I fully disagree that our "protections" in the present Western world are working well, because the United States alone has an unacceptably high level of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse occurring within the home, and this is the direct result of the level of "protections" we have for them today, which effectively makes them the de facto property of their parents. Add to that the huge amount of children in the U.S. living in impoverished conditions, which Judith Levine logically argues in the final chapter of her book Harmful to Minors should be considered a severe form of child abuse in and of itself.

The present Western system offers children virtually no opportunities for degrees of economic independence; no way out of abusive situations unless they get incredibly extreme, or unless (of course) they somehow involve sexual activity; no freedom of religion or even the right to dissent from it if their parents do not already do so; we subject them to "incest exemption" laws simply because the abuse is going on by a parent or older sibling rather than a stranger (who contrary to popular belief, are responsible for just a tiny fraction of genuine abuse against kids); offer them few if any alternative methods of education tailored to the individual needs of different children, thus subjecting them to a system designed to weed out rather than actually teach, as well as all of the bullying from both peers and teachers that go on under such a system; allow them only extremely regulated access to information, which greatly and artificially limits their development and conception of the world and their place in it according to a standardized timetable chosen by adults, and which almost never takes their individual merits into account but gears these regulations solely on the basis of age; and effectively no opportunities for any of them to participate in the running of the system, thus leaving them without a voice of their own.

In effect, our current "protections" entirely rob them of all aspects of their personhood, and this shows what a fine line there is between "protection" and control. Further, in regards to happiness, contentment by simple manner of being used to the way things are should not be mistaken for happiness. Women were often similarly contented with the way things used to be prior to and during the early to mid-days of their emancipation movement, yet do we consider that justification for not allowing them to chose their own destiny today? The same could be said of chattel slavery, as there were a good many slavemasters who did not overtly abuse their slaves, and many slaves on these plantations who were perfectly inured to those conditions, especially the house slaves, who often became quite close to their slavemasters, and were frequently treated as members of the family despite their clear position of servitude.