The Rights of a Child
A promise I made to myself when I was very young that I have tried to keep in mind often is that I should never forget what being a child is like.
I'm a very sentimental person by nature, and I've felt the ache of nostalgia since I was, like, 9 years old. So part of that is just a desire to never forget the memories and experiences, good and bad, that formed who I am as a person. The fear of forgetting precious childhood memories and having them become overwritten by the slog of adulthood is one that I genuinely anguished about!
But, nostalgia aside, there is a more practical reason why I swore to never forget what being a child is like- and then this promise got extended to include being a teenager as well. That shit sucks.
So many adults look back on childhood with rose-tinted glasses. Truly, a life free of responsibilities, where our needs are (theoretically) met, where more grace is awarded to us by virtue of being so new at life, is a life a lot of people strive for. I get it, and there is a lot that I miss from my childhood. But the idea that childhood was a beautiful, innocent thing is not entirely complete. I think, in order to understand where much childhood trauma comes from, to understand children's behaviors better, and to understand why many teenagers act in such "irrational" and self-destructive ways, we need to grapple with the fact that children are not seen as people.
Before I go into what I'm talking about, I just want to give an aside that I live in the United States, and a lot of my knowledge and experience is based off of that. Other cultures may see children differently, for better or for worse, and I'd love to hear about the role(s) of a child in your culture, but this post is about perceptions I've had since I was young that have only grown with time, and I would like to be clear that many of the problems I will be speaking about are very American, or at least are influenced by our individualistic, Christian, and conservative overall culture. Okay! Now...
A lot of attention, when discussing children, is given to "parents' rights". Parents rights to decide what their children learn, when they learn it, and who they learn it from. Parents have the right to decide what medical care their child gets, and when. Parents have the right to decide how to discipline their child (within very loose bounds)1, and parents have the right to decide who their child befriends and who they talk to and what they wear and how they cut their hair and the hobbies they have.
This is not to say that a young child lacking the experience to fully assess a situation should get the final say in whether or not they get a vaccine or a life-saving surgery. But they should be involved in decisions made about them, when possible. Many adults would feel frustrated and looked down upon if they were forced- sometimes physically- into situations they were scared about, even if it was for "their own good". Sometimes you need to make a child get a vaccine or wear a helmet, but their feelings on the matter should not be outright dismissed.
Of course, most of those "parents' rights" are only exercised by the most controlling among us. I was lucky enough to not have parents who strictly policed my clothing, or my friendships, and who encouraged me to learn all that I could. Not all of my friends were so lucky! In what other relationship between humans, other than that between a parent and child, is one's power so absolute over the other? Conservatorships and legal guardians to the intellectually disabled are some other examples- that, frankly, should also be reconsidered and re-evaluated in many ways- but they do not apply to everybody in quite the same way that the rights of the parent do.
There is so much pressure on parents to "make" their children "good" that they neglect the child's personhood. Neurodivergent and queer children are stifled, because their true self does not matter- only the imagined fantasy of the "perfect child" does. "Problem children" are often isolated in school, sent to camps2, or over-medicated, because they are seen as a problem that needs to be fixed rather than a person who is struggling in ways they have never been given the tools to cope with. And then they grow up, and are forced to learn those tools all at once, when they also have more responsibilities to contend with and their own needs to care for.
In school, children are required to ask for permission before using the bathroom, eating, drinking, talking, or moving. At home, they are often forced to hug and kiss family members they barely know, interact with strangers flawlessly, and do whatever is asked of them without complaint. If adults were treated in this way as often as children are, there would be an outrage. Of course, a person who is brand-new to the world and has not learned social norms or rules yet may need more structure! But surely, there is a difference between structure and control?
Hitting a child is common enough that people laugh about it, even though there is no evidence3 that physical punishment works to do anything other than create fear. If a child is too young to be reasoned with, then they are too young to understand why they are being hit. If they are old enough to be reasoned with, then they should be reasoned with. Just as you cannot hit your adult peers if they bother or upset you, you should not hit a child- someone smaller, weaker, with less life experience- for the same reasons.
Especially within the nuclear family, children are not given any sort of freedom. They often cannot go anywhere by themselves until they hit teenhood, and even then they are monitored. If the only consistent adults in a child's life are their parents, then they have even less of a frame of reference for what a healthy relationship is like. For all we talk about children being sponges able to absorb so much new information from their environments every single day, we as a society isolate them in an attempt to control what they sponge up. But by isolating them in this way, within the rigid confines of school and home and structured extra-curriculars, they are not given the tools they need to make their own conclusions about the world; an idea that sounds great when they are young, but causes more and more problems as they grow older.
With this level of scrutiny, montioring, and mistreatment, is it any wonder that as children grow into teens they act out in new and exciting ways? Of course, if yelling and mistreating your peers is the only thing that got you one-on-one support as a child, you will translate those skills to teenhood and adulthood. Of course, with no third spaces away from prying eyes of parents, teenagers become "addicted to the internet" and spend all of their time trying to make an identity for themselves on social media. Middle and high school are often more structured and rigid than elementary school- is it any wonder that so many students chafe at the rigidity, and are deemed failures when they do not succeed in a system that treats them like property?
Around middle school, free time gets cut down pretty seriously too. Recess goes away, every activity you (the general you) do is highly structured for the purpose of looking good on college applications, and homework picks up. Looking back, I obviously see my middle school years as part of my "childhood", and I'm sure as I grow older I'll see high school the same way. But, at the time, it feels like your childhood is dying. And, while the idea of preparing children for potential hardships and making sure they are aware of the way the world works is important, many adults get fed up with the poorly-adjusted, hyper-emotional, and inexperienced state of tweens and teens, leading them to threaten them with "the real world" (which is a concept I really loathe and have written about before here)- so you end up having a demographic which is struggling to adjust, chafing at the (sometimes arbitrary!) rules placed on them, and they also keep being told that things will simply be worse someday.
As a teenager, especially in the 21st century, every move is monitored. It is not uncommon for well-meaning parents to put trackers on their children's phones or bags, nor is it uncommon for well-meaning parents to insist on adult supervision at every event and function. Nobody wants their child to get hurt! But by clinging to control over these young people, we are ridding them of any opportunity to adjust on their own to the world around them. Unstructured time is opportunity to commit crimes and have sex, but it is also opportunity to learn about oneself and have meaningful conversations with friends and learn about safe sex. We are forcing teenagers into a constant state of adolescence, and then get angry when they are not as mature or experienced as we were at their age.
Much has been written about learned helplessness, and the inability of young people to use critical thinking skills or learn things of their own volition, but blaming the young people is the wrong move. If you treat somebody like a prisoner, or an animal, or a problem that has to be fixed for most of their formative years, they are not going to magically know how to act any differently.
In today's political climate especially, so much focus is put on the idea of a child, but little care is given to who the children actually are. How many parents have you seen who force their kids into activities they don't enjoy, who dictate the clothes they wear far past the age where a child can dress themselves, who scold and berate their child in public, all to appear "good" to other parents? How many parents treat their children like property? Who use their children as props to increase their own social standing and supplement their sense of self?
"Pro-Life" sentiment is on the rise in the government, but so are programs to cut free lunches. What sense does that make, other than as a means of fascist control? In this way, hypothetical children, not even born yet, are given precedence over the real, starving children all over the country. They are being used as a weapon against those who can get pregnant. Similarly, children as a concept are used against queer people. "Think of the children" is such a common sentiment when discussing pushing gay and transgender people out of public life, but no thought is given to the real children who are already queer. This is because children are not truly cared about, they are just being used as a political weapon. The perceived innocence of childhood is to be protected at all costs, even if that cost is the children themselves.
In a society that treats children like property, it is frankly very reasonable the despair many parents face when those children grow up. They were promised a doll; a small, cute thing that they can dress up, and talk about, and buy nice things for. Children growing up and moving out is to these parents similar to their house being taken from them. This thing that they have invested so much time, and money, and effort into, is leaving. Even worse if there is no return on investment, if their child does not grow up to be successful enough to support their ageing parents, if their child does not give the same amount of attention and care back that they were given. But a child is not an investment, they are a whole person. No child asks to be born. If you bring a child into this world, you cannot make them feel guilty over living.
Because children have so little rights- a fact that is practically flaunted to them by authority figures in their lives- children often do not grow up with the idea that they deserved any rights in the first place. How many adults have insisted that they turned out fine from being spanked? How many adults have insisted that they needed stricter punishments, harsher rules, more controlling authority as a child? How many adults will defend the oppressive structures in which they grew up in until their dying breath? These are, of course, deeply infuriating scenarios that I see every day, but they are also deeply sad.
The amount of adults that truly do not believe that they deserved better as children is upsetting. We all deserved better as children. I feel that it is an adult's responsiblity to help show children the wide, beautiful world we live in, and to treat them as they are- a small person who simply has not experienced very much of life yet. They do not need to be herded, or controlled- they need to be taught with patience. Children screaming and crying is annoying, but you would scream and cry too if you have just experienced the worst thing in your entire life. Children's lives have been so short that their "worst thing" is probably a lot better than yours- but it still hurts just as much. They can do bad things- on purpose, even!- but because their life has been so short, there is ample time to learn and grow.
It is for these reasons and more that I believe children are an oppressed class, and, like any oppressed class, we will not all have true freedom until children are given more rights as well. Otherwise, much like any other group considered "fine to control", the window for what is considered a "child" will keep shifting to accomodate the needs of politicians and businessmen, and debunked science and moral posturing will be used to justify it. In a world that treats children so poorly, it makes sense that they act out and behave the way that they do. Even if our world was perfect for children, they would act out, because everybody makes mistakes and has difficulties handling their emotions!
Children are not property, they are living, breathing people with their own rich inner lives and thoughts and ideas- they're just not as experienced yet. If we want the future to be kinder and more responsible, we need to start on the ground, and lead by example. Children need many figures to look up to, many people looking out for them, many opportunities to fuck up and make mistakes and grow and learn about themselves and the world.
1: Specifically referring to the section titled "Prevalence/attitudinal research in the last ten years", I do not think criminalizing behavior is a good way to enact meaningful societal change and I do not agree with all of the positions advocated for by the group that conducted this study.
2: Sequel is far from the only example of the troubled teen industry, it's just one of the more prevalent/exposed ones. This article from PBS goes into testimony from people who were put into similar facilities at younger ages.
3: I know a lot of people who were spanked or hit as kids and did turn out to be relatively well-adjusted. I think the point of this research- and the research referenced in the text- is less "physical punishment never works" and more "there are more effective ways to deter bad behavior, and physical punishment has many associated risks that those other deterrents to not". Also just don't hit your kids!!
DISCLAIMER: I do not have children. I do not plan to have children. I do not think everyone (or even you, the reader) should have children because they are so great and everyone should be the change they wish to see in the world re: parenting. Having children or not is an extremely personal choice that everyone has to make for themselves and, frankly, you do not have to purposefully interact with children at all if you feel so inclined. This essay is more of an ask for you to be more patient when you do, inevitably, interact with a child, and to consider how those in your life treat the children in their lives.