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This comment deserves an award. Mods should pin it to the top of the thread, because the majority of comments are totally divorced from their neighbors’ struggle to survive in our imperfect economy.
Comment on A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US
onoira@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
This is contextless ragebait. A lot of the outrage in this thread seems to boil down to:
- Children are too young to be working because factories. This child isn’t working in a factory. The reason children were maimed and killed in factories isn’t because they were too young to handle the machines; the machines were dangerous. Adults were and are also killed in mines and factories.
- Poor children shouldn’t have to work to get nice things because people shouldn’t be poor. Amazing idea. How soon do you think that can happen? It’s not just the poor who need work to afford things.
- Children shouldn’t have to work to survive because parents. Not always available, and, no, ‘put bad parents in jail’ isn’t a solution. State custody is almost always worse.
- Children shouldn’t be working in service roles because abuse. I’ll touch on this soon.
- Children shouldn’t be working for strangers because stranger danger. This isn’t a problem that disappears just because you hit an arbitrary age, especially if you’re a woman.
I’ll preface by saying I am antiwork and anticapitalist, and I support youth liberation.
I grew up in a poor household where I was emotionally and physically abused by my parents and siblings. This numbed me to the abuse I would experience in service roles, but also just as frequently in office jobs. When I was 14, both of my parents were permanently disabled and I was ready to get on with the rest of my life when I realised I was never going to have time to be a child. I dropped out of school and started working multiple jobs, on and off the books. My situation was not unique where I grew up. The income allowed me to survive, to escape my ‘family’, finish and continue my education, and eventually flee the country to get functioning healthcare and a basic standard of living by the age of 18.
This was only possible because I begged, pleaded and humiliated myself to garner enough sympathy from the paternalistic Morality Police who thought I couldn’t possibly know what I wanted for myself, and who thought my place was memorising bullshit in school and being confined to the house with my parents. who thought my parents weren’t abusing me but that I made that up because I was ‘spoiled’(?). It took six years for the ageist remarks to slow down; six years of constantly reäffirming my personhood and defending my intelligence and trying to ‘pass’ as an adult. Even then, in my twenties, it was ‘are you here with your parents?’ ‘why aren’t you studying, partying, travelling or doing drugs?’ ‘what do you know about [insert line of work]?’ Maybe because I’d already been in the industry for ten years and I have bills to pay? Unthinkable, apparently.
I should not have had to go thru any of that, but I wasn’t going to wait for the revolution. If I had lived the ‘ideal’ sheltered life that my lower middle class peers received: my life would have begun suddenly and abruptly — dropped in the deep end — in my mid-to-late twenties with all the skills and worldliness of an infant. Please stop presuming to know everything that is ‘good’ for young people. Please stop acting like the authority on when and how someone should be allowed to live their life. Under the current system: no one could be said to be an ‘adult’, but instead permanent adolescents. One could find several things wrong with this image, but the presence of that child doesn’t even rank in the top ten on that list. Attack the system, not the people trying to live under it.
Honourary mention to everything @Creddit@lemmy.world wrote: lemmy.world/comment/6630731
Creddit@lemmy.world 10 months ago
SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
No one is attacking the child, but the fact that children have to work. If children have to do anything, that’s to learn and to have fun. I’m sorry about what you had to go through, but saying that such a situation is wrong is actually attacking the system, not criticizing the people choosing the lesser evils available to them.
onoira@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I agree children shouldn’t have to work. My problem is that the solutions given average out to ‘prevent them from working’. I see that as an attack on people under the system, because I would not have been able to escape my situation without the freedom to seek employment. I ultimately didn’t have that full freedom, and did a lot of work that was illegal.
Creddit@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You can attack the system and while you do that, there are people under 18 years old who are just trying to provide for themselves or their dependents and need a job now.
They have adult responsibilities before the age of 18. A lot of the commenters outright refuse to believe that these legal minors could have possibly matured earlier than the law expects, but that really does happen and it really is socially irresponsible to ignore their struggle.
Most commenters are essentially holding this series of positions based on a photo that is out of context: "Why does this kid have a job?* The system is bad. Why is the system bad? Some kids have jobs. How can we stop kids from working? We should outlaw jobs for kids.
But that series of positions critically fails to account for exceptions where kids become competent before the age of 18, need jobs and want to work.
It ignores that, in reality, many minors have kids of their own or other dependents that they are struggling to support and it does not provide any plan for them, it makes their situation worse while you fight the system.
That is inhumane public policy. Like many areas of law, this is a complicated issue, and we are going to harm people in our communities if we jump to strict authoritarian control for an answer.