Karen? I didn't take it as anyone else throwing egg. I'm a professional writer, and even though I write fiction, I try very hard to get my facts straight.
It was a harsh rant, for me, about some actions I think are wrong. If I really lay into someone like that, I usually like to make sure I'm right, first.
Look, I have no problem with kids who want to go to a boarding school having a trip to a foreign country and an experience of a foreign culture. I have no problem with consenting adults who are into kink and leather doing their thing. There are things that are perfectly okay when consensual that are intolerable and reprehensible when done against someone's will.
When someone holds a set of positions that trivializes consent as basically beneath consideration, it concerns me.
My view of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood is that it's a spectrum across which human beings normally gain an increasing amount of say in the decisions in their lives. Starting with things like, "milk or juice" or "apple or banana" and moving to which of your clothes you wear, to which clothes you buy (within limits), to who you date, to what extracurricular activities you do, to what electives you study in addition to your core curriculum, to where you go on a date (within limits).
The upside of having that gradually increasing choice and responsibility be informally socially mandated is that kids mature at different rates.
The downside is that if a child's parents aren't divorced and both living, a fifteen year old has as much legal right to make basic choices for himself as a two year old. Namely, none.
My concern with Craig is that his postings (or the anonymous ones I believe to be his) demonstrate a view of parental authority in complete accord with treating a fifteen year old like a two year old who can do more chores. I don't get any sense, from his writings, of a teenager as a *person* with rights to go with his responsibilities, rights the parents have a *moral* obligation to respect.
I once knew a doctor's wife who wouldn't pay for her son to have guitar lessons. He wanted to be a rock musician when he grew up, she refused the lessons because she, "didn't want that life for him." And then she wondered why the kid was hostile and unmanageable---including making a $500 dent in the car by slamming his skateboard into it.
It's not about the car lessons. It's about the parent feeling *entitled* to make deliberate choices to *foreclose* life career options her son would have available to choose from as an adult because *she* was afraid he would choose a particular career and didn't approve of it.
It's like refusing permission for a daughter who wants to be an engineer to take advanced math classes in high school because you think said career would be "unladylike."
I don't see an awareness and acceptance from Craig of basic, fundamental social norms of the limits of parental authority over a high school student versus parental authority over a preschool student.
Parents have a responsibility not to make choice-foreclosing decisions for their children as a way of controlling those children long past their date of majority. Deliberate choice-foreclosing decisions made for the purpose of controlling children after they're grown are evil.
They're one of a class of actions on the part of parents or adults that materially interferes with the ordinary course of maturation of a human being from childhood to adulthood. When you don't let your teen make and live with the *natural* (not imposed by you) consequences of age-appropriate decisions, it's normal and right for the rest of society to vehemently disapprove of your behavior.
One of the things I think is extremely unhealthy about the whole teen BM industry is that they try to keep the teens from going through the perfectly normal and healthy process of separating from their parents and making more and more of their decisions for themselves---and living with the *natural* consequences of same, rather than artificial ones.
Teens should have curfews and get in trouble if they break them. Teens should have dress codes to dress within respectable society's social norms for appropriateness for events and activities. Teens should be expected to go to class and do their schoolwork. Teens should be expected to follow the rules of common courtesy. Teens should be expected to avoid violence and avoid illicit drugs. Teens should be expected to avoid sexual intimacy.
Teens should be expected to slip up and break these rules and push the envelope just because they're teens, and consequences for infractions should be reasonable and proportional.
Teens should have wide lattitude to go places as long as they're back by curfew. Teens should have wide lattitude within their dress code for personal choice of attire. Teens should be able to choose assignment subjects and electives and activities in school in line with personal and career interests. Teens should be able to date the person of their choice provided he/she is within one or two years of their age. Teens should be able to pick their own friends so long as those friends aren't engaged in ongoing criminal activity (aside from a rare screwup), treat the parents with common courtesy most of the time, and aren't doing things like free-soloing cliffs drunk or having wild orgies. Teens should be able to read anything they want, no matter how objectionable. Teens should be able to work at any legal job they can get and use the money as they please. Teens should be able to go to the prom. Teens should not be forced to dress conspicuously even if their parents subculture has a distinct mode of dress. Teens should have freedom of religion. Teens should have the right, if they are required to attend religious services, to quietly and respectfully not participate and to abstain from preparing religious lessons or professing belief. Teens should have the right to form and express preferences on the arts, music, literature, religion, and politics that differ from those of their parents.
Those are the basic social norms of our society.
Nobody wants to enshrine it in law and have the child police vetting how you dress your kid *BUT* society basically disapproves of parents who don't accord their teens this basic scope for personal individual choice.
Teens making these personal choices is how teens turn into healthy adults. It's entirely normal for parents to be somewhat estranged from their teens along the way in the growing up process, and for the parent/child relationships to mend in good time once the grown child is secure in his identity as an adult member of society.
My huge concern with the BM industry is that they seem to be trying to stop this essential, healthy process in its tracks and make these young people into psychologically locked-in-place infantilized sheep *permanently* under their parents thumb, even as full adults, rather than independent adults with individual free choice.
I know some cultures have historically given parents tremendous control over the behavior and choices of their grown children. The difference between that and this is that *these* parents using the BM industry to preemptively acquire controls over their grown children are NOT checked and balanced by the safeguards of having *their* behavior substantially controlled by *their* parents---who have a great deal more experience of life than the parents of the teens.
I have seen *nothing* from Craig that even hints at a recognition and acceptance of normal social limits on the decisions and choices he and the parents who are his customers can and should make for teens of various ages.
There are limits. I don't think this industry has a very good sense of those limits.
Timoclea
