Most Western people don’t want to allow sexuality even to post-puberty teenagers, at least before the ages of 15-16. Some people are even opposed to any sort of sexual education.
The issue is more socially complex than the (true) fact it’s taboo. Most people are not guided by “what would be best / most enjoyable for the children”, but rather “what would be proper” or “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up”.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
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.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice.
Oh wait.
(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
In Asia, as Malthus knew, the norm for women was early and nearly universal marriage. Recent studies of family lineages and local population registers suggest that first marriage for Chinese women around 1800 took place on average at age 19. A full 99 percent of women in the general population married.9 Men also married young, first marriage occurring on average at 21. But the share of men marrying was much lower, perhaps as low as 84 percent. Chinese males were no more likely to marry than their northwestern European counterparts. This was because female infanticide created a surplus of males, and men were more likely than women to remarry after the death of a spouse.10
Egypt:
The one even earlier society for which we have demographic data is Roman Egypt in the first three centuries AD. As in preindustrial China and Japan female marriage was early and universal. The estimated mean age at first marriage for Egyptian women was even lower, at 17.5.15 Marital fertility rates, however, were lower than in northwestern Europe, but higher than in China and Japan: about two-thirds the Hutterite standard. This early and universal marriage, and relatively high fertility rates within marriage, would seem to imply high overall fertility rates. After all, at these rates Egyptian women married from 17.5 until 50 would give birth to 8 or more children. But in fact birth rates were 40–44 per thousand, implying a life expectancy at birth of 23–25 years. In comparison French birth rates in 1750 were about 40 per thousand. So Roman Egypt, despite early marriage, had fertility levels only slightly higher than those in eighteenth-century France.16 The intervening factor that kept Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8.
Europe:
Yet despite the apparent absence of contraceptive practices, the birth rate in most preindustrial western European populations was low, at only thirty to
forty births per thousand, because of the other features of the European marriage pattern. These were as follows:
A late average age of first marriage for women: typically 24–26.
A decision by many women to never marry: typically 10–25 percent.
And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.
Men in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually 30ish at the time of marriage, while women were actually girls—they were between twelve and fifteen at the time of their first marriage. They would usually have several marriages, as their husbands died, but after the first they were firmly “mothers.” They would still usually be younger than their husband by a significant amount, even in their later marriages—by the time they surpassed the age of the pool of potential suitors, their sons or sons-in-law would have taken up their care.
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Most Western people don’t want to allow sexuality even to post-puberty teenagers, at least before the ages of 15-16. Some people are even opposed to any sort of sexual education.
The issue is more socially complex than the (true) fact it’s taboo. Most people are not guided by “what would be best / most enjoyable for the children”, but rather “what would be proper” or “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up”.
There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
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.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice. Oh wait.(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
From Farewell to Alms; Asia:
Egypt:
Europe:
To put these averages in perspective; from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
I’ve seen claims that ancient Greece & Rome may have been very different from the later medieval patterns; from http://community.feministing.com/2010/02/14/misogyny-and-relationship-inequality/comment-page-1/
(Quotes extracted from searching my Evernotes: http://www.evernote.com/pub/gwern/gwern )
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Or feel ashamed at how much more sexually repressed we are as savageorange was doing above.
More materials: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/HISTORYCHHS.HTM http://womenofhistory.blogspot.com/2007/08/medieval-marriage-childbirth.html