Our society loves reproduction, not children. There’s a strong desire for people to create children but there’s barely a willingness on the societal level to take care of them after they are created.
Actually society is very discriminating against children, and in many aspects. Probably the most outstanding immediate example of that is children’s status in their own homes. Basically, what parents are allowed to do to their own children is discrimination in all ways, and we wouldn’t accept the same status – normative and even legal and formal, the same attitude, the same legitimacy of almost absolute domination and authority in all aspects of life, the same verbal violence, in many cases physical violence as well, if it happened so regularly to adults.
The second classical example is the school system.
Children are forced to be at school whether they want to or not. Schools force children to study certain things and direct children to develop into being certain kind of people. Therefore, among other things, schools oppress natural tendencies, desires or curiousness of children regarding things that are not taught at school. For many children the school system is a framework that makes them miserable and in many ways, and here too we wouldn’t accept a similar situation to this in the case of adults. Which goes to show how discriminating against children society is. We wouldn’t conceive of paternalistically confining adults even if we were sure it is for their own future good. But children are structurally discriminated against in human society and so it is permitted to do to them many things that are not permitted in the case of adults. Including forcing them to do things they don’t want to do at school for more than a third of their time, and then forcing them to do more things they don’t want to do at home. The only reason it may sound a bit dramatic is that it is so conventional to make almost every decision for others for so many years. However, this shouldn’t be conventional but denounced.
Some would probably claim that without the oppression facility which is school and without the various studying chores, children would be harmed in the future. Meaning, it is justified to suppress children’s short term interests in order to advance their long term interests. But even if their long term interests are on the face of it greater than their short term interests, this coercion is still unjustified because it is not that these long term interests existed regardless of the creation of people and that the suppression of children’s interests is the inevitable price to pay in order to serve these long term interests, but rather that people have no interest to exist before they are created, and they have long term interests not because they have chosen to exist but because they exist as a result of others’ decision and now that they already exist, since they have to sustain themselves, not according to their choice or interest, it is for their own good that certain interests of theirs, that weren’t chosen or wished for by them before they were created, would be suppressed for their future sake. People are stuck in a situation in which they have all kinds of wills and desires and they have a strong will not to do all kinds of other things such as studying, and yet they are pressed to suppress their wills and desires so as to advance their chances of supporting themselves in an existence they haven’t chosen and wasn’t in their interest before they were created.
This system is in their favor only because they have no choice but to support themselves throughout their adult lives. It is in their favor only because they were forced to support themselves, but this is not in their favor in itself.
Accordingly, this claim actually strengthens the opposite position, because if we need to force children to do many things that they really don’t want to do, and for years, so as to prevent them from having it tougher later, meaning that it is better to harm them now so they won’t be harmed later, when in advance this whole situation that these are the options was chosen for them without them wanting, needing or agreeing to it, then this whole thing is fundamentally defective.
That there is no choice, and if we don’t demand certain things from children they will be harmed in the future, is an essential and intrinsic problem. That we must impose on children things like education, curfew, bedtime, not doing what they want whenever they want, studying, obeying certain rules, eating certain things and at certain hours etc., because ignoring all these would have a heavy price in the future, is an essential and intrinsic problem. That people must inspect, punish, educate, patron etc., is an essential and intrinsic problem. It would have been justified to force it on others only had life been necessary but it isn’t. People choose to create new people and then excuse the many things they impose on them by saying “what can you do? there is no choice!” but there is a choice, not to do!
They can choose not to create new people in such an unfair world in which there is no option but to impose so many things on people so that maybe they’ll have it less bad in the future that they didn’t ask for.
And in a wider context, even the seemingly positive saying that the children are our future is very problematic because it is treating them as means to others’ ends, in this case the ends of society, the nation, the economy of the parents themselves. A much less objectifying saying would be that the children are the present, and their own present. It’s no coincidence this isn’t the saying and instead it’s the children are our future, because children are viewed as tools for promoting social, national, economic, or familial ideas, but not as utterly independent entities who live in the present, and that their child state is not pawnage of the future but as far as they are concerned simply the present. Children tend to live the present and not the future, and not to live big social ideas but their own little private lives. All the more reason why children should be seen as the present of themselves and not the future of all of us.
Society objectifies children. Children are a phase in the lives of adults, not a phase in the lives of the children themselves. And this is by definition, because there are no people before people are created and so childhood, though defined as a phase in the lives of people, isn’t one in the metaphysical sense. Meaning, rather than childhood being a necessary phase, it is socially considered a necessary phase in the lives of adults to have children. People don’t need to be children or to exist at all before they were created. Before someone exists there is not at all someone who we can point at as a subject. There is no one and there is no one who has a need for anything, let alone a need to exist, or a need to be a child.
Children have no need to exist before it happened. Existing people who are already adults have a social need to have children (not a biological one by the way since as opposed to biological needs such as food, water and sleep that we can’t do without, it is absolutely possible to exist without having children). Children have no interest, will, aspiration, hope, or a need to exist before they were created. It is all by the parents, and by society who view children as a phase. But children are not a phase in the lives of others. Once they were created, they are whole people in themselves, whole people who didn’t get to choose anything about their own lives from the beginning and until a later age, when it is too late for them to change things about themselves. When people reach a point where they can make up their own mind more or less, they are already deeply shaped by the minds of others, even if unintentionally. Their parents, their broader environment, their language, their bodies, their voice, their genes, the timing in which they were created, the physical environment they were born into, and many other variables, have already made their deep mark in the created people, way before they could have expressed their opinions about each of these variables. When a person starts thinking, the first thought is already not really that person’s thought in an absolute sense.
Children are never really free to be who they are because who they are is largely a product of their parents and their society. A person starts to be inserted into social patterns such as gender, nationality, ethnic origin, cultural characterization, familial characterization (two heterosexual parents and one brother and one sister, or one gay parent with no siblings), sexual orientation, religious orientation etc., from the moment of birth. Simply be yourself is simply nonsense. No one can simply be herself or himself because there is no such thing. We are all a product of so many things that are not us in the simple but broad sense of the word, meaning in the sense that we were presented with all the options and we have chosen something specific by ourselves. And even if this super theoretical scenario which is absolutely impossible practically reflected something about life, that would also be impossible as these very choices, if existed, would have to be based on some preferences. But how could someone have any preferences of their own before that someone exists? And as mentioned earlier, there aren’t really such preferences after someone was created because then various factors that that person hasn’t chosen already affect that person’s choices. Therefore, at no point does anyone have a choice which is really hers/his, to shape who s/he really is.