Ageism Re: Children and Teens

[unspeakablehorror]

I really dislike the flippant and often overtly hateful attitudes I see people have with children and teens so often.  There's absolutely no justification for it.  'Oh, well they annoy me' or 'but they said something I don't agree with' are not justifications for that kind of behavior.  As for any claims of lack of maturity or wisdom, well there's plenty of adults that lack those things too.  In the end, I think this kind of behavior is normalized because children and teens lack authority or institutional power so adults know they can get away with mistreating them as a group.  All I know is I remember how horrible it was to be treated like something subhuman by adults when I was a child, and I don't want to perpetuate that kind of behavior.  Also even adults who aren't overtly hateful like this can mistreat children either by expecting too much from them or, alternately, by expecting too little and granting too little autonomy (eg. 'a 3rd grader can't read a 5th grade level book!', which is a type of thing I've actually heard before.  Fortunately, this particular evil was never applied to me and I happily checked physics books out of the library in grade school).  If someone doesn't like children or can't handle being around children, then by all means avoid them, but people shouldn't take advantage of their position of power over children to mistreat them.

Unfortunately I think 'children should be treated like people' is one of my more controversial opinions.