Parenthood is a relationship
This is an important point.
It’s also a gross violation of the child’s right to be told the truth.
I think that matters a lot, because children don’t know what’s true, they have to rely on adults to tell them, so it’s grossly unfair for adults to tell them lies (with rare exceptions for compelling reasons). It’s part of adults’ job to educate children, so they shouldn’t tell them stupid confusing lies about basic worldly facts.
Not sure I follow this one. Children don’t have a right to determine who their parents are nor what they are; the portion that goes “…and to have their parentage clearly defined” is simply a worse way of saying “the child’s right to be told the truth.” Other than that, the child would seem to have no right to determine what their parental arrangement is.
It depends on how you define “right,” but I think children do have some rights there. This is one reason some feminists object to surrogacy for gay male couples – the deliberately in advance depriving the child of a mother. Adoption is one thing, but doing it on purpose is another.
“Truth” doesn’t lay out the specifics here. I think the point being made is that a child has a right to know who his or her father is, as well as mother, even if the child is adopted, even if one or both parents isn’t in the picture, and even if the father wants to be called “mother”. One’s accurate biological ancestry is important for many reasons. Birth certificates should not be altered to obscure this information. Birth certificates are just that, not certificates of whatever the child rearing arrangements might be.
Children don’t know what’s true, they have to rely on adults to tell them
Was the point of The Emperor’s New Clothes not precisely the reverse?
Alan, it’s a bit chicken and egg. The child HAD at some point been taught the truth – how to spot nakedness. That would have been by an adult. The fact that adults then forced themselves to enter a state of delusion for reasons obscure to the child, allowed the child to cut through with the plan fact – naked.
When I was an adolescent, I had a rather adolescent perspective, that parents had no rights and all responsibilities with respect to their children, while children had no responsibilities and all rights. Now that I find myself considering whether or not I would like to start a family of my own (which at this point is a purely theoretical exercise), and given the madness unfolding in schools the world over, I find myself revising this stance somewhat…perhaps hypocritically, but I like to think not.
Regardless, children are vulnerable, and they deserve to both know the truth and to know how they might discover that truth. One of the things which disturbs me most about our society is how much we are expected to disjoint our lives and perceptions in order to preserve the innocence of children. While children are not adults, and their perspectives are different, I strongly believe we do them a grave disservice by systematically lying to them about the nature of the world, of life itself, and forcing them to discover this betrayal organically.
If I ever do have children of my own, I will endeavour to facilitate their interactions with reality augmented with their fantasies, rather than attempt to replace fantasy with reality for as long as possible.
This is a symptom of a much larger issue. We live in a civilization based upon concealing unpleasant truths from ourselves. Our food comes from supermarkets, our manufactured goods from stores, or delivered from online services. Behind each of these facades are the nuts and bolts of agriculture and industry, both of which are, as currently constituted, dependent upon the immisration of other beings, human and non-human, and the treatment of the Earth and its inhabitants as little more than resource and labour inputs. Some of us have become insulated from the immediate cost and impact of the activities from which we derive comfort and benefit. The scale of our society means we are no longer in contact with the processes that feed and clothe us. We are not encouraged to remedy this situation. Globalization, and corporate pursuit of lower monetary costs mean the “neighbors” who make the goods we use live on the next continent, not the next street over. Not to say that there was no misery and exploitation when production was closer to home, but that it was harder to hide and deny, and, within a given country’s borders, it was, theoretically at least, more amenible to legislative amelioration.
I don’t know what the answer is. The toothpaste is out of the tube. To quote Vonnegut, I just got here: I’m still learning and trying to figure things out. One thing I have learned is that we’ve become too numerous for our own good, and for the good of the planet. We have lied to ourselves and each other that some of us can have it all, and that Earth, and those who are “not us” can pay the price indefinitely, or, for those more deeply entrenched in denial, that there is no such price to pay. This is delusional, self destructive, and insane. We are burning the world for trinkets and gewgaws. How do we even start the conversations we need to engage in to defuse the bomb we’ve built and are riding?
We have a limited time within which to figure out how to climb down and de-escalate our assault on the Earth. That we are facing so many crises at once does not help. Even without anthropogenic climate change and peak oil, our numbers are still greater than Earth can support. Agriculture and material extraction needed to support the human population, without the cascade of exacerbating factors, would still threaten our own survival as a civilization. We seem to be ill-equipped to deal with this impending disaster, even though many are aware of it. How do we overcome the civilizational enertia carrying us to our doom?
“This is a symptom of a much larger issue.” YNNB #11 summarizes much of what William Rees
says in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oVTHKzC7TM 1:14:14 Keynote Lecture: Prof. (Emeritus) William E. Rees – Climate change isn’t the problem, so what is?, Jan 28, 2021
and elsewhere.
Humans live ‘out of’ their constructed realities as if they were real. Human beings are uniquely endowed with capacity to understand our circumstances, reason from the evidence. We have to recognize we are self-delusionists and need to wake up to our own reality.