Thursday, March 31, 2005
(8:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Right of Intervention
If children are public goods, then it stands to reason that there should be a general citizen's right to intervene and stop shitty parenting from happening. For instance, mom buys already-fat child another candy bar; concerned citizen steps in and places it back on the shelf. Along those lines, there would be a general right for citizens to band together and remove all children from McDonald's restaurants. In addition, we need to get over the pathological and overstated fear of child sexual abuse and allow strangers to touch children -- for example, cover the kid's mouth when he's screaming in the grocery store.[1] Children would be a lot less likely to "make a scene" if they knew that, rather than their parents joining in and making the scene much more disruptive (sighing, wondering aloud how the kids got to this point, suddenly and arbitrarily administering corporal punishment that leads only to more noise), they would be subject to the intervention of random strangers.If children are our future, then we cannot allowed self-centered and lazy parents to ruin the future for all of us -- not to mention the present. But as things stand now, every intervention by someone outside the family results in a ridiculous circling of the wagons, where no matter what the child was doing, the fact that someone stepped in is automatically a much more serious problem (see note 1). This applies equally if one attempts to talk to the parents to get them to control their children -- since one is intruding on something that is none of one's business (despite the fact that it's happening right in front of one and is causing one notable distress), there's even a chance that the parent will encourage the child to misbehave more, to punish the intervener for such a horrible sin.
But this is impossible, because in real life, children aren't regarded as public goods -- they're regarded as the parents' property. So (not that I'm paying taxes right now, but in principle) if I'm not going to have a say in whether your little snot is going to make my trip to the store into a living hell, then maybe you don't want me to help you out with all those tax subsidies and such. But again, thinking about it in those terms routes all social relationships through money -- one should have a right to intervene because one is in some sense paying for those children.
[1] I'm not saying that child sexual abuse never happens or that we should take a lax approach to it. This comes up because my mom, who got her teaching degree in December and has been subbing since then, was having trouble with a child in her class who was being disruptive and rude and who wouldn't look at her when she talked to him. Therefore, she grabbed his face and turned him toward her so as to look him in the eye. The parents complained, and she is no longer allowed to sub in that building, because she touched him. That, to me, is the symptom of a social pathology.
