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I appreciate the candor.
But you missed the other half.
Child liberation is opposed mainly by people who want the power to ensure that their children become the upstanding ideal of their culture, and are uninterested in any compromise that would free their children to pursue becoming the upstanding ideal of a different culture.
So why is it bad for them to become the upstanding ideal of a different culture? I agree that it is bad when a child fails to find any viable niche, which is what your argument describes, but why should every child be crammed into their parents' niche? Last I checked, most of us here value horizontal and vertical societal mobility. Forcing children to be their parents but better is... inhuman. Ant-like.
Seeds within a child should be nurtured. However, if you raise a child with ulterior motives, you are compelled to quash seeds that do not conform. This damages the child and perpetuates a culture of painfully breaking people into a mold. You are losing efficiency by cramming round pegs into square holes. This is an argument against modern conventional schooling as well, you may be more familiar with it in that context.
Longterm- I proudly hold the goal of seeding every ecological niche with human/transhuman intelligence.
Crushing children's exploration of new cultural niches is antithetical to this prospect. Instead legitimizing and teaching the fear of the Other and the New. It robs children of their innocence and teaches them fear.
Because the basic foundation of society the willingness of people to sacrifice their own pleasures to invest in futures they will not personally benefit from. If generations are not tied together and current generations do not have the right to shape what comes next, people will not invest in the future at all. They'll go off and have "fur babies" instead of kids, and let their communities collapse into chaos in pursuit of their own personal virtue-signalling and status.
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The idea that we all have special seeds within us that need to be expressed in the world is decadent romanticism. This belief system is one of the current failure modes of society because it fundamentally misunderstands what a self is. We participate in our ongoing development in embodied relation with the world and others.
In terms of human development it doesn't make sense to posit someone born into one family system and culture as if they were born into another.
This doesn't preclude development that honor's the child's unique characteristics and preferences to give them sovereignty and agency. Or for cultures to adapt and change.
Any parent with any sense knows that while they have a special unique child, they are also responsible for shaping that child's development while their brain is forming. This duty of development means a parent often needs to overrule the childs own view of the world, ie in limiting this or that food, technology, being wary of strangers, trying to advocate options that don't limit in education etc.
Unfortunately people, families and cultures come with a lot of baggage, but there is no utopian shortcut. Transhuman ideas and decadent romanticism have fed into the current trans contagion and are causing irreversible harms.
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Because they mostly don't.
Children need real, living role models that they interact with every day to absorb enough of a functional culture to smoothly take it up themselves. Right now, society is absolutely full of fake role models, cardboard cutouts of fictional cultures that attempt to lure children into their clutches to be used in some way, whether somewhat banally as brand dedicated consumers or more maliciously.
Children are impressionable. They lack good judgment and, especially, have no real concept of the long term until they are already quite mature, ie., until they have already been raised within one culture. There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children: They will make bad, often harmful mistakes much more often than they will learn valuable life lessons and become the wiser for it.
The worst part? The children themselves are the only ones with the right incentives to raise themselves right. Because their judgment is impaired, we are left with the second best choice, those whose incentives are aligned with the child's the second most: The parents. Society has no skin in the game for any particular child and anonymous or large scale social institutions most of all. No parent is perfect and always has all their child's best interests in mind at all times, everywhere, but they're going to be significantly better than a teacher who only has that child for one class for one year, where they are but one of dozens of others. They're certainly better than any bureaucrat for whom the child is one of a faceless multitude.
In the past, face-to-face local society provided an additional set of adults whose caring and long term exposure to the child offered a non-exclusive alternative to the child's parents, but that culture is dead and the modern replacements are not up to the job.
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The alternative to children being broken into a mold by their parents isn't those children freely and independently choosing their own destiny, it's those children being broken into a mold by the first social trend, infohazard, or two-bit groomer they come across. Would that be true of all of them? Of course not, but we don't make policy for outliers, we make it for the average, and it is better for society that a few weirdos like us are given less agency than we could potentially handle for a few years as teenagers then letting all the kids roam free and be manipulated by bad actors into pursuing harmful goals.
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