So I’ve been thinking for a while about this subject, and I finally decided to make a post about this some time after I saw a YouTuber say what I put on the title of this post.
Thing is, I’ve noticed that very often young people and especially kids are treated as lesser beings, like if they were not humans beings with problems and lives of their own but just an annoyance that people have to keep up with.
I remember when I was a kid and I wanted to cross a zebra crossing cars would just pass by without stopping more often than not. Now that I’m an adult they stop pretty much every time. I suspect it was because they didn’t want to stop for someone they consider to be lesser than them.
Also, a lot of people seem to think that being a kid means that you just play videogames or whatever all day, but don’t these people remember when they were kids? I sure do. Going to school has been the worst thing I’ve ever had to endure. The only difference with having a job is that you don’t get paid.
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I do really wish that communist orgs focused more on their youth leagues, really feel like there’s a gap for secular community building that they could step in and fill
Edit: especially here in Amerikkka
I understand why this would be hard to share. I want to thank you for sharing it as I think it is very good for people to read this and understand how it is in a bad environment for growing up. Thank you for sharing. I got emotional reading this.
I honestly don’t have any thoughts on this right now other than we need to discuss this. At the time of me writing this, there are no comments on this post.
This issue is often dismissed, but we Marxists criticize and breakdown every amount of our society in hopes of building a new one, and the role of children and/or childhood shouldn’t be an exception to this.
Also, what are your guys’ thoughts on the concept of youth liberation? Do you support the idea or reject it? Should it be implemented immediately under socialism, implemented gradually as productive forces grow, or not be considered at all?
I support Marxist abolition of the family and education reforms to get rid of the “factory model of education.”
That being said, I don’t think getting rid of education entirely, for example, is a good idea.
I can’t imagine any person in a proper state of mind would support getting rid of education. We need to make education about learning and not about production but I think as a society we need to emphasize learning and education as much as humanly possible
In addition to Rondomi’s reply, I wanted to point out that I interpreted OP’s post as perhaps implying that meaning, when they wrote:
Going to school has been the worst thing I’ve ever had to endure.
This was further confirmed when the first result when searching “youth liberation” was this anarchist article that called schools concentration camps and unironically suggested the word “children” is equivalent to the N-word.
Oh, I was just thinking they meant the current education system needs work. (But jeez, that article is insane, I’m guessing some kid who didn’t like school wrote that)
They’re just grumpy because their mum said it was bedtime.
Our conditions aren’t conducive to maintaining a proper state of mind. After having been put through the barbaric, traumatic education typical to the west, I can understand why people foster a belief that education is bad by default. Like those put through conversion therapy who develop a disdain for psychologists. Or those wronged by their government who become anarchists. All three have applied to me in the past. When one is a victim of poor education and trauma, getting them to see the truth can become an extremely delicate act.
I suppose this is a reason. I still think logically and as a group we need to reject any assertions against education most fully
I support the concept of youth liberation. I can say without a doubt that if I had an “out” from my family, that I would have taken it. Aldous Huxley writes of a concept in his fiction novel Island, where families are assigned to a unit. If children need an escape from their immediate family, they’re able to stay with other families in the unit. I think the saying “it takes a village” is true and we’ve been ignoring it for at least the last century here in the west.
Yeah I take that phrase to be literal. I have a lot more to say in that regard and I’ll update this later.
But the total atomization of the family under capitalism is, in my opinion, the underlying root cause of a lot of strife within our families.
I believe the DPRK is the only nation with direct youth representation in their government, so it certainly is a question many marxist states have considered before.
Any resources on what the concept of youth liberation is and how it might be implemented? This is the first time I’ve heard of it… (Yes, I know I could look it up, but considering how search engines can be biased or low-quality, I would rather ask someone already familiar with the concept.)
I never knew how to engage with kids once I no longer considered myself one, but now that I have kids, it’s like they have wiped that from my brain and I can’t imagine what it’s like to not want to engage with kids. I think that it’s a mixed bag in terms of “Are kids treated like humans”. There are a lot of people who are still holding onto the notions they were subjected to growing up:
- Kids should be seen and not heard.
- Kids should have respect for adults. (which is almost always code for obedience, not respect)
- “My house, My Rules” aka Authoritarian Centered Parenting.
- Illogical or disproportionate punishment for breach of “the rules”.
It seems to me that these “traditional” values in regard to parenting lead to a deficit in trust between parent and child, the child becomes more adept at subterfuge as they attempt to skirt the more illogical rules, and instills a kind of adversarial relationship between the parent and child. Rules like “Don’t wear your hat at a restaurant” followed up with “Because I said so” or “Because I’m your Parent and what I say goes” are just the codification of preferences both personal and learned into arbitrary rules. Naturally, when you point out how nonsensical it is, you’re met with “That’s how my parents were and I turned out fine!”.
Are_You_Sure_About_That.mp4Kids are wiser than you think, and if you explain to them why you’re asking them to do something, they’ll usually get it. Obviously, that depends on their age. One thing I’ve learned from experience with my toddler is that, if you talk too fast or repeat yourself too quickly or expect them to respond instantly to a question or demand, you’re going to have a bad time. They need time to process what you’re saying because they’re still learning how to process language. Usually, if something is pressing or they’re just not listening, you can just redirect them. I’ve never had this become a huge fight so far. Usually I ask twice, and if that doesn’t work, I guide them to the thing we’re doing now, and that kind of direction they seem to just get. Do I get the odd tantrum, sure, but that’s to be expected. I tend to make sure to loop back after the tantrum and try to empathize and explain what the request was and why. Sometimes, the tantrum is just illogical and you have to just accept that.
To be clear. I’m only synthesizing my own experiences along with the experiences of other parents either personally or online. Some people take their childhood as a blueprint for their parenthood, and others have reflected on their childhood and make attempts to have it not be the blueprint for their parenthood. I want to be as communicative and empathetic with my kids as I can, and to actually hear them when they express how they feel. I know that was something I needed growing up, and I know they’ll need it too.
In terms of our social systems and structures surrounding kids, definitely not Humans by any stretch. America is the only nation in the UN that has signed but not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the US played an active role in drafting this bill of child rights, they still have not ratified it. Doing so would require them to completely unearth and rebuild child welfare within their legal system. The primary opponents of these rights are, unsurprisingly, political and religious conservatives such as The Heritage Foundation and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). The Heritage Foundation believes that “a civil society in which moral authority is exercised by religious congregations, family, and other private associations is fundamental to the American order” while the HSLDA argues that ratifying these rights would threaten homeschooling in America.
In the majority of US States Corporal Punishment is legal under statues making exceptions to the states law regarding crimes of assault, criminal battery, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual abuse or child abuse. Exceptions to these laws make it nearly impossible to charge a legal guardian of a child with a crime when certain actions are applied to that child. This extends into the public school system, where 17 states still allow for Corporal Punishment as a form of discipline within their public school systems. The practice was deemed “constitutional” by the Supreme Court in 1977. The Court held that the “cruel and unusual punishments” clause of the Eighth Amendment only applied to the treatment of prisoners convicted of a crime. Which, naturally we understand to be pure hypocrisy when you consider how often solitary confinement is used in the American prison system, and how universally accepted it is that solitary confinement is a horrific, life altering, inhumane experience.
You can read all the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child
There are countless examples of children being objected to utterly horrific state violence, from the cartoonishly evil such as being arrested for not using the potty, to the systematically evil conditions within the foster care system: “According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2018, 62% of children placed in foster care were removed from their homes due to abusive neglect, totaling over 160,000 children.”. Then consider that states are actively fighting against universal free lunch programs in schools, and that the federal government failed to make permanent the temporary expansion of the child tax credit during covid which brought food insecurity in households with children to a two decade low.
For as much as the reactionaries talk about family values in America, it’s clear through their policies and actions that they have no intention of treating kids as anything other than property.
This is great for you to write this. I agree with what you said 100% but just want to say that since it is so long and you must have put a lot of effort into it
♥ Thanks for the kind words comrade! Honestly, a lot of this information lives in my head rent-free. As a family with a comfortable dual income, we’re still treading water because of childcare costs. Where we live the age to enter kindergarten has been pushed up (for sound academic and social-emotional reasons) without any measures to ease the burden on working families who understand the objective reality that public education is also a form of free child care and had been budgeting against that reality.
Being a parent is hard work, and the systems we live under only make it more challenging. This is a perspective I didn’t have until I had kids of my own. If anything, having kids has been the strongest radicalizing force in my life, and is the reason I consider myself a Marxist.
I am surprised to hear about kindergarten age being raised (being 4 here I think was and is a good age as it helped me learn to read faster as it supplemented what I learned at home) But yeah, I try to read and think about the stuff you said due to wanting to have kids (in the future). Why do say that having kids make you a Marxist? (if you don’t mind answering)
Our state was allowing students to enter into kindergarten at age 4 in January as long as they were age 5 by September but that’s now a hard requirement of 5 years old in January. I think every other state does 5 as the minimum. It’s impacting something like 11,000 kids going into the 24 school year, and impacting every daycare center in the state since they only have training and curriculum for students up to age 4.
As for having kids and Marxism, I will say this: You, as a parent, want to leave your kids in a world better than the one you grew up in. You hope that the struggles you endured are ones they never have to. For a long time, I didn’t know how to build a better future, but through reading Marx and listening to other Marxist thinkers, and understanding that all of the things I enjoy today were built on the backs of the struggles of the past, struggles endured by working-class families who ALSO were looking to leave their children in a better world than they had, the HOW became more clear. Marxism is like a north star, pointing me toward safe harbors, toward a better world not just for me and my kids, but for all of us, and all of our kids. It’s a whole other thing to plan for the future of your kids, you start to look at the world over a longer timeline, and you have to anticipate where things might be and hope that what you’re doing now will offer your kids a springboard into a fulfilling and successful life. Reading Marx and planning for the future came up in parallel to each other, but without Marx, I think that planning would have led to fear and pessimism. Marxism provided me with a framework for which to make those plans, or at least, provide my kids the tools they need to critically navigate the world so that they can be better about planning their own pathways.
I don’t know that I would have gotten to this place in my world view with out my kids, because they force me to look beyond the horizon I can see and off to the horizon they can see.
Your post is so inspiring that it has a negative downvote.
Can’t be everything to everyone I guess!
That means the number of people who downvoted you is less than 0. I have no idea how that works, but I think that’s supposed to be a good thing.
No, it means that less than no one disagrees with you haha. I have the glitch too, if I downvote the comment it brings it up to 0 dislikes. So weird
A statement so touching it got -1 downvote somehow.
I agree totally though, the cornerstone of Marxism is wanting to leave the world a better place when we leave it than when we arrived.
Yeah that gave me a good chuckle 😄.
Okay, that makes sense. I had a similar notion about the need to improve the world for future generations but of course that’s different. Thanks for elaborating!
The US “school to prison pipeline” has a double meaning:
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Schools in the US do not adequately prepare children for society, and as a result many fall into poverty and turn to crime to survive.
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Children in US schools are literally treated in a way that takes many elements from how inmates in US prisons are treated.
The presence of “resource officers” in schools also increases the likelihood that a student ends up on the School to Prison Pipeline as administrations defer to the officer as a mechanism for punishment, which often results in criminal charges against the student. Their existence in schools can not even be justified via critical analysis because any inquiry into their “effectiveness” proves that no resource officer in any school building across the country has ever prevented or reduced the likelihood of a mass causality event in the building.
Also it’s surprisingly common for minors, as in children, to be tried as adults and be sent to adult prisons in the US.
Let that sink in.
Oh damn, I thought it was just Australia who did that! Finally, the US is adopting something from our prison system, rather than the other way around.
The US has sentenced people to death for crimes committed as children as recently as this century. Also holds/held children in prison without trial in military bases and committed torture in Guantanamo on minors
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Also, a lot of people seem to think that being a kid means that you just play videogames or whatever all day
Other people have commented on the more important points, so I’m gonna add to this one
The biggest reason a lot of kids do nothing but “stay home and play video games all day” is because they literally have nothing better to do, the car-dependent suburbs that are very common in North America (which are often considered “great places to raise children”) leave kids with an inability to do anything (such as hang out with friends or go to public places) without their parents driving them around, so if their parents won’t/can’t do that then there’s nothing really else to do than just stay home, so the kids can’t have any real “freedom” until they become old enough to drive
As well, kids often aren’t even allowed to be given any level of independence these days, with things as simple as “a kid being outside on their own” (even just within their family’s property, if the neighbors are being narcs) being something that can be reported to the police and the parents potentially losing custody over
It’s okay though, we’re totally not a dystopian police state, right? /s
For real. Growing up in a suburb, the only things that were in walking distance were houses, a park, houses, a convenience store, houses, houses, and warehouses. And our town had that neighborhood watch thing where cops would basically arrest you for being young and outside past curfew.
I dunno what people expect kids to do besides play video games and watch YouTube/twitch/whatever. There’s really not much else to spend time on.
I think car dependency is a big reason but also parents not being involved enough. They also allow the technology to raise the children which is a separate issue altogether. I think it’s used as a cop out to attack children but the tech dependency isn’t the root of anti child discrimination
Also kids play videogames and browse the internet all day because parents give them no attention.
This is something i recently realized about my childhood and a posible reason as why i have a bad relation with my parents.
I feel like some of this points apply, to an extent, to adults. Not only is the lack of public spaces pervasive for both adults and children, but the risk of being outside is as well, with the giant metal boxes flying around everywhere at speeds capable of instantly killing us, and “loitering” being a crime.
Being a teenager was definitely a surreal experience. At school I was expected to write pages-long essays about history and politics without warning. I had to have a litany of formulas memorized and also remember when and how to use them. I needed to know how to analyze dense texts, including ones in middle English.
But outside of school I was treated as an idiot kid who’s 5 seconds away from stealing or breaking something at any given moment. The contrast between how I was treated in high school and college is like night and day even though I was doing much, much less schoolwork that was easier in college.
It’s also noticeable with the way we act and talk to children, like when I was a kid I didn’t like talking with anyone because adults talked to me in the annoying voice thing and they always used to dismiss what I say and underestimate my level of comprehension.
First thing is that obviously, children are far weaker than adults (I’m not included since I got once into a fight with a 6th grader and lost) there’s also knowledge gap from age which creates a power domination dynamic thing.
This also can be a result of self hatred and regret, as we were all young and made dumbass decisions that we look back on and project into kids going through the same.
This also is because of capitalism and the worth of humans being tied to how much value they produce, infact one of the first questions kids get asked is “what do you want to be when you grow up”.
My parents always would always tell people not to ask me that when they would (when I saw like 4-6 and younger than I would care) because it would teach me to see my value in a job. I didn’t really understand why they didn’t like that question then but it fully makes sense to me as an adult
Adult supremacy is a real thing. While it is very prominent among American Baby Boomers, it can afflict people of any generation. I believe we as adults have a responsibility to guide and protect youth, not forcefully shape them into some predetermined mold.
Frankly it infuriates me when I see somebody of my age (early 30s) acting just like a damned Boomer and complaining about “kids these days”, when those kids are just responding to pressures of a world that adults have forced upon them. The only kind of youth I truly dislike are the alt-right kind.
I cannot speak for any other country, but the US public school experience is designed to beat the kids down until they accept their place within the capitalist system by the time they’re 18 years old. Any education that happens in those places is incidental. They’re primarily meant for schooling, not education.
On your last point about adults sneering at children because all they do is play video games and huddle themselves inside; this is patently false and wouldn’t be nearly as prevalent if cities/towns were built for humans rather than vehicles.
Kids and teenagers seldom have an outside public area to hang out in due to them being very inaccessible and worse, needing money to even be there. Loitering laws and prioritizing adults and personal vehicles over the person has created a generation left in limbo.
I’m an adult but cannot drive so getting around and just hanging out is difficult enough for me, let alone a child. I mean, the amount of fear I have crossing the street when there is no stop light is immense, sometimes just existing is seen as an inconvenience.
this world is not built for human beings. escaping to a pretend one is basic self preservation
Here’s an article I found:
Research explores how youth are excluded from public spaces, design practices
There is an article on JSTOR as well but I know that’s not accessible to everyone.
Chad DDR strikes againI was just saying yesterday, ageism is on a bizarre rise recently. Today if someone says “I find everyone 5 years younger than me a stupid child lol” and you don’t immediately agree, you’re the weird one.
I don’t get it where tf it’s coming from. One partial theory is that people are so deathly afraid of csam and being accused of being pedos, that they need to virtue signal how they reaaaaaaaaaaaally don’t care about kids, but there has to be more to it. Casually hating on boomers is completely okay too, so I just think it’s another way of humans hating on everyone that’s not like them.
Today if someone says “I find everyone 5 years younger than me a stupid child lol”
How young are these people? I don’t want to come off defending ageism, but it does make a difference if the person saying that is 18 or 38.
I’ve mostly heard/seen it from people in the 25-35y range. Lower than that and it gets absurd, with even a 2 years difference apparently being an insurmountable obstacle to just having a conversation.
Obviously not everyone is like that, but I do get the vibe that it’s becoming the new standard.
Thanks for the context, comrade. That’s definitely very unfortunate.
Or maybe the opposite:
Children are tripping hazards due to their small size and erratic movements.
Solution: Give every child an air horn so they can announce their presence at all times.
Isn’t that what we were doing for the first 2 years after birth?
And people rarely, if ever, trip over babies. The solution works!
Most children do well enough with that one their own I would say.
New evolutionary biology hypothesis: toddlers are loud and annoying because those that weren’t were stepped on and did not make it to reproduce.
Kids 10+ are somewhat worse at controlling their impulses, usually, but other than that they’re already just as smart as most adults, especially taking into account they’re more up to date on modern tech/developments. I never understood why we as adults collectively decided to act like we’re so much superior when we’re really not
I think you are giving kids too much credit. Even the most intelligent and emotionally mature children at 10-18 years of a age have a lot of growing up to do.
Technology is a moot point because most gadgets are anti-consumer walled ecosystems and information is highly regulated by big tech companies. Therefore it doesn’t necessarily make them smarter.
You could be really smart AND have a lot of growing up to do, and I think this is true for many adults as well.
I agree that children are actively stupefied by propaganda. They’re also stupefied by poor education and hegemonic abuse from teachers, parents, employers, etc, and they then may go on to reproduce this. Our world needs to fundamentally change before we can see and gauge the true potential of children, I’d say.
Being smart and having a lot of growing up to do is true for just about every single human being on the planet
As someone who’s only grown a year and has already seen the copious amounts of cringe I’ve put out, I can confirm this is true. Children don’t really stop developing rationality until they’re 18 or so.
People continue to develop rationally their entire lives as they accumulate knowledge
Yes, but I’m talking about the specific part of the brain that handles rationality. It’s like a sort of xp cap-within the cap you can develop, but you can never pass it.
That doesn’t mean development has to stop necessarily though
The difference is that adults are building upon their existing parts, while children are still developing what they need.
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It is clear that childrearing in the west has become incredibly cruel, so I would say children are definitely treated like subhumans. I have some theories about why that is, but would love some resources to learn more about it rather than just word vomit some complete conjecture.
