I see a common theme in a lot of Tumblr posts about things that children shouldn't be made to do, where the posts go, "Parents are always making children do X, but that's a silly restriction that nobody makes adults follow [implication: adults enforce X in children only to lord power over them] and since children have the same rights as adults this is oppression" where X is, in fact, a (often simplified) version of something that adults actually do have to do as part of Living In A Culture (leaving aside the concept of children and adults having the same rights).
Adults teach children from before they can even talk to "wave bye-bye" to say goodbye to a person as an example of educating children to follow cultural expectations that the adults to some extent have to enforce in themselves, and this extends to "hugging relatives to greet them", "following certain restrictions in dress to particular types of occasions even if we don't enjoy the restrictions", and "not getting up and leaving every time we're not enjoying something that's going on if it's a planned event", among others.
It's good that there's been a movement towards a cultural conversation about the conventions of hugging as a greeting, particularly when meeting distant relatives, as we needed greater awareness of the fact that hugging is really uncomfortable for some people, that many kids are undiagnosed autistic, and so on. Tumblr culture took the helm of this movement and should be proud of it. That doesn't imply the common rhetorical Tumblr-ish insinuation that making a little kid hug their Aunt Shirley is fundamentally motivated by a lack of recognition of their bodily autonomy (even if in practice it does amount to a form of that): parents are trying to teach their kids a social norm that they generally hold themselves to as well (not all grown-ups feel like hugging their relative they feel not that close to or even their friends or shaking their slimy boss's hand and so on).
I've had this post in my Drafts folder for maybe five years or so because I always meant to reblog it with a critical response, but instead I'll just link to it as an example of this concept: in fact, a lot of the reason (though not the only practical reason) adults force children to sit through something until they're dismissed is that this is a simplified version of a set of rules one really does follow in society just as much as waving bye-bye is -- this is what adults are generally socially or professionally constrained to do. There are a bunch of flexible qualifications and nuances to this, as there are reasons to abruptly leave parties or walk out of lectures which are considered valid (and usually have to be apologetically explained later), but in my profession, for instance, it's considered pretty inconsiderate, bordering on quite rude, to walk out of someone's talk just because you find it boring (and I would say it's doubly so if the person giving the talk is younger and just getting used to giving talks, which is very mildly correlated with less engaging talks for obvious reasons involving experience and subject matter). I don't think "you know, when you get adult rights, you can walk out of anything you want just because you feel like it, make sure you know that as you become an adult" is actually great advice.
I've just been meaning to point out this pattern for some years, so there we go.
@aksemmi replied:
it seems like you are sort of skipping over the nature of coercion here. like, when a child is forced to hug an adult, often this involves a threat of punishment or outright physically overpowering them. adults are not typically subjected to this to the same degree at all, you could get into some things as similar to punishment but they are not as universal and adults usually have a lot more exit option. its a lot more going on here than just ~learning to follow an unpleasant social norm. and bodily autonomy - well i dont really see at all how the goal being teaching a social norm does antything to contradict the idea that this is fundamentally because they dont respect the child's bodily autonomy, sure thats not itself the motive they are not violating bodily autonomy for the sake of doing that itseslf, but few things work like that in regards to their motives
I was leaving the nature of coercion implicit because I thought the nature of the coercion itself (that is, children are made to do things on threat of being punished or physically overpowered) was obviously agreed about by both sides of the discussion and I was talking about the motives behind the coercion. Children are made to do things they (in most cases) will later learn are part of Being In A Culture whether we like doing them or not and which adults are also compelled (just less directly and not through physical force) to do.
its a lot more going on here than just ~learning to follow an unpleasant social norm.
My point is that, in many cases, it literally is just about learning to follow a social norm, but that the only way to make the learning happen requires some degree of coercion of the child, as is involved in some way with all learning (including purely academic learning) where the learner doesn't understand the reason why the learning is necessary.
I do think in the OP I included the nuance that the rules are less direct and black-and-white for adults, there is some more flexibility about getting up and leaving a lecture, for instance. There are a lot of (I would think obvious) practical reasons for starting children off with simpler and more absolute rules (relaxed in individual appropriate cases by adults) than the social rules adults wind up living by.
You have a perfectly valid point about how violations of body autonomy are usually not executed by cartoon villains who crack their knuckles and go, "I'm going to take away your body autonomy for the sake of cruelly depriving you of body autonomy." But a lot of people here insinuate -- and validly, in many contexts, as I've observed as well that this is a Thing and a Problem with some parents! -- that certain violations of children's autonomy come from a deep-down feeling of "owning" the child the same way one owns a house and a yard, presented to others as a proud expression of oneself. In that regard, not respecting a child's autonomy really comes from a feeling of not considering them as an autonomous agent completely external to oneself. My above post, however, was pointing out that in a number of contexts that's not what it's about, and that it's not as simple as "in our society, adults get body autonomy but children don't" so much as "in our society, adults have to force themselves to do things with their bodies that they don't much like, and children are trained to do this by initially being forced by the adults to do things with their bodies they don't much like." I acknowledge there's still a fundamental difference here between restrictions externally put on children through physical force and restrictions adults put on themselves, and I'm very glad there's now a movement against forcing children to hug people, but I'm trying to point to a perspective that seems to go totally unacknowledged in the rhetoric of advocates of children's autonomy.
Really your comment serves to once again point to what is perhaps the one and only fundamental disconnect between myself and the children's rights rhetoric that's prevalent on Tumblr: I contend that children have fewer rights because they are generally not old enough to know things that adults know. And one manifestation of this is that children are disciplined through force by adults while adults have to discipline themselves, and this is in large part because children don't have the wisdom yet to understand why we all have to do the things that adults will understand they have to do, and children need to be trained to grow into adults that discipline themselves.
This comes with a terrible risk that children will inevitably get socialized through direct (ultimately physical) discipline to follow cultural norms that are wrong and harmful and which lead to necessary inter-generational work to undo those bad cultural norms; this is what maintains an immense amount of unjust belief systems in the world. But I don't see how letting children do whatever they want rather than enforcing that they begin to follow the rules of living in a society is a viable alternative.
