Ok, so here’s a thing. I talk a lot about autonomy and freedom for children, and a lot of times that comes up in really radical ways, dropping out of school, running away from home, *big life choices*.
But that’s not the only place where we curtail kids’ freedoms. Like, say a little girl’s getting a haircut and she wants to get half her head shaved so she looks like Natalie Dormer in The Hunger Games, like, first the barber’s going to look to the parent for permission (which is already fucked up) and then the parent’s almost certainly going to say no and tell the barber to trim a few inches off or whatever it is they think their hair should look like and…
What I’m getting at is that so many of the things we think we need to protect our kids from are *fucking harmless*. Shaving their heads, going to the supermarket in a spiderman costume, eating ketchup for dinner, these things are not going to seriously harm anyone. In so far as they are mistakes, they are mistakes that kids should be able to just make and gracefully recover from.
And I think the mindset here – that children need to present *normally* because otherwise what will people think of them, and what will people think of their parents – is *precisely* the same mindset that leads to abusive shit like “quiet hands” and ABA. That it doesn’t matter what they want, what’s good for their well-being, what matters is that they *look and act* “normally”.
Like it seems like there’s something akin to a curb-cut effect here? Where this mindset hurts developmentally disabled children more, a lot more, but maybe the most efficient thing to do is just to tear it out by the root, to criticize it wherever we see it?
Like it’d be nice if we could just say, if they’re not hurting anyone, kids should be allowed to look and act the way they want to, they should be able to cut their own hair or flap or crossdress or refuse eye-contact or have cereal for dinner or not want to be touched and it should be the parent’s *responsibility* to fiercely defend their child’s right to do those things and set those boundaries against anyone who wants to give them shit for it, not to victim-blame and say no you can’t do those things because people will give me shit about it if you do.
I got tired of my bangs in fifth grade and straight cut them off and had to live with looking like an idiot for over a year n feeling even worse and ur gonna sit here and tell me that was an important step in the development of my agency and that it was good my momma didn’t snatch the scissors from my dang hands
unironicaly yes, you need to be able to make choices and that inculdes bad choices
i was sheltered from making many mistakes as a kid and it letf me an anxious wreck as a teen bcs i wasnt used to failure and took every possibility of it as world ending
seconding unironically yes. having a bad haircut for a year is not a consequence worth taking away your control over your own body.