there’s this wonderful quote I keep seeing going around:

“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”

and I would just like to say:

why do children deserve equal footing with parents if they do not contribute to their own housing, education, and living? Why should a dependent get to make demands of their benefactor, assuming the benefactor is not abusive? (Obviously I’m opposed to hitting your children to discipline them, or verbally abusing your kids, but if you’re going to be a disobedient child you deserve some form of civilized punitive measures.) Why should a kid feel entitled to smartphones and cars if they didn’t earn the money to buy them themselves? 

Obviously this doesn’t apply to minors who contribute to their households, buy their own shit (with the money they themselves earned, not a friggin allowance), and have legitimately abusive parents. Kids are entitled if these circumstances do not apply to them, and they’re still making the above demands. If you want to live life on your terms, become completely independent. If someone is bankrolling you, put up with their rules and don’t be an entitled brat. If you want equality with your parents, contribute equally in terms of work and financial input to your household, otherwise you don’t have a leg to stand on. 

Again, this does not apply to kids whose parents are actually abusive, or who do in fact contribute financially and labor-wise. The rest need to learn how to respect and obey their parents. 

“why do children deserve equal footing with parents?” really? for the same reason women deserved equal footing with men even when very few of them worked outside the home, you unfathomably dense avocado pit: because human beings’ right to equal status and dignity does not depend on their income. the better question is, how fucked in the head by a toxic mix of capitalism and ageism do you have to be to think “I pay the rent, therefore I deserve to be treated as generally superior to you” is a reasonable argument?

and as for the assertion that kids should earn their own money to pay for things…guess what. they can’t. they can’t because adults have decided that “for their own good”, kids can’t work for any significant pay - instead, they have to spend between 60 and 80 hours a week at school and on school-related activities, contributing to a trillion-dollar education industry that gainfully employs millions of adults, and never see a cent of income from that labor. and when adults, over the years from around 1870 to 1950, decided that was going to be the new social contract for kids, they agreed to fucking pay for things for them. just like on an individual level, when adults decide to have kids, they agree to fucking pay for things for them. you don’t take away the ability to earn money on a scale greater than pocket change from 1/3 of the population and then say “well, why should you feel entitled to things if you can’t pay for them?” see above, re: capitalism and ageism fucking you in the head.

also, using the word “disobedient” to describe a human being is creepy as all hell, because it presumes that submissiveness to someone else’s commands is the default state for that person. what you’re describing when you talk like this is abuse. (no matter how many times you say “oh but of course I don’t mean kids who are *actually abused*” - as you define it, of course.) no human being is morally obligated to be “obedient”. believing they are is an abusive mindset.

and before you go off on some dumbass tangent about kids playing in traffic, I’d like to point out that the sheer number of adults who think not letting someone you love get killed is functionally the same as insisting on the right to absolute power over their daily lives is the scariest goddamn thing I’ve ever encountered.

“respect and obey their parents”? no. fucking no. when parents say “respect”, they do not mean “respect”. they mean “treating my word as law, my whims as edicts, and my desires as more important than your own, and being thankful for the privilege.”

parents need to learn to respect their children. and, as was the original point of this post and as you’ve just so handily demonstrated, adults need to stop thinking that treating children like human beings is degrading to them.

“you unfathomably dense avocado pit”

Youth Rights

I’ve checked some youth rights blogs here, and I still feel alone in this area. They tend to focus on parental control, while I’m primarily concerned with teenagers’ legal and social inferiority, such as the drinking age etc., and the expectation that parents control their teenage children. If teens had the same rights as adults, they could more easily defend themselves from and escape abuse, and their relationships with loving parents would be much better. Teenagers also suffer far more from their inferiority than (unabused) little kids. Though I do support non-punitive/ positive parenting. One of these people is a youth rights activist and Magic: The Gathering fan, like me, but also a vegan animal rights activist who doesn’t even tag posts “animal rights”, but just “speciesism” and “sj”, and calls animals “people”. Humans are naturally omnivores, and predation a vital part of the ecosystem, so if meat really is murder, nature is oppression. She also primarily focuses on abolishing parenting and nuclear families, which I don’t have any problem with, rather than restrictions on teenagers. I feel unacceptably liberal, in ways, next to them, even though my ideas are equally non-mainstream.

Youth rights covers a wide range issues, including those you’re mostly interested in. Some are more interested in the legal restrictions on teenagers while others want to reform the whole family structure while still others focus on students’ rights or something else entirely, or all of it, and it’s all good and all part of it. And, yes, some youth rights supporters also have some radical views in other areas as well, but I wouldn’t let it make you feel left out or unwelcome. I went through a similar thing when I first got into the youth rights movement back in the day, and one thing I learned over time is that you don’t have to work on every single issue, certainly not one you either don’t know much about or are not comfortable with for whatever reason. Just focus on the ones you are most interested in. Please do post about the teen rights issues you mentioned! :) 

Who Are We Talking About, When We Talk About the Minimum Wage?

in other words, “fuck young people, even though they’re twice as likely as adults to live in poverty in this country. 35-year-olds deserve more money, though, right?”

seriously, whoever made this can fuck right off. do not throw one marginalized demographic under the bus to help another, you atrocious clotpole.

Agreed. I ranted about this exact same graphic about a year and a half ago. Why is a teenager not as worthy of being paid a fair wage as those older? Also, “clotpole”?

depending on your point of view it’s either a Shakespeare reference (King Lear), a Merlin reference

or just an archaic word meaning “blockhead” (”pole” or “poll” was another word for “head” up until the late Middle Ages)

Wait back to the topic. While young people are equally deserving of decent pay, they are not supporting others. I’m sorry but young children take precedence, and they are supported by their parents.

that’s the same argument misogynists used to be able to make when women, who were “not supporting families because they were not primary wage earners”, were first demanding equal pay. it was wrong in that case and it’s wrong in this one - first in the sense of being incorrect, since just like many women in those days were primary wage earners and were filling that role invisibly, many teens from impoverished backgrounds these days are working to help support their siblings and parents. more importantly, in the sense of being morally wrong; people deserve to be paid equally for equal work. to do otherwise is to devalue their labor, which in a capitalist society is to strongly imply they also have a lesser value as people.

I’m not sure I understand why any age group should “take precedence” over any other, but I think I see what you’re getting at here, which is that in the larger scheme of things, we should be more concerned with what people need rather than what they “earn”; that’s the argument for socialism, and it’s definitely a reasonable one to make, but I don’t think it belongs in a conversation that’s specifically about the minimum wage, because that frames the discourse in a capitalist context.

It’s also worth noting that in plenty of cases the teens themselves are parents. I should hope the young children of teen parents take as much precedence as those of older parents.

I love how we’re all just continuing to discuss this like there’s not a gif of Merlin with literal horseshit on his face halfway up this post

A youth rights discussion punctuated with unrelated GIFs and esoteric word choices. Also known as just about every NYRA chat ever and most of the forum threads circa 2005. Almost makes me nostalgic! But yeah, anyway, as we were saying, “it won’t benefit teens as much as you think” is not an argument for raising the minimum wage. I wish I were more surprised that anyone thought it was.

please continue to bring this back at regular intervals.

Your clotpole GIF up there is an appropriate response to this minimum wage graphic.

Curtailing young people’s freedom through widespread coercion and force - even in an effort to protect them - is blatant adultism.

We don’t do this with anyone else. Anyone over the age of 18/21* is granted the privilege to make mistakes and learn from them.

Just because you think you know better, even if you can see the consequences better doesn’t mean you get to make choices for another person.

And ftr I’m not talking about pulling someone out of traffic or physically stopping them sticking their tongue in an outlet.

I’m talking about making laws that prevent a person having full access to their own wages or denying them power to make their own medical decisions.

Just to name a few.

*anyone able bodied, and not otherwise similarly oppressed

Children do not owe their parents anything. At all. Not respect, not time, not emotional energy, and certainly not obedience. 

By having a child, the parent agreed to take good care of that child. That means food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, toys, love, support, encouragement, etc. 

Even if they’re perfect parents, their child doesn’t owe them anything. And a truly perfect parent would be horrified at the idea that they were owed anything at all. 

replace the phrase “temper tantrum” with an acknowledgement that children have a right to feel and express negative emotions.

you also have the right to whoop them when they act up like it’s about disciplining them? lmao?

no one has the right to hit another person, there is 1000% no such thing as the “right” to assault someone, and you are disgusting

this is such a white thing to say like in asian households this argument is not tolerated lmao y'all so worked up about it but don’t wanna understand different cultural aspects of anything 😴

the morality of physically attacking people is not culturally relative

Let me just clear this up. Discipline and physical abuse are not interchangeable concepts. Thousands of minority families have extremely different authoritative understandings of discipline so don’t undermine all of that because it is extremely disrespectful to generalize something that is a huge part of our standard beliefs. Please think of thousands of minority households and understand this outside your own spectrum. Spanking your kid is not attacking them. Before you step into someone else’s culture please look into it first.

you. are. WRONG.

intentionally causing someone pain by striking them without consent is assault. the only way to believe that “spanking” (note: that word is a euphemism used solely to cover up the fact that you are talking about hitting a child) is not attacking is to start from the position of not seeing children as people with the most basic of human rights: to be secure in their own bodies.

physical “discipline” has been proven over and over again not to be effective as discipline, and to frequently serve as a stepping stone to more serious forms of abuse. furthermore, though most parents claim that they strike their children only in a controlled, rational state of mind to enforce a lesson, it has been conclusively demonstrated on numerous occasions, across cultures, that this is false, and the vast majority of parents who hit their children do so in anger and frustration, and feel okay doing so because they believe they have the right to exact physical revenge for perceived wrongs by their children.

furthermore, when any level of violence against a population is normalized, it contributes to a system of oppression in which serious abuse is more likely to happen. violence against children is epidemic in today’s world, and it is systematic violence and needs to be addressed as such. that means recognizing all violent acts against children as wrong inasmuch as they all reinforce a social attitude that says it is okay for adults to treat children in violent ways. (by the way, this is the same argument that applies to violence against women and racial minorities - when any level of such violence is normalized, things get bad for that group pretty damn fast.)

since almost as many white people as people of color in the United States believe it is acceptable to hit children - within a margin of 10% - your charge that there is any significant cultural element to this conversation is dubious at best in the first place. however, even if it weren’t, that would not make violence against children acceptable. if a culture endorses abusive practices against children, that culture is wrong - just like if it endorses honor killings, rape, or slavery.

culture does not determine human rights. children’s human rights are no more subject to limits in non-white cultures than LGBTQIA people’s human rights are subject to limits in highly religious cultures, for example. the only reason anyone who gives a single flying fuck about justice would argue otherwise is if they do not see children as having human rights in the first place. and such people, fyi, are not only wrong, but disgusting.

The race/culture “defense” of corporal punishment? Seriously? I’ve seen this trotted out a few times, and the supposed intent is to defend non-white races/cultures, when this “defense” is actually racist as hell! Because, 1) many non-white parents don’t hit their kids, and there are whole cultures out there where hitting kids just doesn’t happen, all of whom are erased with these assertions, 2) this characterizes non-white parents as uniquely violent and abusive and non-white children as uniquely deserving of violent and abusive treatment, and I don’t think I need to explain everything wrong with that!, 3) even if we were to pretend for a moment that corporal punishment were a cultural thing, literally no culture would dissolve if this practice were stopped and in fact any such culture would be a lot better for, you know, not beating children. Corporal punishment is not an “Asian thing” or a “Southern thing” or a “black thing” or a “Christian thing” or a “poverty thing” or whatever else. It’s a “violent piece of shit parent thing”.

“There’s a difference between discipline as abuse”… Um no hate to break it to you but violence against a child is inherently abusive. I don’t understand how people can process and understand that it is never okay for a husband to hit his wife and make very progressive comments about abuse in relationships that involve adults… but as soon as its parent and child, there’s apparently all these loopholes that make it totally okay for adults to be violent towards children.

My parents hit me when I was younger and it was abuse, I love my mum but her hitting her 7 year old bcs she messed up her crayons eventho she was told not to, or hitting me bcs I went outside to play eventho I was grounded, is abuse. I told them that and they’ve apologised to me about it, even my mother can look back and reflect that her hitting me was not good parenting, I was a child… it was lazy and wrong but it’s just how people are encouraged to parent in Nigeria… it’s sickening.

The playing field was not even, I was a child making mistakes bcs that’s what children do, when they hit me, even if they explained “why”… all it did was instil fear in me and make me resent them. Hitting your child is abusive behaviour. It’s that simple. People will say, if a child acts up, you have to hit them bcs that’s the only way they’ll learn. But adults act up in public *all the time*. Working in retail, adults were just as disrespectful and disruptive as the children were, yet everyone knows you can’t just go round hitting adults in an attempt to make them learn bcs gee, that’s assault! But apparently, children, who actually should be afforded more leeway bcs they’re children and are still growing and learning and need the support and encouragement from adults to become well rounded individuals.. are the ones who just need a good smack when they act up. It’s disgusting and when you put it like that, you realise it’s abuse, that’s really all it is.

Stop defending and normalising abuse against children. Stop trying to find loopholes in which it is okay for you as an adult to lay your hands on a child, stop pretending that violence is ever a good learning tool. Stop promoting unhealthy tactics as a means of parenting and do better. If you wouldn’t someone to be violent towards you every time *you* make a mistake or do something problematic, how about you afford that same level of respect to children who are legit growing and learning everyday of their lives.

the extent to which it is considered acceptable to hate children is out of control, deeply disturbing, and seriously harmful. and if you don’t care, then you have no right to claim to support equality or justice.