Will Someone Please Think of the Children!

Maybe I haven't sufficiently honed my maternal instinct, but I can never get too worked up when people employ argumentum ad juvenis, namely, the rhetorical tactic where someone suggests that an action might just harm "the children" and therefore must be wrong. There are a couple of problems with this argument technique.

First, and less universally, the action the person's trying to stop is often...not actually bad for the children. Take this fine editorial by Institute of American Values VP Elizabeth Marquardt. Marquardt is trying to argue against giving kids three legal parents, and she does so by saying kids who grow up split between several households can be in no better shape than kids from more-or-less amicable divorces, who "must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home." FOR SHAME. I think the world might be a better place if the only values that were reinforced by all adult figures in a kid's life were those that are universally held. If one parent thinks eating meat is fine and another parent thinks it's cruel, or if one parent thinks responsible premarital sex is beneficial and another thinks it's unhealthy, it's great that kids have to recognize these ambiguities. It will also help them pick out the really important values (don't steal people's stuff) from the less critical ones (always look your best). Or maybe it won't. Whatever. Maybe on balance, kids from three-parent families have a slightly less happy childhood than kids from two-parent families. Which brings me to my second point.

Why the hell do we think it's so important that things are perfect for kids? Seriously. All kids ever grow up to be is adults, and we don't care nearly as much about them. It's not like kids are such freakin' saints; they can be downright cruel and self-absorbed and irritating. They're not any less pure-hearted than adults are. Most adults aren't truly cruel; they just want to get what's best for them and are often too self-centered to realize they're hurting people along the way. As any kid (and, you'd think, any former kid) knows, that's exactly what kids are like. Childhood isn't bliss. It's a shitshow of a social scene and you get totally scared by bizarre things. I don't think it's clear what factors make kids happier eventual adults, but you never hear people arguing about what will make kids better adults, just what's better for them while they're kids.

So why do we care so much about kids, without facing specifically that they're just going to turn into adults like all other adults? I think that the answer is—and steel yourself for the short-lived cheesiness—the kids represent hope. Awwwww. Ok, end cheesiness. I think kids represent false hope, the hope that these people will be totally unlike all the other people in the world and will somehow start a new world order where everything is just Jim Dandy. I'm kind of serious here. I have this feeling that adults are constantly looking for prodigies. They really want to find the one person who changes the world. You're a pretty special group of people, people who read the blog: When you were younger, did an adult ever relate to you as if you were really, really something special? And do you find it just a bit creepy? Like they expected oddly big things from you, things no adult could ever deliver on? I think everyone wants to find that Harry Potter, that kid that with ingenuity and goodness turns everything around.

Or maybe it's just an evolved emotional response. Wish we didn't have to base so much policy on it.