While child labor is viewed negatively, apparently child labor and child slavery aren’t the same thing, and child labor though it could still be exploitative/cruel in other ways, can be done voluntarily by the child, and with fair treatment/compensation/etc.
I suppose you could make the argument that any child labor opens itself up to problems, but could it be done responsibly? And if not, then at what age do we draw the line of labor being not ok regardless of consent?
I mean this with all due respect, but are you under the age of 21? Your posts sound a lot like my opinions when I was younger.
I grew up thinking a lot of the rules surrounding childhood consent were dumb—I considered myself intelligent and mentally complete, so I figured the rules existed for some other type of kid. Then I got to 25 and realized that I had profoundly evolved mentally over the previous decade, and finally realized what adults had been saying all those years ago. I have had another one of those revelations recently, and it has been about another 10 years.
I realize now that my confidence as a teenager was primarily an expression of immaturity and inexperience. Yes, school sucks, but work does too. There is no magic freedom with adulthood, there is responsibility. Expanded choices also bring expanded consequences, and failure is most definitely possible.
If I could do it all again, I would enjoy those younger years for what they are, and not try to move too fast. You’ll have plenty of long decades as an adult to decide how you feel about it. My guess is that you’ll feel differently than you do now.
And yet kids are given gender-affirming care without parental consent, meaning only the medical practitioner is giving consent for the treatment. How do we square that with the wider discussion of the ethics of childhood consent and labor?