Sine
@sinea
24 okur puanı
Ocak 2021 tarihinde katıldı
Adultism shows up in things like ‘no children’ signs in shops and the Mosquito alarms used as ‘teenager repellent’. Marketed at residents and small-business owners who want to prevent teenagers from gathering in public, these dystopian-sounding devices work by emitting a high frequency tone that adults cannot hear but which is unbearable to young people. Can you imagine it being socially acceptable for something like this to be sold targeting any other group of people?
0-30p: Kontrollü okuyucu 📖
40-70p: Hafif bağımlı 👀
80p+: Geçmiş olsun, kitaplar seni ele geçirmiş 😅
When we see children as future people it positions them as less than fully human, even if that isn’t our intention. When we assume that they are incapable of complex, rational thinking, we assume that they cannot make important decisions about their lives and that it is down to adults to take control ‘in their best interests’, without ever questioning our focus on rationality as a marker of humanity in the first place.
When we move towards seeing children as people who belong only to themselves — who wear many labels and social identities, as we all do — then it becomes easier to notice when they are treated in ways we would not tolerate ourselves, and to think about how we can better protect and support their collective rights while honouring and respecting their individual needs and preferences.
How we think about childhood is intensely bound up in our ideas and understandings of time. To be a parent is to be always looking forward, both in our children’s lives (celebrating milestones as they acquire new skills, chalking up lines on the door frames to measure their growth, imagining what the next stage of parenting will bring) but also in how we think about ourselves, situated on a family tree stretching back into the past and onwards towards future generations. Yet while we might have long-term dreams and fears for the children in our lives, we also live alongside them in the present. When my daughter falls down and scrapes her knee, I respond to her in the here and now, not because I’m thinking about how this will affect her in the future, but because I love her and want to support her through her discomfort. I see her as the person right in front of me, not her future self.
To acknowledge a child’s personhood without invoking their potential as an adult does not mean that their future ceases to be important. We would do the children in our care a disservice to never be thinking about the years to come, just as we as adults think about our own futures too. This is why we might still insist on teeth being brushed, even when the child in front of us doesn’t feel it’s high on their priority list! But we can speak to children about their hopes for the future and how we can support them to meet these, rather than making assumptions about what a ‘good’ future life should look like. It is their lives, after all, not ours.
Puan vermedi·48 syf.·
2026 2. kitabı
