“[Age is] being used as a stalking horse for decision-making capacity. It’s assumed that all children below a certain age lack this capacity, and that all above some age have it. I don’t buy that.”
– Tim Starr
From the archives: The original post was posted on 28th November, 1994
[This old post is for historical interest.]
“The relevance of age is whether they have the capacity to make the required independent judgement.”
How does age cause children to have that capacity or not? As I see it, age is simply an irrelevancy here. It’s being used as a stalking horse for decision-making capacity. It’s assumed that all children below a certain age lack this capacity, and that all above some age have it. I don’t buy that.
I had written:
“Their muscular abilities aren’t very great, either; does that mean that adults should do all their lifting for them? If they’re weak, then how are they to gain strength if they aren’t allowed to exercise what little strength they have? Same goes for making decisions: if they aren’t much good at it yet, then how are they going to get any better at it if they aren’t allowed to make their own decisions the best they can?”
The poster replied:
“Yes, parents permform almost all the lifting for an infant that is essential for its survival.”
[…]
As for the notion that some coercive intervention must be done by parents for the survival of the child, I ask again: How do you tell whether any given intervention is necessitated by the child’s need for survival or not? Since the particular case in question is whether children shall brush their teeth or not, am I to conclude that you think that children who don’t brush their teeth won’t survive? That such neglect constitutes a clear and present danger to the survival of children? If so, then how did any children survive at all before the practice of tooth-brushing was invented?
[…]
“Would you tell an infant that it’s responsible for its own decisions, and must earn the money needed to buy its formula and diapers?”
No, but I wouldn’t bitch about it spilling some formula on the ground because I paid for it, or piss and moan about it tearing diapers I bought for it either. I’d accept those risks as occupational hazards of parenting. I wouldn’t use them as excuses to force my kids to do what I wanted them to if they didn’t want to do it.
“You cannot take an idea like non-initiation of force and apply it willy-nilly as though it were one of the ten commandments. Infants do not have the ability to make most of the decisions required for their survival. You seem to purposefully ignore this fact.”
There are plenty of adults who can’t do that, either. That’s no excuse for me to subject them to my will. Why is that any different when it comes to young people of my own blood?
See also:
Tim Starr, 1994, ‘Age as a stalking-horse’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/age-as-a-stalking-horse