"I'm all in favour of the principle that it's good to reward people who do things that contribute to society and it's good to punish people, one way or another, if they do things that harm society. This means that people who develop Free Software that's useful deserve a reward, and people who develop proprietary software that's attractive deserve a punishment."

That is from this interview https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/transcripts/rms-fs-2006-03-09....

We aren't talking about the age of consent. RMS explicitly said children before they hit puberty / sexual maturity which is a bit different than a 17 year old to most people.