried out in Festinger et al. (1956), was for a team of social psychologists to infiltrate the group as prospective members and record the happenings as they observed them, the justifications, rationalizations, and social dynamic of the group. It was known that each member of the group had invested heavily in the belief that they would be saved from a great flood through their actions. Festinger hypothesized that following any disconfirmation of their belief the group would proselytize in order to lessen the negative effects of the disconfirmation.

The research team was so successful in presenting themselves as believers that one of them was thought to be an alien messenger in disguise, and soon the night of December 20th was drawing to a close. When midnight struck and no saucer appeared, the group wasn't devastated, and insisted that it wasn't technically midnight yet because another clock in the room was slow 5 minutes. By 4:00 am, with no visitors yet, another automatic writing session produced a "new response" from Clarion--that the "God of Earth" had spared the planet due to their actions. There was to be no devastation.

"The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction" (Festinger et al. 1956).

The term "cognitive dissonance" refers to the uncomfortable feeling from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena. The theory put forth by Festinger based on his observations, as well as other more experimentally designed studies, is that when a human being is placed in a state of cognitive dissonance, they will engage in some thought or behavior that will sooth the discomfort--they'll warp their beliefs to fit their behaviors, ignore information that does not support their beliefs, or create new information that does.

My first comment in regards to this episode is that young children could not have constructed such a belief as elaborate as these individuals did in 1956. This is due to a number of factors: that children normally have little knowledge of extra-terrestrial bodies, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and the phenomenon of automatic writing, and that children don't physically own anything, and therefore "investment" in any one particular belief can not be measured in terms of what the child has "financially invested," (but it can be measured in other ways). Often if children do seem to have inordinate amounts of knowledge about such things, less skeptical adults see them as "Indigos," "Star Children," and other such entities, and more skeptical adults are right to point out the proliferation of children's educational media for the early appearance of such leaps of cognitive reasoning. It takes a lot for a young child to recognize the permanence of the Earth, and once a child is capable of doing that, they will broaden their cognitive sphere to that of the cosmos, as this adult cult was capable of doing.

To be fair though, to both developmental stages (and all those in between), the beliefs described above about the cult represent only a small fraction, a fringe in a larger majority. The majority of individuals do not believe such radical beliefs, but they experience conflicting beliefs nonetheless. One does not need to be a fringe, a cultist, or mentally disturbed to hold beliefs that could be termed "irrational beliefs," and one does not need to be less cognitively mature to experience cognitive dissonance over those beliefs when they fail to be confirmed in reality.

Beliefs lead to the amazing diversity of the human imagination, and to much of human culture, lore, and myth. The human race would not be as socially cohesive without these shared traditions. The point is not to diminish the importance of irrational beliefs but to understand the difference between what is fact and what is fiction, and the larger gray area in between that the human mind, for all it's abilities, has not been able to perceive yet. Most importantly, this notion of adults having the ability to perceive the optimum should be dismissed. It is simple arrogance on the part of one adult over another, and one adult over a child. Instead, human cognitive development should be interpreted as a summation of the resources physically and mentally available to the individual at each stage of development, along the lines of a continuum, the likes of which Piaget only hinted at: that the adult is in fact not a sage of "cognitive competence," but like children, simply displays a "relative degree of functioning."

If this is so then adults couldn't design a test to verify whether or not adults are cognitively competent, because to do so would require knowledge about the universe and higher functions of the mind that human beings have not accessed yet. It would be the equivalent of children testing themselves on knowledge and cognitive functioning that only their respective biological and psychological development has access to, and then declaring that result definitive. If this is true, than it poses a problem scientifically, and must be taken on its own terms.

Spoiled Into Submission

Sometimes you can beat a child into a fury and spoil a child into submission, injure them with kindness and strengthen them with sternness, build resilience by letting them subsist and entitlement by giving them everything they want. Sometimes carefully structuring a child's environment to work exactly to their developmental mindset only weakens their ability to grow beyond it. The point to any interaction between an adult and a child is not to gratify the child's strengths, but to challenge them.

This is hardly revolutionary--Lev Vygotsky wrote on the Zone of Proximal Development and defined it thus:

"...The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygostsky, Mind in Society 86).

Because we can not count on the "line in the sand" age-limit legal definitions, which automatically render all children regardless of maturity or skill incapable and therefore useless, we (you, me, and society at large--parents, teachers, coaches, adult friends, children themselves) have to be that "more capable peer" who dares challenge a child. We all have to take personal responsibility to ensure that children and youth in general are actually prepared for life at the ages the law arbitrarily sets for those milestones.

The line in the sand age limits imposed on minors, if they are never going away, are NOT the time to begin teaching children how to live, they are benchmarks for all progress up to that point--not the first opportunity to teach a youth a thing or two, but the last. The mythology or "magic" that the law bases its reasoning on as to how children develop into adults (based on their date of manufacture alone) certainly isn't going to do it for us.

If we do expect the law to determine how and when we decide to teach children about how to live in the world--that is, if we wait until their 18th birthday before we decide to stop spoiling them with ignorance and politically correct entitlements--how can we expect them to actually be able to do what is their right to do, and have responsibility for the things they are then responsible for? If we give them no adversarial situations, how do we expect them to handle conflict constructively? Childhood is supposed to be a living, challenging time of life, not a paradise, and the more adults try to make it a paradise, the less livable it becomes.

The law can not raise kids for us, it is too busy harming those who didn't develop properly.

Three Theories

The first I call, Developmental Ageism, which is just as it’s name implies, a prejudice against certain individuals on the basis of their developmental state. This is the view that suggests children ought to be barred from certain activities completely until a specifically determined age at which they should be able to demonstrate complete competence.

This view holds that children and adults exist along two separate planes, and that the child plane dies out and is replaced by the adult plane through physical and cognitive maturation. And lastly, this view holds that full “adult” maturity is a child’s teleological path. This view is bigoted and leaves no room for a child to actually do the very all-important transformation from "child" to "adult" in any meaningful way, despite best intentions. In seeking to protect children, it starves them. Children and adults are not two separate species, either.

The second I call, Developmental Egalitarianism, which is commonly called the “children are little adults” rationale. This is widely denounced in the modern world simply because it is has been largely scientifically discredited with the movements of Empiricism, Darwinism, and countless developmental studies into human physical and psychological growth over the past 200 years.

Proponents make the supposition that child development is stalled by social or cultural expectations, and that children are naturally able to do adult tasks long before they are said to be developmentally capable, and therefore argue that only through full incorporation into "adult" society can children develop in a natural way. This view is ignorant and also leaves no room for a child to fit into an adult world made for other adults, and therefore become systemically disenfranchised, despite its best intentions. As you can observe, it is just as bigoted to ignore a child's unique developmental characteristics as it is to limit a child by them.

The third I call, Developmental Relativism, which I personally believe to be the right way of looking at human development, if not the correct manifestation itself. Unlike Developmental Ageism, this theory posits that the developmental plane between children and adults exists along the same continuum, and therefore behaviors carried out along the continuum are the same behaviors as they would be at any stage in human development, only expressed in ways appropriate, physically and cognitively, for that developmental stage.

Unlike Developmental Egalitarianism, this theory posits that children are not capable of certain adult tasks, but may be capable of adult tasks that take into account the unique developmental differences that impair a child from performing certain tasks. Therefore, it is the view that forbidding a child from participating in an adult activity (as in Developmental Ageism) should not be necessary so long as the level of participation is appropriate for the ability of the child. Children and adults are the same species, just express the same human strengths and weaknesses relative to one another.