I’ll be so glad when the current incarnation of the Cult of the Child ends. After almost 40 years of mass cultural child-worship I’m so sick of it I want to puke. This isn’t the first time Western society has been obsessed with the bizarre belief that “children” (which doesn’t only mean actual children, but also biological adults the law defines as “children”) are spiritually “pure” and asexual, while simultaneously being blank slates for “socialization” to write upon, and yet magically wise, so that any stupid opinions they vomit out of their ignorant, inexperienced heads come straight from the gods. The Victorians were also obsessed with this mawkish nonsense, and it made several other short-lived appearances in overcivilized cultures over the previous millennia.
In the current incarnation of this perennial madness, “children” are held to have no legal rights, yet at the same time to be prophets no one is allowed to criticize. “Children” are adored like cultic icons, and their ignorant opinions (contaminated by adolescent hormonal emotions and uncontaminated by anything like advanced study of whatever the opined-upon topic might be) held to be above criticism, yet they are denied even the most basic freedoms enjoyed by “children” or young adults in every other culture, past or present. Teens have fewer rights than active-duty military, yet their immature fantasies about how the world works (or “should” work) are revered like the utterances of sibyls and there’s even talk of giving them the right to vote (while denying them the ability to consent to sex, drink, or even do a lot of the basic things adults take for granted). It’s typical self-contradictory religious madness.
The point of society is to prepare children for their future lives as adults; it is not to artificially “protect” them from reality by shielding them from anything that might upset them and congratulating them for accomplishments they should’ve mastered at half their current age, nor to coddle them by pretending their immature notions are actually deep and mature thoughts. And it certainly isn’t to keep them stunted and trapped in an artificially-extended childhood like china dolls in a display case, nor to limit the rights of adults to those appropriate for people who still believe that supersonic flying reindeer are a reasonable concept.
