Contra chattel childhood

Aella writes about how wrong it is to treat children as property:

I don’t mean we should let kids do whatever they want - we don’t let adults do whatever they want; if they smashed your property we’d put them in a locked room until they calmed down, if they hit you you’d hit back in self defense. Failing to have boundaries against children much as you would adults is also dehumanizing!

But good treatment of children should likely be closer to how you would treat a parent with dementia. Sometimes forcibly controlling their body is necessary to prevent damage to themselves or others, and you definitely don’t let them go outside alone, and there will certainly be many grey areas where you’re conflicted about how much to override their agency. But at least you’re starting from a baseline of treating them as a whole person!

I agree that there is one extremely important way in which children should be treated in the same way as grown ups: they should be taken seriously, and interactions with them should be in earnest. This includes answering their questions properly (kids are both interested in and capable of understanding more than you might expect; and my experience with kids and grown ups alike is that people’s efforts are like a gas, with expectations being its container: increase your expectations, and their efforts will expand to fill them) and joining their games as a bona-fide participant, and not as an indulgence to them: when I play with my kids, I make it a point to make the game fun for me too — for instance, when playing tag, I don’t let them designate every single area in the playground as ‘hommy’. When I play games with other adults, I don’t let them get away with cheating; why would I let my children? (An excellent piece of advice I once read is that when you play any game with kids, you shouldn’t let them win: instead, you should handicap yourself. For example, if you’re teaching your child to play chess, don’t make bad moves on purpose — instead, start a game without several pieces, e.g. your rooks.)

So far so good. But children are not yet whole persons. Their characters and habits are not fully formed, and it is the job of parents to mould them. This means intervening more frequently than when it’s strictly necessary to prevent harm.

The issue here is that Aella is weird. I don’t mean this at all in a derogatory sense: I mean it in the purely descriptive sense that Aella’s way of thinking, her values, her experiences, and her friends are very different to the average person’s (and don’t let’s get into a pedantic argument on what ‘average’ means: I do think we habitually overestimate people’s normality (a subject to which I hope to return in a different post), but I hope everyone who’s read anything Aella has written will get my point). As such, when she extrapolates from her own or her friends’ experience, she reaches very wrong conclusions. She speaks of her friend who was forced to attend school, and ended up in a detention centre; she implies this was deeply wrong, and unnecessary since her friend did not need school — he ended up at Rutgers anyway. But most kids who are not encouraged to study do not end up pursuing philosophy Phds: they end up watching an endless stream of Tik-Toks and stuffing their faces with sweets.

Most children require some coercion to begin activities that they end up enjoying. It’s a nice fantasy to suggest you should offer your children options, and only enrol them in those activities they themselves ask for, but first, again, many children will opt out of everything; and second, even if they do ask to try karate or ballet, what should a parent do when the child realises after one class that the activity isn’t as exciting or easy as they imagined? Do you let them drop out? Do you teach them that’s it’s OK to give up at the first sign of difficulty? Or do you teach them to persevere, to build up their discipline and willpower? Talk to any child who was forced to learn a foreign language while little: the vast, vast majority will tell you something like ‘at the time I hated my parents for making me go to classes on a Saturday, but now I’m grateful.’

(The kind of thinking that objects to traditional approaches to upbringing is the same that leads to extolling ‘creativity’ over teaching hard skills such as drawing or grammar. The result is a generation of people who lack the ability to express any creativity they might have.)

Coercion is not only necessary when it comes to teaching skills, but to teaching manners and good behaviour. A rude child is not actively harming anyone, except in a very mild manner; a child that dresses badly and inappropriately for an occasion does even less harm in the grand scheme of things. This does not mean parents should let their children get away with not saying please and thank you, with not showing gratitude, and with not being kind and caring with their friends. It does not mean parents should let children wear dress-up costumes to a wedding.

(To be clear, ‘coercion’ does not mean using violence. It means imposing one’s will on the child, which usually does not require anything beyond making it clear to the child that something is non-negotiable. And I certainly do not mean to say that parents should force their children to do things without explaining why; I abhor ‘because I said so.’ But some times, you need to do both: you have to explain why you’re asking your child to do something, while also make it clear that you expect them to do it even if they remain unconvinced.)

So parents should not take the creed ‘children are people’ to mean they should wash their hands of the responsibility to shape their offspring. Believing that children can forge their own path from an early age is either wishful thinking, or an excuse for lazy, conflict-averse parenting.