The Rights and Obligations of Children
"There are no conflicts between the rights of adults: for there can be no conflict between different people’s right to be let alone – which is the essence of the fundamental human right to be free from the initiation of physical force.
The issue is not so clear-cut when it comes to the rights of children, as the last thing children need is to be let alone. Their peculiar position is that they are dependent beings with rights to their dependency."
ok, this should be fun...:)
The issue is not so clear-cut when it comes to the rights of children, as the last thing children need is to be let alone. Their peculiar position is that they are dependent beings with rights to their dependency."
ok, this should be fun...:)
Start point. guns in schools. How many in retaliation against bullying? Who should have stopped that crime? The little kid fights back gets kicked out for three days and a one point GPA loss.Or shoved in a boxing ring with three pound gloves and no training.
Eventually some reach the breaking point and only adult delinquents allowed it to get that far.
I think kids have a natural urge to leave and find their own way shortly after they reach puberty and develop congnitive "formal operations", i.e. reasoning and abstract thinking. Our society draws the line a few years after that at age 18.
My kids are 6 and 4. I tell them I'm the absolute boss when I have to be but my goal is for them to be their own bosses in all areas of life ASAP. My goal is for that to be way before age 18. I want to let them do stupid things like blowing money and letting them face the natural consequences of their actions as much as possible prior to 18. If I'm having to warn them against very dangerous behavior at age 16, that's a big problem, b/c they'd be less than two years away from me not having legal rights to tell them what to do.
Right now we have to be authoritarians. Like the ancient stereotype, they mind me better than my wife, and she has to threaten them with me. All I do is when they misbehave is say the society you were born into says you have to go to jail if you get caught hitting or stealing, which discourages people from hitting or stealing *from them* but also means *they* have to have a time-out if they do these things. It works suprisingly well now, but they change on a monthly basis, so who knows in the future.
I *hope* that at age 15 they can be mostly left to their own devices, but we'll see what I think then.
I'm in the same camp. For me, the real issue of the day is parental rights. More and more, the government wants to be the daddy. They did it for decades with single mothers. Now they are trying it with educated, married couples. It's not going over quite as well here in California (ground zero) - haha....
Yes. The daddy discourages or forbids kids from doing the kind of things I did as a kids. I used to run around the neighborhood with my friends. I walked a few blocks to school at age 6 with my 6 y/o friend from across the street. It was fine to talk to strangers from around the neighborhood as long as you stuck with your friends and NEVER went off with a stragner or got in his car. My dad used to let me sit in his lap and help drive the car in the neighborhood, with neither of us wearing seat belts.
We are slightly reducing the risks our kids face at the expense of the natural playing and exploring that kids want to do.
I finished it. Amazing. I can't quote my favorite lines b/c they're all favorite and there's no fluff.
It's the opposite from that article posted here a while ago who written by a parent who apparently accepts the "modern non-objective philosophy of law, which defines rights by needs (thus switching rights from justice to demands, effectively negating rights entirely)" and says that makes parenting harder.
I also like this article b/c it's an answer to the claim we sometimes hear that objectivism doesn't apply to children.
The question is better stated as, 'Does the community/society have responsibility to ensure the minimal rights of the child are protected?' Can you determine and accept the answer?
The author has made the mistake of translating the normal nature of a human to seek intimacy from another, to form bonds with that other, and to procreate into conscious decisions with arbitrarily imposed responsibilities to another resultant human with consequences beyond those of nature. It is the nature of humans to form bonds with their offspring that have the result of caring for and raising the child without having the rights of another given a higher precedence.
Nothing can be imposed on a free man. His rights derive from his life, his existence, and his efforts to maintain or improve that existence. His only moral responsibility is to his own nature and self interest. Any other interpretation only leads to some form of social contract which is not compatible with an Objective philosophy. The child cannot have rights until it has the ability to exercise and defend those rights.
And I think, therein lies the key to our discussion here. Objectivism is a developed (some might say discovered) philosophy for a human possessing such a rational, reasoning mind. That is something a human child is born without. And until that child (a developing or potential human) achieves such a point, it can not have rights. It must, of necessity, rely upon it's nature and the nature of human parents.
As to any other issue; "I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
in any contract arrangement, the contract parties will each revue the contract prior to agreement and negotiate for the terms most favorable to themselves, yet in the contract you propose, you leave no room for negotiation of terms. Further you offer an either/or contract. If you choose to raise a child you must accept a set of arbitrarily imposed minimum standards, as if it was a building code.
So you have immediately brought into the contract a third, even fourth party, and possibly more. And one or more of those parties is an enforcement arm of some entity to make sure you are performing to the minimum standard (code). You are in essence, licensing and regulating child rearing (a situation much as we find ourselves in today), and removing the guardianship of the child from the parents and giving it to several other parties whose interest may or may not lie with the child.
While I won't argue at this point that there may well be a set of moral equivalencies to this situation, by couching your argument in terms of contract and enforcement, I obviously find a great deal to differ with. Respectfully
In Hillary's "Village" no one has consequences, someone else is always responsible, and no adults are produced.
Neither are teen-agers, and neither are many adults. There is a continuum (and I believe the author finally acknowledges this later in the article). All we can try to do is help our children along the path to rational decision-making - first and foremost by being rational ourselves. That can sometimes be a tough act to follow.
"children are the result of the decisions of adults, and adults must bear the consequences of their choices."
I would quibble with this one, as "adulthood" in this case has nothing to do with one's cognitive maturity and EVERYTHING to do with one's physical maturity. This is why sexual promiscuity - especially among youth - is so dangerous. Parents who are ready (or at least think they are) to have children have a tough enough time navigating parenthood. But EVERYONE has to deal with the consequences of their choices no matter their age. It's just that some decisions have consequences only an emotionally mature adult should be making at all.
"... children have known needs, so adults know what they are getting themselves into by having them"
See my note above. The author makes assumptions that people engaging in sexual activities are not only physically mature, but emotionally and intellectually as well. All one has to do is look around to see this is a patently false assumption.
"Morally, people should not have children unless they have cause to believe they will be able to care for them"
Finally a statement I agree with 100%.
"At what age is a person ‘adult’?"
The author contends this is a legal issue regarding nothing more than passing of time, but is missing the point. The issue is one of emotional and intellectual areas which can not simply be manipulated with blanket rules. It may be the only way human minds can deal with the complexity and subjectivity of the issue, but we should not overlook the fact that it is merely a crutch.
"Naturally, children usually love their parents and will voluntarily help them out—but there can be no legal requirement for that."
In point of fact, the law ought to stay out of the matter entirely except in the case of extreme neglect or injury. To pretend that a third-party such as government can impose just requirements or restrictions on either side is a farce at best.
"The default presumption is that the best of their ability is good enough (after all, they managed to reach adulthood themselves), and thus they have the right to do it according to their own judgment."
I'm not sure if the author even realizes that the core fallacy here: No one raises themselves to adulthood. People predominantly parent based on the way they grew up - they take their parenting cues from the mentors they had while they were children (whether parents or not). To say that someone is using their own judgement when raising children is largely false: they are in actuality attempting to apply the principles that they admired or saw in others - they do not derive them in and of themselves. Do they use their own judgement? Yes. But the derivation of that judgement should be recognized to have been an evolutionary (ie learning from example) process rather than some epiphany of maturity.
"These superficially opposite policies of repression and over-permissiveness actually share the same essential error. Both are manifestations of ‘whim worship’: where the whims are the parent’s or the child’s respectively."
YES!!!! What should be pointed out, however, is that behavior is LEARNED. The old adage of "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" is a fairly accurate recognition that children behave in many ways EXACTLY like their parents. Social scientists see these predilections for behavior all over: children of smokers are more likely to smoke, etc.
I would also echo the comment at the bottom and ask the author: "how many children do you have"? I personally don't accept advice about child-raising from people who don't have them. And it's worked pretty well for me so far.
Would I rather have a POTUS candidate with the experience of failing at running Hewlett Packard or a POTUS candidate with success at fooling 51% of the people often enough to be repeatedly elected?
Of course, I'd want neither. I'd rather have a candidate with a reputation of doing exactly what he/she promised the customers and continuing to be financially solvent even if he had no experience in government or a large enterprise.
I contrast this to my children (and if you had ever met my kids you'd know I wasn't just boasting). I hold an MBA and my wife a Bachelor's degree, so parental education (a known factor in child-rearing) is controlled for. Both mothers stay home. Each one of my children (six in school) is among the top students in their respective classes (public education) and each one _also_ gets praises at Parent-Teacher conferences for their civility and respect towards both students and teachers alike. Two of my children just this past month received Student-of-the Quarter awards.
My practical, personal experience tells me that what my wife is doing works and what my sister-in-law is doing doesn't - despite them being sisters of only minor age difference. The tests of the hypotheses proposed by these so-called "experts" has produced verifiable evidence in the cases of my nieces and my children that I can't reasonably ignore. And these tests uniformly confirm that this "expert" advice (when observed) has produced some of the most ill-adjusted children I've ever met, while good old-fashioned, values-based parenting has resulted in well-adjusted and productive children.
You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but if a self-proclaimed "expert" on any subject - and ESPECIALLY parenting - has zero practical experience, I'm going to dismiss them and their suggestions right out of the gate. They can be well-meaning, intelligent people, but until they have passed through the crucible of child-rearing - the forge of parenthood - they are like raw ore proclaiming itself fit for inclusion in a mighty skyscraper.
I didn't say I thought they were experts, nor that they should claim to be.
With apologies to any psychologists present, all the psychologists I have ever met and talked with became interested in psychology because of their own problems, so based on that limited sample, I would not put much stock in someone professing to be a child psychologist without children of their own. Yes, I have a bias against psychology as a "science."
I also think that the article that was orignally posted is speculative and without any basis in science.
And congratulations on your children ;^)
A child's launch into adulthood happens in stages and varies from child-to-child depending upon the personality and preferences of both parent and child.
That's why my husband and I are caring
for an elderly parent who let others make his decisions for him. He's an 82-year-old baby-of-the-family who never was allowed to launch.
Incredibly sad...
His parents (he is a step-dad) didn't know how to raise him. He has a peculiarity artistic personality that they could neither understand nor appreciate.
They treated him as though he was slow.
He internalized that assessment of his life and never really grew up.
Now we are attempting to launch him into rational thought and independence.
It is a tough row to hoe. Lots of weeds to dig up...so-to-speak.
This is a topic I have thought about and have reached no answers. If I were to come across answers that contradicted Objectivism I would likely accept and deal with the contradiction, real or apparent. What little I have concluded is that there is a sort of contract here, implied/implicit, perhaps a Deed may be a better legal term.
So, I am delighted to see this article. It does not provide all the answers I think are needed but I do not disagree with any point. Robin Craig has made a significant step in philosophy with this article.