Ageism

Minish said:

The privileged experience of being older? o_o I'm not sure I understand! People should listen to kids about their own issues, obviously - it's when kids start speaking about experiences they haven't really had that I tend to find easier to dismiss! So if Social Justicing has rules, this largely sticks to it!

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In addition to what Dannichu mentioned, which is super important, there are the simple facts that kids literally don't have the same legal rights that adults do. They aren't entitled to make decisions for themselves, an adult has to make it; they can't vote, they can't drive, etc. etc.

Note I'm not arguing whether these are good or bad laws, just that it is literally illegal for you to do these things as a kid. You have way more rights than a kid does; you are way more privileged.

Dannichu said:

I get that you think that kids should be listened to when they try and talk about things happening to them, but not everyone does. Pretty much everyone I've ever talked to about being bullied as a child has said that adults would just talk to them about their childhood experiences, rather than actually listen to what they were saying. I spent last summer talking to dyslexic people* and a depressing number of them talked about how their parents, carers and teachers would tell them that they were stupid and lazy, rather than talk to them about how they were feeling in relation to schoolwork, so many didn't discover they had learning difficulties until sixth form and beyond. When a child's trying to learn with words and numbers but things don't make sense to them, they can either be talked to and treated like their experience is important and create learning tools that work for them, or be told that they're just not trying hard enough. A hugely disproportionate number of children expelled from school have learning disabilities/difficulties, but are often not diagnosed so they can't get the support they need.

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Believe me, I went through a lot of that shit! I think all that's pretty awful! It doesn't really have much to do with taking a kid's view on things they haven't really experienced with a grain of salt, though. :(

Doing that can lead to a 'kids don't know anything' mindset: kids definitely need more listened to than dismissed at the moment, probably. I'm just explaining my viewpoint!

yeah, i think it is a bit of a stretch to go from 'kids generally are less experienced with some things which they therefore know less about' to 'you're not being bullied! you're just a kid, you don't know what you're talking about'.

Yeah, but that kind of generalisation is hurtful, and it's especially silly on the internet. If people's (voluntarily listed) ages weren't displayed on this site, people would have to judge a person's posts purely on the quality of their argument, rather than how old they are.

Anyone who's never met me has no actual proof I'm 23, and yet I'm sure my opinion about life-stuff is more likely to be taken seriously than someone who's age is listed as 16, even if a much younger person has had a ton more actual life experiences than me (which is probably true, I've had a terribly boring/easy life).

Plus, if I decided I didn't want younger friends, there's no way I'd even be on this forum. I've been done with uni for ages, have worked a bunch of jobs and have two degrees, but I don't think I'm magically more mature than everyone who's still studying. If, when I started uni, I thought 'well, I don't have anything in common with people still at school/people who haven't left home', I'd have missed out on a bunch of great friendships :(

Can't speak for everyone, but I never look at other members' ages unless something particularly immature prompts me to search for explanations. Age isn't a reason to be dismissive of people, but it's a reason to show forbearance.

Dannichu said:

If people's (voluntarily listed) ages weren't displayed on this site, people would have to judge a person's posts purely on the quality of their argument, rather than how old they are.

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But that doesn't sound good to me. :( Posts or arguments don't just appear, you can't look at them in a vacuum. What's the point? They come from people and they come from those people for reasons. On a forum, I'm not interacting with posts, but with post writers!

This actually feels really similar to the argument people use constantly on forums, like, "if you didn't know I was a white cis guy you'd have taken my opinion seriously there!" and yeah, maybe. But it's important I knew! This isn't quite on the same scale, but like, knowing the person behind a post is useful and important for the context of a post. Age can sometimes be really important for context.

Like that one thread about child discipline - I thought it was really, really interesting and relevant that the handful of people defending it were pretty much all children themselves. I'm glad I knew that they were children, and it was not because I felt I could then dismiss them.

It's much more difficult to classify things on a case-by-case basis. Most kids are still immature at the ages that they're restricted. If they're not, then they're mature enough to wait until they're of age. It's not such a terrible set up.

Qvalador said:

It's much more difficult to classify things on a case-by-case basis. Most kids are still immature at the ages that they're restricted. If they're not, then they're mature enough to wait until they're of age. It's not such a terrible set up.

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How is that different than dealing with an adult...?

I was about to be hasty and reply something probably stupid, but.

What do you mean, "handling adults"? You really don't handle adults the same way at all.

Qvalador said:

I was about to be hasty and reply something probably stupid, but.

What do you mean, "handling adults"? You really don't handle adults the same way at all.

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I said 'dealing' with adults.

Why don't you deal with them the same?

Because they're trusted with responsibility that children aren't. Adults almost always have the extra level of maturity, thus more is expected of them. Also, the rules adults follow are different! Different crimes get different times.

On the one hand, we should all be willing to respect and engage with the experiences and expressions of young people, but it would be absurd of us not to be conscious of the fact that perspectives change with age. And that's not just a truism, I mean, the older you get, the less significant an hour seems as it becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life.

In other words, it's perfectly reasonable for you to think to yourself "ah, if only he knew" when a kid says something naive or silly or just unnuanced, but you're a dick if you throw that back in their face, because you're essentially punishing them for the crime of being a twelve-year-old. You should just explain, as best you can, the flaws in what they said and encourage them to give it more thought.

As regards law, though, sheer practicality means not enshrining age as a basis for things in law would be silly. However, I agree with Danni that there should just be one age where you suddenly get all your adult rights and responsibilities, as opposed to the current situation in many countries, where you're able to go abroad to die for your country before you're able to elect the government that sends you there. I'm also open to the idea of some sort of mechanism for essentially "skipping ahead" to adulthood, like a system of tests or something that prove you're ready to have adult rights and responsibilities, but I'm more in favour of the idea in abstract rather than any concrete policy platform.

Also, since we kind of got sunk into ageism against the young for some reason: ageism against the elderly is fucking terrible. Many OAPs suffer from such severe social isolation that winter in the UK and Ireland inevitably results in several deaths in elderly people who had no one visit them to check that they had sufficient heating to keep them from straight-up freezing to death. The elderly are constantly made to feel like they're a burden on society, especially those who weren't in a position to develop a pension in their working years and have to go on welfare to survive once they retire (or are retired, forcibly), and their experiences and expressions are constantly dismissed as relics of the past, when plenty of people of age have vibrant and fascinating opinions.

Qvalador said:

Because they're trusted with responsibility that children aren't. Adults almost always have the extra level of maturity, thus more is expected of them. Also, the rules adults follow are different! Different crimes get different times.

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Interesting you'd bring up crime. A person 18 or under(though in some cases, this age ceiling has been pushed to 21) is usually put through the juvenile "justice" system, where the crime isn't really a crime, you talk to a referee instead of a judge, and you're not entitled to a jury of any kind. From what I've seen and heard, the fact that a minor cannot be convicted of a crime allows all sorts of messed-up things to happen.