“Few things are more indicative of our mainstream media’s idiocy than the fact that right wingers have been allowed to wave the “family values” banner for so long despite this rather unseemly hostility to minor children.”

I like how you explained that. Very helpful. Thanks.

Please stop conflating arguing in favor of children’s rights with my arguing against the increasing tendency among middle and upper-class American parents to have increasingly diminished expectations of their adolescent children’s/young adult’s capacity for being able to make responsible decisions and being able to think for themselves. All I am saying is that adolescents/young adults should not be patronized as being incapable of doing anything without micromanging parents around. Being that type of parent would retard the maturation process as the adolescent/young adult is not being given substantiative chances to start learning how to make their own decisions responsibly and to deal with the consequences that may result. While older generations have always ragged on the younger generation, it seems as if the adolescents and young adults are increasingly being seen and treated like young children rather than people in transition who need to start preparing to live and act as independent adults. In the case of the 14 year old whose parents won’t allow her to cross the street, I do believe that’s being overprotective as I still routinely see kids as young as 7-10 routinely crossing busy multi-lane streets in NYC without anyone raising a fuss of “OMG, that’s child neglect!! Call out Children’s services!!” Fortunately, this insanity has not yet affected most New Yorkers barring some wealthy poshy parents I remembered from middle/high school whose overprotectiveness had more to do with insulating their precious children from us lower-class riffraff than any actual concerns over safety or maturity.

Assuming the parents concerned were involved in their children’s lives and patiently explained their values over the many years into adolescence, a few courses in public school or university or limited exposure to a relative or neighbor with contrary beliefs would rarely have the power to completely turn most adolescents/young adults completely opposite to the way they were raised. Though this is admittedly anecdotal, most adolescent children/young adults I knew who grew up in liberal and/or agnostic/atheistic homes who were taken by a relative to a Fundie church or event ended up not only not adopting the Fundie beliefs, but ended up being more turned off from it as their worldview was greatly influenced by their liberal and/or agnostic/atheistic parents. The few I knew who did join the Fundie church/groups tended to have poor/nonexistant relationships with their parents.

In the context of parents fearing “indoctrination” in universities, I found most conservative oriented students would avoid classes dealing with Marxist theory, Feminism, or other courses they consider to be “leftist indoctrination” or professors with a pronounced reputation for being politically left. Heck, most conservative students I knew avoided applying to certain colleges/universities like the one I attended (Oberlin) for that very reason. Conversely, I’ve known many liberal oriented students who avoided taking Economics and certain Poli-sci courses because they viewed them as “right-wing indoctrination” or the Prof concerned had a reputation for being conservative
(*cough*Samuel P. Huntington *cough*). Also, i doubt you’d see these students applying to conservative schools schools like The Citadel, Liberty, or ORU. Heck, I had a classmate who turned down admission to Yale and a classmate who transferred from Berkeley because they both cited the increasingly conservative climate at both schools.

The few who took courses in opposition to their political beliefs such as my taking an advanced Marxist theory seminar despite my vehement anti-communist beliefs or a liberal friend’s taking Huntington’s course at Harvard rarely “converted” to the views of their profs. In our cases and that of several other similarly situated acquaintances, those courses either had little effect beyond more knowledge or reinforced the views we had before we took the course.

Dana - I was speaking more of parents who are drug addicts, living in poverty, dealing with domestic abuse, whatever. I meant parents who are too busy with their own shit.

I meant charmed life in the sense that we have time and space to worry and wonder how these things affect our children.

Yes, overprotective parents can cripple maturity. But children are, well, children. Immaturity does not mean “your parents coddled you”.

My comment about fundamentalist Christians was not “fear”; it was noting that liberals tend to see “let your kids make up their own minds” and “subvert kids with new ideas” as running in only direction: getting a kid with a repressive, conservative upbringing to learn more and think about Good Ideas. But that door swings both ways.

And I’m guessing you’re not all that old, if you think of 1993 as the Good Old Days. I was hearing the same old kids-today-are-spoiled-rotten thing back then too.

Mythago,

Although I agree that children do mature at different rates, part of that is dependent on the parents and the larger environment. If the parents and the larger environment perceives children to be incapable of learning how to start making responsible choices independently, that could very well become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

“Okay, then. I’m making decisions about what my kids can do at particular ages, and not asking anyone to make those decisions for me.”

Fuck that, thankyew.

Some of the fears of your children getting involved with fundamentalist Christians are the exact same fears I hear from Conservative parents who fear their adolescent children will be corrupted by the teaching of evolution in high school science classes or by “evil Liberal indoctrination” at many universities. That is a patronizing view of adolescents and young adults that does not account for their agency, however immature they may be. Moreover, influences from teachers and other outside sources do not always impact the adolescent in a direct linear fashion.

Moreover, I am not arguing that children should have complete freedom….just that too many current parents seem to have such diminished expectations of what their adolescent children are actually capable of compared with their counterparts 15 or more years ago.

The legal and societal standards uphold this perogative of yours. Hopefully, the parents who use this perogative do not end up being part of the increasing trend of infantilizing/micromanaging parents whose children are burdening university faculty, staff, and even some employers. I’m still amazed at how many of the current undergrads I’ve talked with saw nothing “weird” about calling up their parents to resolve grade disputes, clean their rooms, or other matters that my friends and I dealt with ourselves.

BTW: Good use of invective to advance one’s point! /snk

Do you mean the ALA rather than the government here?

Sure. But I wonder how much the “rah rah independence!” crowd would keep cheering if the kids in question were experimenting with the Silver Ring Thing, or if the childfree Interfering Auntie, rather than bringing cool toys and Judy Blume books, was taking the kids to Jesus revival meetings behind their parents’ backs.

“You should be responsible for your kids and not expect the media/Internet/government to make the world safe for them!”

“Okay, then. I’m making decisions about what my kids can do at particular ages, and not asking anyone to make those decisions for me.”

“OMGWTF you are oppressing your kids FREEDOM 4 TEH CHILRENZ!!!!”

Fuck that, thankyew.

Um, NO.

As someone whose government defined job description includes strict rules about answering kids questions with facts, no matter what the parents want, it’s pretty clear to me that what this is about is respecting kids as people; establishing that my role is different from that of a parent - I’m there to to be an advocate for parents, but I’m there to be an advocate for the kids themselves, too; and making it clear to kids that I won’t ever lie to them, so that they learn to see libraries as places where they can come to for unbiased information.

This isn’t to say that I give the kids anything they want if the parents is right there saying they can’t have a certain book or movie or answer. What this means is that I should never lie to a child or refuse to let a child check a particular book or movie out myself, which includes acting as a surrogate parent if the parent requests it. “Don’t let Billy check out those awful Captain Underpants books when I’m not here, ok?” No, not ok. I’ll offer the kid something else if you are standing right there, telling them that they can’t have that. But if you aren’t there, and they ask for the book, I’m getting them the book. No matter what I heard you say yesterday. I’m not a babysitter.

I actually agree with some of the rules parents have tried to get me to help them enforce: “HW must be done before getting onto myspace.” But I think it would harm the kids more for them to see me as a non-neutral party than it harms them to have to be grounded and lose library visits in order to teach them priorities and time management.

While I’ll admit my first instinct was to side with the “a 14-year old can’t cross the street alone!” crowd, having just spent several minutes last night at the library trying to prevent an food fight between a 12 and a 15 year old - started and repeatedly escalated by the 15 year old, no less - from coming to blows…

um, yeah.

Granted, bad parents exist. But often times the good reasons for certain rules aren’t immediately evident to outsiders. And teenagers especially are pretty notorious for acting more mature than most adults one minute, and like five year olds the next. (”He started it! Yeah, so? What are you, in first grade?) I’m all for letting kids have the chance to take risks (like letting them have pizza in the library after hours, which I’d never let some adults do) - there’s just no reason to let them take life threatening risks if one can prevent it.

And yeah, I realize that a 14 year old can get a learner’s permit in a few years. The whole thing about “life threatening risks” is that how life threatening certain risks are depends on the maturity of the person taking them. Thus why learner’s permits require parental permission.

I think the bigger issue is parents (and pundits) who define “life-threatening” as “exposure to ideas” and “experimenting with the unconventional” rather than “getting hit by a car.” In other words, it’s one thing to require adult supervision at teen events, it’s another to not let them have a decent amount of freedom in terms of choosing what those activities are.

And regarding the parents that try to micromanage their kids college schedules, that seems to be more of a control issue than anything to do with the parents underestimating their kids’ maturity. Unlike the 14 yr old who can’t cross the street by herself, the thinking seems to be that they aren’t capable of making any choices for themselves period, not that they aren’t mature enough to be counted on to make the responsible choice consistently.

There are lots of tweens at my library that have similar
“crossing the street” rules. The “street” in front of the library is actually a sporadically busy highway with no crosswalk. When the school bus stops by the library, they are allowed to get out and come to the library by themselves, even though they are technically too young to be there unattended. They can even go between shops and stores along the street (There’s a cafe nearby that they go to a lot.) What they aren’t allowed to do is cross the street. (Which means they have to choose between the library and the new arcade. ) And this rule has as much to do with the fact that they tend to go in groups, and tend to be hyper focused on each other, and ignore practically everything else, as it does with individual maturity.