A thing people often do is give advice or a message to their younger self. From what I've seen, the trend seems to be some coping mechanism where they affirm things will get better and basically just make a convoluted message to say don't give up; maybe in the rare instance, they give pragmatic advice like telling themselves to brush their teeth more or ask someone out but in general, it's just stuff you'd expect to get from some self-help book you'll never actually apply to your life. Now, what advice would I give to my younger self? If I had the opportunity to tell myself anything as a child, it would be two words: You're right.
Family
Let's discuss various parts of a child's life and analyse the systematic transgressions they face along with people's harmful and hypocritical beliefs towards kids. We'll start with parents and family. While there are certainly good parents and family members that do respect their child and raise them fairly to achieve self-actualization, often, parents have a blatant disrespect for their children and disallow any questioning of the parents' beliefs, methods, and attitudes. As a personal example, I had one side of my family that enforced their beliefs onto me while the other didn't. As a child, never did I hold the beliefs that were enforced onto me and later in my young childhood, I would question these beliefs to my family members and request they stop trying to force me to hold their beliefs but their responses were always that of hostility and could never actually explain why they held their beliefs. On the other hand, the family members who respected my beliefs were able to explain their own beliefs and understood beliefs outside of their own and were capable of explaining the beliefs they didn't hold better than those who held the beliefs themselves that would enforce them onto me. Needless to say, people's enforcement of their beliefs onto me as a child did not work and in fact, it completely backfired. And it isn't just something I'm telling because it's my own experience. A lot of kids and even adults I've met who've gone their entire life without questioning the beliefs imposed on them as children or were met with hostility if they did question those beliefs have become agnostic towards those beliefs after talking to me, oftentimes after a single conversation. When you don't allow a child to question your beliefs and respond to them with hostility for questioning them, you only make their beliefs they get from you extremely fragile and it takes only one conversation with someone whom can explain themselves competently to ruin that fragile belief system. Children aren't dumb little shits you can just force to puppet your beliefs and values but many parents and family don't realize this.
Going further into how parents and family disrespect children's cognitive ability is with how they wish to restrict the education their children receive. While I do believe schools are indoctrination machines as will be discussed, often what you see is that parents themselves want to be the indoctrination machines and limit the educational resources children have access to so they won't wander out of the parents' belief systems. Whether it's secular parents complaining about schools teaching bible studies as part of public school curriculum, conservative parents complaining about how they're pushing the woke agenda, or parents calling for books that portray things they don't believe in to be banned from schools, they wish to limit children's access to information because they fear their children straying from their own beliefs. They often don't teach critical thinking skills so that their kids can see past the perceived harmful education either, probably because that would risk questioning the enforced beliefs.
Even if the parents are right and what their children are learning in school is actually harmful, what they don't realize is even when they don't teach their children critical thinking, kids won't just lap up any propaganda thrown their way. People tend to overestimate just how much children are susceptible to memetic viruses and don't realize who has the most memetic influence over children shifts as they grow up. In primary/grade school, parents and family do indeed have the most memetic influence over most kids and therefore their beliefs and understanding of the world. However around early secondary/middle school age, this memetic monopoly most parents have over their children stops as children usually develop the capacity to reason around this age. Most children begin questioning the philosophy of things and starts perceiving things as wrong, also being capable of understanding that they, their parents, and anyone else could be wrong in their beliefs. Parents lose their memetic monopoly but what they don't understand is that this memetic monopoly doesn't shift to the education they receive like they get so uppity about when something they don't like is being taught. Instead, this memetic monopoly disperses towards their friend groups and their voluntary associations. This is why preteens often develop rebellion and begin to identify with groups such as cliques, fandoms, or even political associations. It doesn't actually matter if the school is genuinely pushing some agenda because they don't actually have as much memetic influence over kids in this regard as many whiny parents want you to think. As I will discuss later, there are certainly effective agendas schools do push but it's not in the material they have children learn. Now, college and university on the other hand do have massive amounts of memetic influence over people but like the preteen who is memetically influenced by their friend groups and voluntary associations, the college student likewise is memetically influenced by the voluntary association with their college or university as opposed to a child whom is involuntarily attending schooling.
You then also have the parents whom do understand this so they instead want to restrict their children's voluntary associations. An example of this I come across constantly is that of the parents whom complain about how "they're transing the kids" or think their child's homosexuality is a result of being groomed. More than a couple times, I've come across the rhetoric about how le heckin' tranniez are convincing little boys to "chop their cocks off" which I find extremely ironic considering the same people who spout this usually mutilate their sons' genitals through circumcision. To these people, it's perfectly fine for them to quite literally chop parts of little boys' cocks off but Mox forbid a boy doesn't appeal to gender normativity. I agree that many of these voluntary associations are predatory but never, as already mentioned do these kinds of parents teach critical thinking skills nor train their children on how to detect and avoid these predatory groups, a problem I discuss later.
Many parents also view their children as property, subhuman trash they can treat however they like. Think of the parents whom beat their children or all the parents' rights types that want absolute control over their children and have no respect for them. These parents usually argue on the basis of parents' vs. government's rights but never do they advocate for the child's rights. Both these parents and the government only seek to treat children as subhuman trash that is property and not their own human. Children themselves are legally mandated to take their parents' abuse too as it's illegal almost everywhere for a child to run away or for someone to help a runaway child no matter how abusive of a situation they're running away from and even if the abuse is bad enough to warrant a child protective agency to take the child away, unless there's a family member to take care of them, the child will just be churned through the state foster system and while I was never one of these kids, there was a period of my life where I had to experience the same conditions many of these kids go through and by fucking Mox, was it horrible.
If children can't escape physical abuse, what way out do they have other than fighting back? They can't run away and being taken by the government puts them in an even worse situation. Parents who beat their children only do so because they perceive them as weaker or unwilling to defend themselves so if you do fight back against the abuse, this is the only way they will maybe stop. Hell, while I never was physically battered by any of my family, there was one time when someone who I will only state was a nurse for children and had a position of power over them told one of my family members to just beat me if I got unruly. I told that cunt I didn't care who it was; if someone attacks me, I'm defending myself and since then, whenever a kid has confessed to me that they get beaten by their parents, I tell them to fight back. But the sad thing is, many of them cope and make excuses about how they deserve it or it teaches respect. They have become so accustomed to abuse that they view it as a good thing.
Schooling, Work, Finance
Now let's discuss schooling. Schools themselves systematically abuse children, laws mandating schooling have drastically affected children's mental health and safety negatively, and societal expectations cast upon children harm them all the while adults tell themselves this is okay. Now I'm sure we all know about how schools are just indoctrination machines but people don't realize just how much schools and societal expectations relating to them are designed to beat you down into submission and filter out anyone whom can't take the abuse.
We've all heard the thing about schools being designed to turn kids into factory workers but I hold a different theory. I believe schools are designed to passify people and train them to take abuse without retaliation and obey the whims of authority. It's not just the fact that you have to ask permission to take a piss or make sure you're in class on time; schools force to you take literal abuse. If you're being bullied or even physically assaulted, you're not allowed to defend yourself. You must rely on the adults to solve your problems, "authority". Notice how into adulthood, almost everyone's adverse to self-defense and this has created an over-reliance on police. Very few are willing to defend themselves, others, or their property because this passivity has been implanted into them. Like the child afraid of getting punished by school staff for defending themself, this seeps into adulthood and now most people are afraid of getting into legal trouble for defending themselves and have become completely reliant on their "authorities" for their defense.
Schools don't give a shit if you're being bullied, harassed, or abused. You're always told to rely on some authority whether it be parents, teachers, or police to solve your problems but they only care about your obedience, not your wellbeing or even safety. I go into my personal experience in regard to this in I'm A Brony Because Nihilism. And as much as people love say how much they hate adults abusing children, going on about how children should report when an adult hurts them, they don't actually care. Hell, when I was 8 or 9, my vice principal physically assaulted me and screamed in my face and when I reported it like I knew I should as a child being hurt by an adult, I was simply told to "respect adults". This was the moment I realized no adult deserves respect from a child for simply being an adult and I have since told this story to adults and kids alike to get this message across.
A combination of laws mandating children go to school and child labor laws have only harmed them. As we've established, children are forced to take abuse in schooling environments and legally required to stay in school until a certain age, sometimes it being illegal entirely to drop out. It doesn't matter if you're relentlessly bullied or stressed by nonstop schoolwork; if you don't go to school, you and your parents will face legal trouble. It's no surprise teenage suicide rates keep rising, children are self-harming more frequently and at younger ages, and kids keep shooting up their schools; they aren't allowed an escape from their torment.
Now let's discuss how laws restricting child labor contribute to this problem. Pretty much everywhere with at least somewhat functional societal infrastructure, there are strict laws against child labor. Generally, if you're still in school, your ability to work is severely limited by laws mandating kids may only be allowed to work a limited number of hours outside of school time and if they're under a certain age, usually being 16 or 17, they need a permit to work. Even if they're the legal age to work without a permit, they may have to be doing well enough in school to be legally able to work anyways. This creates a catch 22 for kids struggling in school whether it be with schooling itself or the fact they're on the verge of grabbing Dad's handgun and painting the walls red due to previously mentioned reasons. They can't escape the schooling environment by working but they also need money for after schooling. This regulation only harms kids and leads to financial problems for them.
People tend to freak out when anything regarding child labor is brought up and love to strawman by arguing deregulation of child labor to equate to sending 9-year-olds into dangerous jobs such as how they mockingly say "children yearn for the mines". These people don't realize people like me whom support this deregulation support it precisely to better the wellbeing of kids, giving them a means to support themselves after schooling. And it's ironic how a common argument against child labor deregulation is that they should be in schooling when said schooling is often why they want to work instead. And it's not that proponents of child labor deregulation want to "send them to the mines", what we want is for children to simply be able to hold the same taxable job as any other schmuck. Hell, no one bats an eye when preteens do outdoor manual labor such as mowing, shoveling, or landscaping but Mox forbid a 14-year-old can be officially employed to be a stocker.
Now let's get into how children are groomed into financial servitude. We all know how school pushes college and university on kids and how you absolutely must get a higher education if you don't want to be some burger-flipping peasant. People cast expectations on children, that's nothing new or egregously dangerous itself but the vileness in this regard comes from the fact that kids are quite literally being groomed into reliance on the insidious credit system. And it's not just with their being convinced to take out loans that will be of financial harm for years if not decades to come, it's that many societies, especially in developed nations, have become so utterly entrenched in the credit system that financial credit scores are essentially social credit scores and in order to simply rent a place to live, you must meet credit requirements. And no, it doesn't even matter if you have enough cash to just pay people as regulation, once again ruining things for sane people, makes it illegal to pay upfront payments that exceed specified downpayment amounts to avoid credit bullshit in many places. Because society is so intertwined with this capitalist social credit system, what better way to groom children into it than by introducing the system as a way to pay for college? And going back to child labor, if kids could work, they would have more money to pay for college and even in places with very expensive tertiary education like the US, community college tuitions are still low enough that they could likely be payed for without needing loans if kids could just work and save money.
Double Standards
Now let's discuss the double standards and inconsistencies with how society views kids. Many if not most people hold the belief that kids are just dumb little rodents that can't be trusted to do anything themselves or make their own decisions. Pretty much universally, law states you're magically mature enough to now have all lawful freedoms when you're 18, a single black and white line being the cutoff point between a kid being deemed too stupid to have any freedom and being fully capable of having all lawful freedoms. However if you actually analyse things, you realize this black and white treatment goes out the window when a kid's the perpetrator of a crime. Think of all the children whom are tried as adults, how a quarter of the US sex offender registry is people who got on it as children. Notice how when a kid is the perpetrator of something, there are cases in which they are treated the same as an adult and deemed mature enough to face the same punishments as adults but never, ever, can a kid be treated as an adult in any other case, even to escape from abusive situations.
The perception that children are all these weak little beings that must be protected at all times also harms them. Obsession with children's safety often goes to such an extreme that children never face any danger in their life and therefore never adapt and learn how to handle dangerous situations. So not only are children being conditioned to be passive their entire childhood but they're also sheltered. Some places even legally mandate parents hold absolute control over their children's movement and will legally punish parents, possibly even take their children away for simply letting their kids walk around town on their own. Looping back to before, children are conditioned to be under absolute control and constant surveillance with how kids are being GPS/Bluetooth-tracked and having spyware installed on their devices so everything they do on them can be monitored. This absolute control and monitoring then bleeds into being okay with mass surveillance and having every aspect of their life tracked as adults.
It's ironic how children are considered too at-risk to have their own autotomy but if this were the case, we'd be getting uppity about a small woman walking alone at night or someone with mental retardation walking about but adults with attributes that actually increase their likelihood of falling victim to crime or getting into trouble are allowed to roam free but a kid isn't allowed simply because they're under a certain age.
The people who obsess with protecting kids are often completely unaware that the best people who can prevent children from being victimized are the children themselves. I already discussed this as it relates to online predation in Absurdity Of Kids' Internet Safety but the same can apply to real life contexts. In short, children being educated on threats and how to avoid dangerous situations entirely is much better than relying on others for their safety. People view the "protectors of children" whether they be predator hunters, police, parents, or whatever as the end-all-be-all of children's safety when children themselves need the means by which to guarantee their own safety without relying on someone to protect them. As stated in the article: When a predator is stopped, you aren't preventing a kid from being victimized, you're only preventing them from being victimized by that one individual. It's ultimately up to the kids to protect themselves and avoid dangerous situations. Unlike on the internet, I know there are cases in which a child is simply overpowered by a predator and in those cases, external protection is probably the only thing that will save them but kids should still develop knowledge and intuition to avoid these situations as much as possible.
Adult Coping
Something I've observed in people is they often hold the belief that they were utterly dumb as children and I've come to the opinion this is a symptom of their coping with the societal mistreatment they faced and an affirmation that it was okay. As children, they recognize the restrictions and expectations put upon them are bullshit but due to the way children's lives are orchestrated, they're whittled down through institutional abuse and society is constructed in a way that demands their compliance to be a functional member of society so they conform to the expectations cast upon them and tell themselves that this manufactured attitude is simply their growing up and they suppress the observations of the bullshit they noticed or even faced as a kid.
Final
Every day my child self is proven right more and more and I notice the increasing mistreatment of children is a result of the restrictions placed upon them and how this mistreatment is seeping into the lives of even adults with how everything is becoming increasingly more regulated for the sake of children. All these people who spout about how much they want to "save the kids" or "protect the children" in reality fucking hate them and only want to control them. They're so concerned with people harming children that they harm them themselves. Fuck saving the kids; free the kids.
Written 2025-10-17 Published 2025-11-1