I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.
Here’s a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:
To Roommate: “Your music’s bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?” (justification usually given or implicit) To Pet: “Your meowing’s loud, shut the fuck up.” (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*) To Child: “Turn down your music! It’s loud!” (No justification given, usually even upon request)
To Roommate: “Could you wash the dishes? I’m really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X’Y’Z′ reason)” To Pet: … (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater) To Child: “Do the dishes before 5 PM.” “Come do the dishes NOW or I’m unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)”
To Roommate: “I’ll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don’t care about yours as long as it doesn’t stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons” To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space) To Child: “Clean your room by the end of the day or you can’t go out this weekend.”
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
For many families, though I don’t know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual “pets if my pet could talk”, and completely incompatible with the “Roommate” examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).
In a large number of situations I’ve seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you’re stuck living with, but who still doesn’t / can’t pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).
But their child? “People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children’s education” (read: They have a “right” to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)
Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.
Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. In my case I was also thinking of the way some parents train their children to make their parents look good—as objects to show off, just like dogs or cats at a show, not individuals whose accomplishments are largely their own.
I don’t think this is so much “treating children as pets” as it is “treating children like not your peers”. When your boss asks you to do something, does she say “Hey, would you mind helping me out with X? I’d really like to get it done this week.”? More than likely, she says “I need you to finish X by Friday.”
You only need to give justifications to peers. A person in a higher position of authority can make a request of a subordinate without justification. So it is with officers/privates in the military, managers/employees, and parents/children.
To adress your second point:
The point isn’t in justification. The difference I’m pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren’t accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.
Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or “should” be used.
Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.
Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the “private life” of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.
Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).
Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn’t behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee’s phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.
Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
I know right?
Guess the best part. Go on.
(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they’re only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)
Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it’s on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.
What do you mean by parents treating their children like pets?
I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.
Here’s a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:
To Roommate: “Your music’s bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?” (justification usually given or implicit)
To Pet: “Your meowing’s loud, shut the fuck up.” (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*)
To Child: “Turn down your music! It’s loud!” (No justification given, usually even upon request)
To Roommate: “Could you wash the dishes? I’m really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X’Y’Z′ reason)”
To Pet: … (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater)
To Child: “Do the dishes before 5 PM.” “Come do the dishes NOW or I’m unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)”
To Roommate: “I’ll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don’t care about yours as long as it doesn’t stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons”
To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space)
To Child: “Clean your room by the end of the day or you can’t go out this weekend.”
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with “treating children like pets” is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
For many families, though I don’t know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual “pets if my pet could talk”, and completely incompatible with the “Roommate” examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).
In a large number of situations I’ve seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you’re stuck living with, but who still doesn’t / can’t pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).
But their child? “People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children’s education” (read: They have a “right” to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)
Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.
Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. In my case I was also thinking of the way some parents train their children to make their parents look good—as objects to show off, just like dogs or cats at a show, not individuals whose accomplishments are largely their own.
It’s a good thing I asked—my guess was that you meant that children were coddled but not trained.
I don’t think this is so much “treating children as pets” as it is “treating children like not your peers”. When your boss asks you to do something, does she say “Hey, would you mind helping me out with X? I’d really like to get it done this week.”? More than likely, she says “I need you to finish X by Friday.”
You only need to give justifications to peers. A person in a higher position of authority can make a request of a subordinate without justification. So it is with officers/privates in the military, managers/employees, and parents/children.
To adress your second point: The point isn’t in justification. The difference I’m pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren’t accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.
Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or “should” be used.
Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.
Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the “private life” of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.
Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).
Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn’t behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee’s phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.
Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
I know right?
Guess the best part. Go on.
(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they’re only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)
Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it’s on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.