Unwanted Protection is Oppression

John Ruth: I’m gonna take your gun, son.
Joe Gage: You are?
Ruth: Yes, I am.
Gage: I feel kinda naked without it.
Ruth: Oh I still got mine. [Reveals the gun on his belt.] I’ll protect you.
Gage: [Laughs.]

Many children and teenagers don’t get to make their own movie-viewing decisions. They are prevented from watching certain movies if they aren’t ‘old enough’ – not in their own eyes, but in the eyes of lawmakers and adults around them.

This understandably frustrates them. While movie ratings are (presumably) designed to protect, they are oppressive instead: it’s a kind of protection children are seldom allowed to refuse. It thus violates their autonomy and agency. If a movie really is bad for a child, it should be easy to persuade him of that – and, failing that, he should get to watch it; he should get to make the mistake, if it even is one, and then learn from it. The adults in the child’s life should be his friends, not obstacles. Luckily, children often find other ways to watch what they want, but then have to do so secretly and lie.

The same age restrictions extend to video games as well. The idea is that games depicting violence might harm children. The games children do get to play are often restricted by arbitrary screen times, both in blatant disregard of their property rights and, in some cultures, in reference to the false claim that their eyes will turn into rectangles – not cubes, but rectangles! – if they stare at a screen for too long. (Even if adults don’t understand the difference between two and three dimensions, they must know this claim to be false, but that doesn’t stop them from enforcing screen times.) Bedtimes are also enforced rigorously for some children, which has similarly oppressive effects, although the intention is to protect them from the harms of not getting enough sleep.

The titular idea of this post, that unwanted protection is oppression, builds on this quote from Taking Children Seriously (TCS):

It is usually taken for granted that the best way to protect children, both in law and in education, is to override their wishes for their own good, for instance by preventing them from doing things that they may regret later. I shall criticise this assumption. I shall argue that while such policies are intended to protect children, the effect is to oppress them, and that any policy whose effect is to disregard children’s wishes in regard to their own lives, is likely to harm children.

One particular example from my childhood should clarify further what I mean. I was over at a grade-school friend’s house; we were playing a game with small plastic figures. The details of the game aren’t important here – suffice it to say that, at the end of each round, the winner got to keep all of the figures used in that round. Normally, you’d bring your own figures to wager, but I hadn’t. My friend and I both agreed that we still wanted to play; we both understood that he might lose all of his figures to me while I could not lose any to him at all; and yet we decided that it was worth the fun of playing the game.