hot take: children are often unwise and by default inexperienced, but our society takes that to mean "they are complete idiots incapable of making any decision for themselves"

this leads to an awful lot of terrible stuff happening or being done to children and the precise impulse to ensure they are "protected" often puts them in harm's way even more

I was never in danger from strangers, or from my doctors, or anyone who was all so often told to back off because they were not my parents and thus didn't have my "best interests" at heart.

And yet? Most of the harm that came to me? That came from my parents.

I found out an interesting thing from looking through my old medical records - for years I thought I had been misdiagnosed by the educational psychologist who was assigned to me when I was eleven.

Turns out I'd been demonising her wrongly for all these years.

Her initial assessment of me said "suspected ADHD, or possible autism" - and because my parents didn't believe ADHD was a real thing, they latched on to the latter and refused to let me see her again for further assessments.

Cue the next fourteen years of knowing something wasn't working right in my brain but *also* knowing that the label I'd been slapped with was wrong - but because of that label and because nobody listens to kids, I was stuck.

That did a lot of fucking harm to me.

If someone had sat down and explained what ADHD is actually like to live with - the rejection sensitivity, the inability to direct focus at will, the hot-temperedness, the impulsiveness - I'd have got it.

But those conversations never involved me.

So much of my childhood was being talked *about* and nobody listening to what *I* had to say.

Like I said. Kids? Unwise and inexperienced.

But they aren't idiots and if you treat them like they are, you will harm them.

It's only a matter of degree at that point.