A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the state) giving children access to books with sexual content against the will of parents is definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.

I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16, after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my parents denying me.

And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way imaginable, including through sexual repression and agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my life, including through my school systems. They repressed nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".

When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved by anyone.

They were evil people and I do not support any institution or government which wants to perpetuate the experience I had for other children. I seek to enable children to have access to knowledge and tools they need to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that full access to information and supporting institutions will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than will restriction of information.

I’m sorry for your experience but your extreme case does not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise guidance over their children and to decide when and to what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are exposed.

My experience is the edge case that people like you try to pretend either doesn't exist or doesn't matter when justifying the current system.

FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.

Parallel really, not orthogonal. It's better that I cut off your internet than hit you with a hammer, but not much better.

Is cutting off a teen’s internet bad if they’re being bullied or groomed on social media?

Do you think if a teen is being bullied, cutting them off from the Internet will help?

It does. Because a child is a sentient being. Not an accessory for a parent. If you respect the autonomy of someone who is sentient, even when they're dependent on someone else, it's important they're given the ability to forge their own life.

And no, it's not an "extreme case" — it's a common one.

    Wildeman et al. estimated the lifetime child maltreatment prevalence for US children as 12.5% by age 18 years, but considered only child maltreatment reports substantiated by CPS.12 Substantiated reports are a small subset of all reports. In 2014, only 21.9% of investigated reports were substantiated.10 (Technically, “investigated” indicates “investigated or assessed” and “substantiated” indicates “substantiated or indicated” here and after.)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227926/pdf/AJPH.20...

1 in 5 is hardly uncommon. Note, these are the substantiated reports i.e. an investigation was done and it was found, "yes, the child is being abused."

But even if it was 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000 then we still can't design the system without this in mind, because any system needs to have a safety margin for failure, and that includes caring for children.

> definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.

That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking stupid.

So we have public school, where real things are taught. And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!

But this notion that everything should always bend over backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked before. If parents don't want their kids learning about X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is, isn't an option.

And now my state has this bad boy: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/28/what-is-louisianas-...

"Louisiana is the first US state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools. The law stipulates the following:

- Public schools are required to display a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, school library and cafeteria.

- They must be displayed on a poster of minimum 11×14-inch (28×35.5cm) size and be written in an easily readable, large font."

Separation of Church and State, my ass.

They're not going to understand unless they lived here long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing a different pharmacist because the one they went to not being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for them.

Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand, arguing that the state should have the right to intervene in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining that the state is requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. The power you’re arguing for is the very same thing you’re complaining about.

There is no irony here, you're not understanding the context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even if they personally disagree with displaying and perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms, when separation of Church and State is such a core component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state was against this violation of free speech, but our governor signed it into law anyway.

The library is still a resource for those who wish to learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while learning about various religions that I was not allowed to research at home.

Here's the problem with your rather simple-minded analysis. Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too. I trust the parents way more.

> Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too.

Yeah, sure, they can be. The difference is that this is their JOB and they're EDUCATED.

If you trust parents "way more" than actual educators, then great! Pull your kids out of school and teach them yourself. That's always been an option. But don't go around proclaiming public school should be specifically engineered to make YOU comfortable.

You? Are nobody. Your opinion does not matter.

EDUCATED or indoctrinated? And you only have to look at the abysmal track record of the "Dept of Education" to see how badly things can be run. And yes I agree..my opinion is not that important, just like yours.

It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.

I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.

I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c) conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything beyond that to parents. Kids aren’t under the purview of their parents forever; they’ll soon get out into the world and come to their own conclusions.

When you are a child you are not an individual. You are a child. What your parents want matters more than what you want.

No.

Yes, that's what my guardians told me, too. I contend otherwise. Now, who is right? On what foundation do you rest your claim that I lack the protections of an individual as a child?