I can make a decent argument for children being controlled by adults until a certain age. It's a sort of apprenticeship model. Everyone serves for a while, and then everyone gets to be master. Summed over time, there is no inequality. Many cultures have an "honor-thy-parents" principle that actually serves the societies quite well. It certainly makes it more appealing to become parents than what our society does.

Returning to apprenticeships is a great idea that youth liberationists support, but we would not agree on putting arbitrary limits on how long one must be an apprentice because everyone would develop at a unique pace. Otherwise, we're doing things more or less the exact same way we are doing them now. Also, denying kids rights that go beyond that--including right to freedom of speech, right to religious practice, freedom of access to information--would be a corollary that has nothing to do with competency levels. Inequality between members of one designated demographic (adults, in this case) while denying it to another demographic that entirely ignores individual merit is unjust. In this particular case, it's also a sneaky but transparent way of arguing to keep things entirely as they are now with just a bit of window dressing to create the illusion of meaningful difference. It also makes the poor argument that being controlled by others is fine as long as it's temporary.

But our society is nothing like that. Children here have more freedom and autonomy than ever before.

Seriously? With the nuclear family unit becoming more and more insular, and kids being supervised more and more? The only greater freedom kids enjoy today is what the Internet offers, yet parents and politicians go out of their way to control kids' access to it. Clearly, you either do not know or try your best to ignore the Free-Range Kids Movement, which is comprised of adults who challenge this and make it clear kids are most certainly not more autonomous today than they used to be.

Surely if you hit someone else's kid or try to discipline them you risk big trouble. Parents who proudly proclaim how they don't spare the rod to the social services people won't keep their kids long, if those kids show up with bruises in school.

Presuming that the parent has such a lack of control that they actually leave visible bruises with their physical abuse. It's certainly possible not to do that. And parents, as well as teachers, have a virtual blank check when it comes to emotional abuse. The fact that kids are not allowed to simply extricate themselves from these situations is precisely what makes them get so ugly and involve so much bureaucratic intervention to resolve them when a report is acted upon. A parent has to be "proven" unfit, since a youth is not able to simply leave or have places to go like what I suggested above.

There's this illusion of the past child of age 14 setting up their own business and becoming financially independent. Ha. I'm sure it happened, in economic boom times, but I can't imagine it was ever very common. Today we have fully liberated 18+ people who live in their parents' basements in large numbers.

Um, Ethan, it's not easy for even adults to start their own business and run it successfully. This is why corporations are taking over and pushing out small business owners at today's stage of economic development. It would be as easy or as difficult for competent younger people to do so as it is for adults with equal degrees of competency and/or money to spare for the initial investments required. More younger people in their 20s are living in their parents' basements these days because the days of readily available, high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, those offering well-paid office work, well-paying government jobs, and jobs that well compensate people in the creative fields are greatly diminished. Not only that, but labor unions are currently a shadow of their former selves, with many big corporations like Walmart offering no unionization whatsoever. They have been replaced by usually non-unionized, low-paying service sector jobs and gig work that require long hours for very low pay, with many of the previous decent government jobs getting privatized or offering far less pay than those in the past; and on top of that, even many service-sector jobs are being outsourced to nations with cheaper labor and lax labor protection laws, let alone any union representation.

Not only that, but younger people who attempted to get their own houses during the last decade were misled by the bankers in the savings and loan scandal that cost millions their personal livelihoods while rewarding those criminal plutocrats with huge government bail-outs thanks to they're being "too big to fail." All of the above went a long way to trigger the current Recession, along with college loan debt that penalizes younger people who wanted higher education becoming a huge problem over the past two decades that is pauperizing young adults all on its own, not to mention when you add that to all of the above factors. The parents who do own their houses that their kids are living in the basements of are mainly from a previous generation where the economic landscape was different. If youths had their emancipation during that time, many of them may have succeeded along with the adults of that previous era, though of course racial, ethnic, gender, and class factors would also have played a role in the overall success rate.

The main thing is, if younger people had a hand in deciding government policy, then there is a good chance they'll vote for changes that would make it considerably easier for everyone to earn a good living, succeed at running a business, etc. You just do not like admitting that adults alone being in charge caused the problems we now live under. I am NOT saying younger people could or should run the system over and above adults, but their greater willingness to embrace or even consider fundamental change may make them the decisive factor when a vote is taken by a group of lawmakers comprised of both adults and youths of various ages.

Child liberationists call for complicated competency tests instead of age limits.

I confess such tests are not ideal, but they are hardly overly complicated. They are often very much to the point, with typical adults and the average youths often scoring at an even keel.

I could see them as making sense in some cases, though the logic behind them could suggest denying privileges for such things as sex or voting or driving to many adults, and that's not a place many people want to go.

Yes, it's always about adults maintaining their rights and privileges even if younger people of reasonable competencies and proven merits do not. The system must continue to favor adults, so restrictions must continue to be arbitrary. Therein lies the main point here.

It's also a bureaucratic nightmare.

If it means giving more rights to people who merit those rights, then a bureaucratic "nightmare" should be considered worthwhile. Especially when centrist liberals can readily justify maintaining the bureaucratic nightmare that is "Obamacare" (read: a refurbished conservative plan designed by Mitt Romney for the state he was governor of) over that of the far less paperwork-intensive, far more universally beneficial single-payer health care. And continue to justify the nightmare of pre-emptive war on Middle Eastern nations that routinely kill, maim, or render homeless numerous kids in addition to other innocents. And no, I do not think these other issues I mentioned are beside the point but very much the point.

The truth is that parents are more motivated more than anyone else to do well by their children, and are able to balance freedom and responsibility in line with the particular situation of particular children as they know them personally.

Yet this concern often becomes corrupted as a result of the nigh-total power parents have under the current schema. Which can result in the denial of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religious practice, freedom of educational choice, freedom of bodily autonomy on many levels, freedom to work (while frequently reminding their kids of "who pays the bills around here!"), freedom of political practice, freedom to pursue the type of relationships they want & which are most natural to them...the list goes on. This power-tripping is also the source of the greatest amount of violence and abuse of all sorts, including sexual, being inflicted on kids. Good intentions far too often result in results that are not so good when the one making those decisions wields so much power over those whom they care about. And kids are all too often at the mercy of parents who may love them but are very troubled individuals.

Yes, they are far from perfect, and all too often make grave mistakes, but there is no better place to put that authority, all else being equal.

Yes there is: putting that authority in the hands of youths themselves, allowing them to become part of the overall authority that comprises not only their own lives but that of society overall, so that everyone has the access to information, freedom of speech, and ability to acquire support required to enable everyone to make the best possible decisions for themselves as individuals.

If you feel the nuclear family unit is the best possible place for kids to be, then let us see if it can be improved by democratizing it. That way, kids will be more likely to stay living within such a unit of their own volition. If they are forced to live in such a unit save under the most extreme conditions (always decided by another adult agency), and no matter how unhappy they may be there, then it only becomes the norm by tyrannical default.

The fact that you support the current power imbalances yet claim to be concerned about the alleged "imbalance" of power implicit in intergenerational relationships pretty much proves it's not the well-being of kids you are concerned about, but the retention of something resembling the current power structures that you are accustomed to. Your loyalty is not to kids or the principles of freedom on a broader basis, but rather to the status quo as it is, favoring just a few largely superficial tweaks here and there. You do not see fellow MAPs as the greatest potential threat to youths; you see us as one of the greatest potential threats to the present hegemony as you know it--along with the principle of youth liberation.

It's often not clear the best thing to do, and a range of parental reactions will give rise to a range of results that may enrich society.

In some cases, that is true--though the best range of reactions is coming from the growing number of parents who are themselves youth liberationists (such as Richard Farson in the past and Robert Epstein in the present), the Free-Range Kids movement, and the Unschooling movement. But parents who keep their range of reactions entirely within the boundaries set around the current status quo? Which is the great majority of them in this day and age? Um, not so much. They are opponents of real change, at most favoring superficial changes that amount to no actual change at all (a textbook example or two you generously provided in this very discussion).

I agree parents will eventually play quite a big hand in the mass progressive improvement of the lives of youths. But the majority of these parents do not live in the present era, as like you, they currently have too much invested in the power structures of today and thus will be resistant to giving that up. Much like all other groups of people throughout history who wielded power over others.

Their hearts may often be in the right place, but their actual priorities are not. And that goes double for adults in higher positions of power, i.e., those who wield power over other adults as well as kids. And we know which side you favor, Ethan.