The Child In Distress

Parents and professionals who continue to fall prey to cheap tabloid journalism have learned nothing from the childhood tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In the "child in distress" narrative perpetuated in our culture, children are constantly prey to whatever new scary apparition appears on the horizon, and everything must be sacrificed to keep them safe from the next "flying inevitable". One can scarcely go through ten minutes of media without being bombarded by a child in distress. This repetitive narrative of the child in distress, however, only drives the same psychological niche for adults as the "damsel in distress" once did for the chauvenist culture, and is just as flimsy a vehicle.

Being concerned about the actual hazards a child may immediately encounter is crucial to human survival, but we seem to think being afraid of the foretold but non-existent "wolves in the fold" has something to do with it as well. It doesn't. It's a justification we created for ourselves. In general, those who are in their own minds powerful like to perpetuate fantasies of their own usefulness, stemming from arrogance. It doesn't matter who that powerful source is or whether that usefulness is needed, natural, or man-made. For adults, that fantasy manifests itself when we make ourselves feel useful for slaying the demons in our own heads out to possess our children (which probably don't pose any immediate threat to justify such a reaction), regardless of whether such a crusade is actually useful. 

It is hardly a revelation, as Nietzsche and Rousseau described the arrogant fantasy of the powerful in terms of social class in the 19th century, and Mill and Wollstonecraft in terms of indefensible sexism in the 19th and 18th century respectively. But I equivocate it now toward all adults who still maintain this ideology of superiority over all age groups below them despite hundreds of years of evolution on the "dignity of difference" between class, race, and sex. Why the feminists in particular ignored the similarity between the "child" and "damsel" "distress narratives" when they hurled criticism at the old self-serving male fantasy only speaks volumes about the limits of feminist critique. After all, women are adults too, and are served by the repetition of the "child in distress" narrative just as much as men are, if not more.

Instead, the myth of some "age determinism" of superiority and inferiority continues without reproach, with the justification that children ought to aspire to the adult example and adults ought to aspire to the child's. It is just assumed, by adults first and then by children, that this is a beneficial co-dependence between the age groups and that it is necessary, but it is neither. It's not instinct. It's in fact a self-serving ideology on behalf of those who created it--the powerful, the adults. It is created out of adult-centric culture. 

It's easy to see how superiority theories like this breed only inter-group contempt. While aspiring to the adult example as they are expected, children are taught to despise their childish nature, and while aspiring to the child's "innocence" as they are expected, adults are taught to despise their "adultish" nature. Neither is expected to appreciate who and what they are at either end of the developmental timeline, and they take their induced self-loathing out on the other group, be them perceived as superior or inferior. Sentimental sloganeering is constantly depicting children as "wide eyed" and "innocent," and proposing that if only adults could be like that, all our world dilemmas could be solved. While this is hardly convincing, it is pervasive, because adults and children alike will naturally seek out the positive traits of the other for their own sake, and condemn the negative traits of their opponent for their opponent's sake.

So I don't like to ever say one group is better than another group, because typically the group that assumes it is better is only better because it alone set the standard by which "betterness" is tested. Adults have always been powerful. They've always set the standards by which betterness is tested, so by their might alone, they are superior. And what have they done with their power? They've declared that only they are capable of using the power they've granted to themselves, and they remind themselves of this by reproducing the child in distress narrative.

But does not assuming that children are capable threaten to become an even worse imposition on children than assuming that they are incapable? After all, children and adults are different, you say, and wouldn't imposing the adult world onto children be just as bad as imposing the will of adults over them onto them? That kind of thinking, while overtly condemning ageist imposition, further establishes systemic ageist inequality. It is like dropping a weight down on one of two otherwise "conceptually" equal scales. To justify legitimate differences, the two must be given two different narratives? That only works when you can be sure you're not inadvertently disenfranchising one's differences and advantaging the other's in your distress narrative. 

Educator John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, wrote on how the assumption of capability in children only opens the doors for those who can, and does nothing to impose on those who can't or won't, so long as the initiative is voluntarily entered into. Right now, children are automatically involuntarily entered into the narrative as pawns in the adult's innocence game, and are thus stripped of their dignity as women once were, and rendered involuntarily defenseless despite their abilities. What in the chauvinist narrative, as it existed, advantaged a woman's dignity? And if you can't answer, ask yourself, what in the adult narrative of the "child in distress," as it exists now, advantages children? The answer is nothing at worse, or a negligible advantage at best, as perhaps one could argue that the "child in distress" narrative "motivates" adults to care about children. But the assumption of their inability affects every child through repression by its involuntary imposition still, while the assumption of a child's potential only affects those who rise to the occasion through voluntary inclusion, and in doing such, is not repression.

Because the adult narrative often disenfranchises youth and solely advantages adults (as it exists for their benefit), it shouldn't be tolerated as the sole paradigm. The narrative should only be justified when the inequalities between the age groups, or gender groups, or race groups, don't "consistently" manifest themselves along traditional power differentials. If the child is "always" the disenfranchised one, the meek one, the one being saved, when positioned in the distress narrative, and the adult is always the one in control, always the one doing the saving, then it is unjust inequality being represented. Likewise it would also would be unjust inequality if, all things being equal, it was assumed that only black children did poorly in school and had to be rescued by whites, or if it was assumed that only women become jeopardized and need to be rescued by men.

Unjust inequality is the imbalance between groups that exists due to human assumption rather than natural occurrence. It is one thing for natural inequalities to present themselves--for a black child to do poorly, for a girl to do poorly, or for a child to be controlled by an adult--but if any of those are the only paradigm ever shown, then one group is being unfairly advantaged while another group is being disenfranchised consistently. Individual variation is a good measure of natural inequality. If individuals vary from person to person, then all are equally being served and all are varying in their response. If a whole swath of people aren't being served to begin with, then there is no variation, just one group advantaging while another group is disenfranchised. That is not an acceptable "difference."

But adults have more self control, you say, and better cognitive skills, and superior strength. Should not adults take the initiative to rescue the weaklings? Of course they should, but only because it is intuitive that those who are strong look out for and protect those who are weak, and not simply because they are adults. If a child or young person happens to be strong and capable enough to take the initiative, why deny them only for not being old enough? To continue to misrepresent strong and capable young people as meek and defenseless only implies that one favors infantilizing them, and all the repercussions that causes, over empowering them, and all the benefits of that.

After all, it's not about believing one group is better than another group, it's about recognizing the differences between the two and affording them respective to their individual ability. The weakness of the adult narrative is that it ignores the possibility that capability is a human trait that everyone possesses to some degree, and instead tries to claim "capability" as its own entirely, and therefore the term "humanity" as well. There is nothing wrong with an adult taking initiative for a child in distress, so long as we recognize that there's also nothing wrong with a child taking responsibility for another child in distress, or an adult in distress, if they are capable of doing so, and we should depict all scenarios accordingly.

The question becomes whether or not children benefit from the adult narrative of "the child in distress," or if they are just the recipients of neutral, natural circumstances. Perhaps adults are inspired in some way from the repetition of the narrative to nurture their children, but even still, this isn't a satisfactory motivation. The best display of the adult's weakness is their need to justify their position of unquestionable authority (their so-called "maturity") by fantasizing about distressed and endangered children. If adults were truly matured, they would feel the requirement and responsibility to nurture the young the young people's sake, without having to resort to storytelling cliches that serve only their personal sense of pride, and ego.

Not Special Unless Special

Most of the time, the best way to raise a kid is not to raise a kid, it seems, but to raise a person. The child of today is going to spend maybe 10 years being a kid and upwards of 40 years being an adult, God willing. So the question becomes, do you want to raise a big kid, or a person?

When you treat an adult like a kid, it means you're being needlessly suppressive (choosing not to respect them like the people they are). When you treat a kid like a kid, you're being needlessly repressive (choosing not to see them as people to begin with). Treating a kid like a kid is never letting them taste failure. It's excusing their misbehavior, spoiling them into submission by praising their lethargy, and never letting them face rejection--in short, it's about keeping them as far from being human as possible for as long as possible--despite their longings to be. It's about purposely neglecting to preserve or even recognize their dignity because they are supposedly incapable of being dignified. Here they are not being respected for their strengths, they are just having their weaknesses catered to.

On the contrary, treating an adult like a person is how respect is shown, and it should be no different with children. Treating kids like people means recognizing them for the their actual strengths (rather than treating even their weaknesses as if they too were virtues). It's letting them face the real consequences of their own misconduct with discretion (and not just the politically-correct prefabricated ones). It's teaching them how to walk away from rejection without feeling rejected. It's about building them up rather than talking down to them, building them up to be able to respond to the natural ups and downs of living--of personhood. It's a far more healthy way to live one's life.

When you tell a child he's special before he has even done anything worthy or special, you weaken his ability to be anything but average. All he becomes is what he is. Who needs to work to be special if they already are before they even put in the work? If you tell him instead, that he has the ability to one day be special through work, difficulty, and problem solving, and that his actions toward those positive ends are what ensure his being special regardless of the outcome, you strengthen his ability to go beyond himself--to become a better person than he is. Is that not what you want? Is that not what our society demands?

We need not tell a child they are good at something before they have shown themselves to be objectively good at it. We don't do that with adults, so there is no reason to do that with children. On the other hand, we shouldn't then be dismissive of a child's attempts to go beyond themselves, even if they fail in the end. We shouldn't fault a child when they do put in the honest effort and come up short, because that is life, and the same ought to go for adults. Working hard makes you "special." Working hard makes you a person.

No Muddied Angels

Nietzsche famously wrote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth." Children are no exception. Adults throw an interpretation at childhood, and it becomes a cultural standard by virtue of their power. Adults create the terminology we use to think about the position of childhood in society, and those terms inevitably find their way from the realm of ideas (taken as truth) to practice in real life. The powerful look at the powerless as innately inferior, deserving of their status, even by genetic argument, but also fool around with this notion of the noble savage, whereby those that are powerless, innately inferior, are put on the pedestal of righteousness simply because of their righteousness. This is often referred to as the "white man's burden."

As anyone can see, this ideology is so pervasive it has been enmeshed in the terminology of racism and racial prejudice for centuries, but it also lends its support to the arguments of ageism as it has always done. Nowhere does the adult interpretation of childhood rear it's ugly head as forceful and destructive as it does with the paradigm that childhood exudes natural purity. In the modern age, children have become deified as noble savages. Ignorance is their grace, it's the halo affixed upon their anointed heads, and to do anything to cast away that ignorance is to pull the child down to hell from their hearth upon the clouded realm. Ignorance preserves their subservience, and such is the motivation for maintaining it, for infanillizing their activities and restricting their natural inquisitiveness.

Every breath is sacred, as a byproduct of their angelic grace, when breath is nothing but a bodily function. If we are going to anoint a bodily function simply because it originates from a pure body, there is then no reason to not anoint their other excretions. A hole is a hole. Their anus is as sacred as their mouth, their breaths as gracefully angelic as their farts. Both preserve the organism, after all. Both perform a necessary function to keep the child functioning, but why one is anointed and another ignored, even shunned, has only everything to do with human preference, by interpretation, and serves to exemplify the fickle creation that humans begin to play with when they ascribe purity to human flesh. There are no muddied angels.

Ignorance in relation to the so-called adult standard should not be celebrated, the child's knowledge relative to itself should. Children are not an exception to this game of interpretation either, as their ascriptions and summations of adults are often faulty and inconclusive. A pure mind does not make faulty interpretations of others, and certainly not ones that threaten their relationships with others.

As girls are more prone to make judgments about people, girls invent many interpretations about adults they interact with on a daily basis, and just like adults, some may be perceptive and others may be just as much a product of ignorance as adults. Boys don't tend to make subjective judgments, as they aren't as aware of what they are projecting, never mind contemplating how others are receiving those projections. Girls have considerable power to create interpretations, just as adults, and the reason girl interpretations even prevail as truth has more to do with the degree to which the girl is anointed by adult interpretation (even beyond the boy), and is certainly no matter of truth.

The Minor Trap

Teenagers are caught in a trap. They have the strength and ability to get out of the trap if they want to, but it is illegal for them to do so. So here we have animals caught in a trap that is too small for them, willingly keeping themselves captive to certain extents to appease their overlords. Some manage to broker a deal with their overlords and are granted short little excursions outside the trap, but most simply aren't extended the resources to enable them to take that great leap.

Each and every day they are shuffled through the maze from room to room, sitting here for a while before moving on to sit there fore a while. Some enjoy it, some make the most of it, some don't enjoy it, some can't make the most of it. Those who enjoy life inside the trap are the ones clinging to its sides, ready at the stroke of midnight to rip the veil from their heads and drop their ball and chain. Those who don't enjoy it are the ones who inevitably wear those chains the remainder of their days, whether it is legal or not.

In either case, youth is made to be something to flee from rather than something to enjoy. Youth is a prison for which there are no exits. Even if one were to escape, the mere quality of how many earth revolutions around the sun one has lived to see makes all the difference in how that individual is to be treated in the world of human beings. It has everything to do with whether they are permitted to shake themselves out from under the trap they're born into or whether they are condemned to live inside its boundaries day in and day out, happy or sad, like it or else.

Some teenage animals don't have to be wounded when cornered in the cage, some wound themselves, if only to scare away the overlords trying to corner it, if only to give it some bite. And all this so as to preserve the adult's sentimental idea of children enjoying childhood at all cost to human dignity.

Repicturing Minors

Minor is the term used to isolate young human beings apart from humanity. A minor is not human in the eyes of the law. They exist in some designation at the junction of being an animal and a piece of property for which others have specific rights to and are expected to perform specific duties on. A minor is little different than a piece of furniture--the property of it's originates by default, but with the added restriction that, unlike furniture, it can not be completely done with as its owner sees fit. For instance, a piece of worn furniture that no longer serves its usefulness can be taken out back with an axe and be done away with at it's owner's discretion without fear of social reproach. A minor, though still a piece of property, has been granted by society a right to exist and a right to be taught things--but other than this, shares more in common with the piece of furniture than with human beings--at least to the law.

The fact that a minor is technically a human being isn't one wasted on most average people, regardless of what the law has determined. The fact that the time period covered in a young human's life for which they have been set aside from humanity as minors is quite a length of time whereby many alterations in the individual appear as they develop. There are virtually miles separating a five year old and a 15 year old, and yet both are considered to be minors according to the official, legal, so-called agreed-upon definition of their existence. The miles that exist between them developmentally have been compressed back together by the force of law like a spring, so that what once seemed to stretch a 10 year developmental separation by nature, now seems to span a matter of moments.

Kids who exist between the age-determined social cultures, the proverbial 10 year old who no longer finds his preschool fascinations as fascinating but is not granted access to more mature forms of expression, spend years of their lives inevitably stuck in coast. This is what youth rights advocates call "infantilization." There's a constant expectation for kids to act half their age.

All being minors by definition, if they were to fail to distinguish themselves--in other words, fail to socially develop beyond the early childhood stage at least socially so that a 16 year old was still living the typical lifestyle of a seven year old, it wouldn't be hard to imagine society neglecting to notice. Minors, being non-human entities by definition, would not develop the way human beings are expected to. Minors would be infants from birth to the day that society "agrees" they are fit to be counted into the human clan--in most cases their 18th birthday. They are children. It's what's expected of them. And from 0 to 18, the term minor fails to recognize their developing capacity towards maturation as an adult and instead regards them as perpetual infants--helpless and about as removed from the adult as possible.

They are born and they get bigger. At no point does the law recognize that a minor can make even simple decisions for themselves. They need mom to lay out a pair of clothes in the morning and button their shirt, regardless of whether they are toddlers scrambling about on all fours or high school seniors about to assume their role in society.