Response to Chattel Childhood
Aella’s Chattel Childhood (which contains graphic descriptions of child abuse) has the following thesis: cultures around the world, both in the past and today, treat children as property.
The system of chattel childhood happens over a much wider scale. It involves ownership over people who are physically much smaller than you, who are effectively mentally disabled, and who will experience some amnesia about what you do to them. You get the privacy of your own home to do what you like, your ownership is legally enforced; if your property runs away, your taxpayer money funds the police to forcibly hunt them down and bring them back. If you hit them, it’s to “prevent them from becoming a burden to society.”
She offers numerous uncomfortable examples of the normalization of abuse directed at children, and after reading them I couldn’t help but agree that indeed, children are obviously physically, mentally, and socially at a disadvantage, so outcomes like these shouldn’t be so surprising.
And while this point is itself very important, and I’d find the text valuable even if its conclusions stopped there, I started thinking about how well it describes present-day Finland. The description above is in a way true here too, but then again, we also have legislation about violence against children and child protection organizations.
The text’s second big thesis concerns the stripping away of children’s agency.
I don’t approve of the Simbari childrearing, not because I think the pain and disgust of what the children are forced to do is inherently bad, but because they are forced.
To love someone skillfully is to pour fuel on their soul. It’s to see the world through their desire, to delight in it, and go “I desire you to get what you want.” It is the amplification of their will.
The Simbari people are destroying the will of their children. My parents destroyed my will. And I think, quite seriously, that our current culture is likewise destroying the will of its children en masse. That’s what you do to property.
The text offers a couple of examples from the education side that are, as I see it, relevant in Finland too. One is that school forces children to wake up early, earlier than they themselves would want to wake. Reading it, I recalled having myself felt considerable discomfort waking up at seven for school, but – like the character in the text’s dialogue – I wouldn’t of course label this child abuse.
Another example:
I have a friend who, as a teen, decided he didn’t want to attend school. He just stopped going. Things escalated, and the police ended up forcibly taking him to school, but he would just walk out as soon as they left. They threatened that they’d get his parents in legal trouble for failing to get him to go to school, so he finally complied by going to school, but sat in protest out in the hallway. They ended up sending him to a detention center for bad kids.
With this case I was already less sympathetic – if a teenage child is so unwilling to go to school that even forcibly dragging him there can’t keep him there, then maybe it isn’t moral to detain him?
If done to an adult, that would be a serious violation of human rights.
But maybe this too is a selected example, and something like this wouldn’t happen in Finland?
I started thinking about my own childhood, the situations where I experienced my own freedoms and agency being restricted.
One example is school lunch. I’d say “I was forced to eat food” is a truthful description of what many of my elementary-school lunches looked like. Not literally in the sense that the teacher physically shoves a utensil into my mouth, but in the sense that the teacher watches me take a “sufficient” amount of food onto my plate and ensures that the plate is eaten clean. With an adult’s social skills (and position), maybe one could have negotiated one’s way out of it, but in a child’s position I had essentially one option: eat the food.
(Or: try to return a non-empty plate while the teacher is looking the other direction, which of course I also did.)
Having gone through the Finnish education system, I’m of course aware of the general arguments for this. It’s good for children to get used to tasting new foods. It’s important for children to eat. During the school day it’s important to eat, not only for the child themselves, but also because otherwise the child starts disturbing others. The plate should be eaten clean so there’s no food waste. Very reasonable.
In any case, in second grade it happened one day that the food was so bad I had to run from the lunchhall to the bathroom to vomit. The teacher followed me to the bathroom and scolded me, saying “is this how you thank the cooks [for having made the school food]”.
Boys’ P.E. class in middle school. Knowing me, you can guess I was not a fish in water there.
That understates it. There were several P.E. classes where I felt physically threatened. Naturally I was forced into this situation: leaving is forbidden by the rules and social norms, and violations carry punishments.
Depending on which school of thought you belong to, you might be sympathetic toward me or offer defenses of P.E. class. Young people, after all, ought to move, and ought to vent a little energy through exercise. It’s good to get used to it sometimes hurting a little, so you don’t grow too timid. And it’s unfortunate if something worse happens sometimes, but one teacher can’t see and prevent everything.
In any case, the middle-school gym is, as I recall, the only place where someone has touched my sexual organs despite my physical resistance.
When I was a child it was typical for my big brother to provoke me about something and then for us to settle the matter with violence. The thing is, a two-year age advantage is fairly significant in free combat between children, so I often almost always drew the shorter straw in those.
Being older, I admit that sometimes it also happened that I started it. I was sometimes annoying just for the sake of it, too. So I don’t deny that some of those fights were “my fault”.
(But I still maintain that less than 50% of them were “my fault”, even before taking my younger age into account, and a big part of the fighting was big brothers deliberately provoking to make me angry.)
The result of those fights wasn’t usually too rough (perhaps surprisingly – maybe it’s just that children wrestling with each other don’t very easily do lasting damage?). And if mom was home, she usually did step in once the decibels rose high enough. Mostly physical pain, cuts and bruises, hyperventilating a couple of times, but no broken bones or worse.
I feel I can give a quite convincing-sounding rationale for why the matter wasn’t addressed more than it was: “Children need to be able to settle things among themselves: mom can’t be (and doesn’t want to be) constantly scolding and acting as referee. In the same way it’s good for a child to learn not to annoy others, and that if someone annoys you, beating them up isn’t a good solution. It’s also perfectly healthy for children to physically test each other now and then, as long as nothing worse happens – better to learn as a child, since it gets ugly if full-strength adults start fighting.”
In any case, I was deeply despondent when I was twelve. One day, when these conflicts had been more frequent than usual, I fetched a steak knife from the kitchen, grabbed it with both hands, and yanked it blade-first toward my stomach–
If you’re a child…
…who is repeatedly provoked by other people so that you lose your temper…
…who really is a child and whose metacognitive abilities don’t allow the option of “just not losing your temper”…
…who is physically at a disadvantage to them and draws the shorter straw when it comes down to fighting…
…who can’t get any authority to intervene…
…who feels that the authorities who know about it think you’re the main cause of these problems…
…who doesn’t have the option of just leaving the situation or not seeing these people…
…who doesn’t have an adult’s problem-solving ability to find creative solutions…
…then to me it’s not surprising that this can lead to despair, even to the point of self-destructiveness.
Someone asked me how I would be different if my will had been respected more as a child. The right answer is probably “I don’t know”, but I speculated that I’d probably have more unreflective, system-1-level emotions and preferences if I hadn’t gotten a lot of negative reinforcement for showing them when I was smaller. I feel my distribution there is narrower than people’s on average, in a way that the general treatment of children may causally have influenced.
I’d consider it a mistake if, after reading all of the above, someone concluded that I had unusually bad teachers and parents.
(I think this would be a mistake similar to the “homeschooling should be illegal” comments that appeared in Aella’s post – flinching away from the core issue.)
All things considered, I think they’ve been better than average. The reason you don’t hear more stories like this isn’t, in my view, that they don’t exist – social dark matter and all that. I probably have a better-than-average memory, a stronger-than-average tendency to think about such things, and a greater-than-average willingness to write about such things (publicly, no less). And naturally, in an essay of the form “This Is Done Wrong in Childrearing” you don’t hear the best sides of childrearers.
My intention is also not to criticize what those particular people did or failed to do. What I’m trying to convey here is that, structurally, children’s position is such that situations like these just happen, even if no particular adult does anything exceptionally badly.
I feel adults find it hard to understand how diffcult situations children are often in. It’s an absurd idea – absolutely ridiculous, completely outrageous – that at an adult’s workplace they’d be forced to eat food and scolded if they then vomit it up. And an adult could at least take countermeasures against that workplace and decide not to go there the next day. Children don’t have these options.
(At my most despondent I sometimes “ran away from home”. For an unprepared elementary-school-aged kid that’s a somewhat difficult operation, so after camping out at the nearby bus stop for an hour or two I always went back.)
I feel some sort of obligation to express my sympathy toward reasonable parents who find it hard to solve, on their own, problems arising at school, for example. It’d be nice if I had silver bullets to share, but I don’t really have any.
I could say this: I don’t think I myself was an unreasonably difficult child. I feel I had empathy and theory of mind fairly early: already in early elementary school I had a cringe reaction if a teacher tried to do something silly and fun that the job didn’t directly require, and a classmate of mine gave negative reinforcement for it. In the same way I understood our family’s financial situation early on, and very rarely asked for or demanded anything costing money. And of course at school I was quite conscientious and respectful of authority.
So I feel I could have been a reasonable child, one you could negotiate things with and who could settle for some solution other than “I get everything I want or I throw a tantrum”. Likewise I feel my cognitive abilities would have allowed me to express my own preferences (but that, in turn, was at times memorably negatively reinforced). Of course only at the level you can realistically expect from an eight-year-old, but nothing short of that either.
(Again, I don’t want to downplay how much my preferences were listened to and how much non-coercion-based interaction I had. As said, this text is focusing on the negatives.)
It’s worth noting, though, that the bronze bullet I’m offering here is “it’s worth talking with children about what they think of things (and being the kind of person they can express their own thoughts to without reinforcing them to be a certain way)”. If someone has a problem, perhaps the most natural approach to solving it is to talk with them. And the fact that this was, in my view, done comparatively little, and that adding it is my foremost suggestion, evidences what I see as the core problem: that children and their thoughts aren’t respected enough that talking with them is seen as productive.
That’s of course generally hard for people – probably one of the central problems in interaction between adults too is “people don’t take account enough for other people’s thoughts and situation”.
But if my friend told me they’d vomited at a workplace lunch, I’d find it natural to ask a couple of follow-up questions.