To What Expose Kids?
State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents. The main complaint I’ve heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the world. For example, Will Wilkinson:
About kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics … It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. … They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds. Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children’s psychological freedom.
Of course responsible parents know they should expose kids to more than just the local neighborhood. But parents’ judgments on optimal exposure surely depend on their judgments about that outside world. Someone who sees outsiders as mostly immoral heathens will choose less exposure than we as outsiders would choose for those same kids.
So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids? For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids? Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids? Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?
I wonder, could different cultures make a deal where they each give the other cultures X hours to make their case to their kids? Of course with many cultures of differing sizes there’d be the issue of what fraction of that time each culture gets to use. And of course unreasonable cultures might be excluded from the deal. (But what criteria could characterize "reasonable"?) And if such a deal is not possible, even among some reasonable cultures, what exactly would that say about what we think about who should be exposed to what?
Added 29June: Will responds here.
@ Daniel Yokomizo
> Because most parents "expose" their kids to a very narrow subset of existing cultures.
This is one of the benefits of living in a massively multicultural society like canada. Most parents here *do* expose their kids to a set of existing cultures that is large and gets larger with time. I think by the time I was 8 I had already traded bullets with yugoslav refugees, had made close friends with some cree kids who were close to their relatives on rez, had family dinners with ukranians/dutch/germans who barely spoke english, was in french immersion class taught by a just-off-the-boat-from-spain french teacher, and went to school with at least one person japan/korea/china/vietnam/laos. I am not a special case, either. Outside of rural areas(and some urban enclaves in vancouver/toronto) where multiculturalism is more a theory than a practice, you can ask many(I'd guess even most!) canadians about this and they'll give you the same kind of answer. You can fix this problem in your country by allowing more immigration from a more varied source of countries, by bringing the world close in physical proximity to you. Though that is not without its costs since each group has to learn to live with eachother and make decisions like the question of how much access children have to eachother.
> Also exposure by media does really count?
Yes, though there's a difference in just watching something/sight seeing and actively participating in that culture. Media allows and did allow for participation in the means of production both local and abroad even as of 2008.
There is obviously a trade off of how deep your integration and access to various culture can be when there's so many cultures represented and around. Every hour standing in a circle and praying with anishinabek elders is usually an hour you can't headbang with the emo punks. But a lifetime of experience gradually adds up over time and some patterns of culture get imprinted on you, as a child, no matter where they come from.
In general, children grow up, they leave the homes and sooner or later have access to things like the children's help line. (At least they did until fairly recently, now it's not clear that these sorts of things are present for victims of abuse in canada (for example the children's help line is tapped by the government, who seems to have been involved in helping to cover up pedophile rings in the UK)). But at least in principle, geography helps solve these issues. Look to Marshall Mcluhan : bring everyone closer together in the global village, and the problems of individual cults being exclusive break down as you can't *help* but be influenced, and influencing your surroundings since they are so nearby.
The bigger question is what happens when the global village
itself gets coopted/corrupted, and how to create space for children to develop in such a dystopia when this happens to the point where they can fix things. I think the answer to that is putting them in communication with eachother in such a way that the oldfags can't interrupt/spy on, which every generation so far has figured ways to do and doesn't seem like this is a trend that will stop any time soon.
See my added to the post.