Portland gets youth rights wrong

I'm afraid your claims are not entirely honest in this regard. Youth rights advocates do not consider adolescents to be "children" in any factually accurate sense of the word, and consider adolescence to be an unnatural and arbitrary extension of childhood. Even as recent as a century ago in this country, adolescents were treated as adults.

Thank you Julian. Even today adolescents are treated in many respects as adults - but never in all respects. Who except the "child and youth rights" movement thinks it an injustice that aspects of childhood naturally and reasonably persist into adolescence, especially of responsibility toward family and the right to protection within it?

This movement has been antagonistic to these appropriate relationships, aggressively and exploitively interfering with them in the interest of an artificial ideal and a radical ideology.

It has frustrated legitimate authority and care within the family, in some cases directly standing between the individuals and the attentions to which they are entitled within the family, contributing to growing numbers of youth living unnecessarily in danger and poverty.

I should first plainly state that I am a member of the youth rights movement, and for that matter, I am a particularly radical member. I am what is considered a "liberationist" in youth rights circles in that I favor the eventual abolition of age restrictions.

That seems extremely far-fetched by modern standards, but to be honest, I don't regard the doctrine of adolescence as a failed social experiment as an especially "radical ideology," and neither, apparently, does Newt Gingrich. http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_45/b 4107085289974.htm

I shall comment on the issue of youth living in danger and poverty by stating that youth rights advocates do not consider this to be an at all desirable goal. As a matter of fact, we believe that this poverty is a result of direct state enfranchisement through the methods of compulsory schooling and child labor laws. We do not believe that the repeal of child labor laws would place youth in danger, as the unsafe work conditions that endangered ALL WORKERS in times past have largely been eliminated through labor reforms. We regard laws originally intended to keep six year olds from working in sweatshops as today preventing sixteen year olds from working in air-conditioned offices. Since youth largely do not have the right to work and all youth under 18 are prohibited from signing legal contracts, we regard this as directly withholding responsibility from youth, preventing them from adopting self-reliance and a work ethic, the prevention of which I have never regarded as conservative values.

The intensity of your involvement gives you an advantage in our disagreement. But I think that trends in the movement you are committed to bear out a prediction, that "youth rights" are expanded by eliminating the legal privileges extended to the family which enable parents to protect children and youth in a manner that is appropriate to their age and maturity.

Rights are misnamed, when all they really stand for are implications of a monomania, an absolutized ideal of the individual.

We will go on punishing neglectful parents, of course - because the consequences of neglect are obvious. But at the same time, we have made it, and will make it, harder and harder for parents to provide the care and discipline to which the child or youth is entitled by nature - which is necessary to preparation for adult responsibility - by building a fence of "rights" around the individual, derived from an ideology.