My grandfather left school at the age of 12, like many children of his generation. He got a job as a butcher’s apprentice so he could supplement his parents income and help feed his siblings. He could read and write. He joined the war effort and on his return he managed to set up his own shop and support his wife and children.
I think there are arguments on both side. When we over protect, children don’t get the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and will continue to make poor choices. They’re also more inclined to rebel. Too much freedom can also be overwhelming and exploited by undesirables. Finding a balance is key.
I also think young people need to understand that you don’t age into freedom, you age into responsibility. That nugget of wisdom seems to fly straight over their head. Hard lessons to learn and they don’t benefit from being protected from it or being bailed out of it.

Just go and read Lord of The Flies.

This is really, really funny and makes a really, really serious point. Thanks.

When the Left talks about liberating children it just means “liberating” them from their parents as the state takes over raising them. Thus they can be marinated from birth in the “correct” political views without the interference of parents – a pilot program of which we’re already seeing in public schools.

‘Were we to take seriously the notion that children should be put in charge of their own destinies, I feel confident we could reverse the goods of western civilisation, patiently accumulated over millennia, in a generation or two’

Exactly. Anyone who thinks child lib is a wonderful idea needs to read Lord of the Flies.
Having worked with young people in the care system, I saw the damage inflicted on those children who grew up without rules or boundaries because their parents were engaged in a long term love affair with alcohol, drugs or just sheer laziness – and the damage that the children grew up to inflict on others. .

The great Kurt Vonnegut foresaw everything, apart from the Lotus Biscoff spread problem, in 1961, in his short story Harrison Bergeron.

I am left wondering if Dr. Finlayson has any children. And if she has, I would enjoy their thoughts on their mum and what other adults think about them. Child/Adult is an extremely complicated and delicate balance between rights and responsibility and deserves serious thought and analysis, as it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. However, this is pure pretentious BS that is just meant for clickbait. Just another greedy hack and publisher. Look at the bright side, it can always be used to line the bottom of the birdcage.

Can we at least concede that it’s pretty nonsensical that you have to be twenty-five to rent a car? I don’t know where that came from but I’m pretty sure no government came up with it. If one is looking for oppression, I submit that one could find a great deal more exploitative and oppressive ideas and attitudes towards children and every other conceivable group in the policies and day to day operations of international corporations than in parents and schoolmarms. Makes sense that corporations love child liberation. They already go to great lengths to build their factories in places where labor is cheapest and child labor often acceptable. Why not ‘liberate’ native children to join the workforce as well. Would give CEO’s more options in a multipolar world. Sometimes I wonder how much of the nonsense about oppression social justice is just performative distraction so we won’t notice big business making serfs of us all.

Quote “Dr Finlayson complains that nobody takes the idea of child lib seriously.” Yes, the only people I’ve heard of pushing ‘child Liberation’ are pedophiles and their sympathizers under the guise of “lowering the age of consent.” People like Peter Tatchell, Edmund White, NAMBLE, and the U.N.s former ILGBT group which included pedophiles as an oppressed minority. But far from liberating children their goal is to legally subject children to the sexual urges of adults. Would she abolish child labor laws as well to free up the kiddies to get their own spending money? Then they could eat gummie bears for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Oh boy, another day, another wholly gratuitous reference to the “happily now defunct” Paedophile Infornation Exchange. As if at the last moment the author is hastily presenting his bona fides, just to, you know, make sure ‘nobody gets the wrong idea’.

I would like to ask the Unherd commentariat: how many of you have actually bothered to read Tom O’Carroll’s “Paedophilia: The Radical Case”, and discovered just what a thought-stimulating work it really is, very far from contributing to any suffocating *ideology* by which a person might crystallize that precious thing they call their mind?

Does anyone here care to seriously examine our long crystallized discourse on children, and just what it has cost us – since say, the early 1970s – to maintain and reinforce that? Does anyone care what really happens when “the child” is conceived in terms not of what it is, or indeed might be, but in terms of what it is NOT? To wit, not any of those manifold nasty things that oh so mysteriously come to comprise an adult, now doomed to gaze helplessly back across the abyss at that other species it allegedly once was – a “child”?

Does anyone care to examine the utterly inextricable relationship of taboo to the generativity of desire, and how forbidding so much as the first suggestion of speaking the child and sexuality in the same breath has created a subliminal Fort Knox of erotic capital throughout the W E I R D nations that is nonethelss exploited daily in a host of different, mostly maximally coy, devious and hypocritical ways?

Is this truly the best we can ever do?

Reading this article, I variously scoffed, visualized removing my 6-year-old son (also feral) to a cabin in the deep wood, considered that this is a frog-in-the-frying-pan ruse to normalize paeodophilia as mentioned, and then thought about Jonathan Swift.
That a child might have the right to consent to sexual activity (and, of course, to make morally neutral decisions like where they want to live) is a phrase that has no truth value, so one hardly knows where to begin. One of the most valuable books I think I’ve ever read was called Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy by Julian Franklin; it was my first encounter with the terms ‘moral agent’ and ‘moral patient’. Leaving animal rights aside for the moment, the ‘moral patient’ idea is spot-on and very handy when arguing the case for loving common sense where it concerns children, profoundly disabled people, and–and this is important–adults in temporary states of unaccountable behavior, like manic psychosis. When a moral patient is granted moral agency, we get things like the Anna Stubblefield case, and I don’t have the emotional fortitude to extrapolate from there.