radicallane:

My son may be small but he has fairly big ideas about how respect feels. He understands that when you won’t look into someone’s eyes you aren’t really listening. He too translates eye rolling into disdain and impatience. He fully gets the inequality of other people making choices on his behalf and shit does he hate that! He is just as offended by being interrupted as the rest of us. He too has hurt feelings if his ideas get blatantly brushed off. Human to human relating doesn’t actually change all that much from age to age. Children are capable of incredible bluntness, sharp-wittedness and unprompted compassion. And it’s true; children can be loud, obnoxious, disrespectful and needy. And they can be told so; nine out of ten kids will quit once their behavior is called out. I’m not sure this statistic stays true for adults.

Here’s what’s frustrating about the sub-cultures I have brushed elbows with, the activists, earth-firsters, queers, anarchists, radical leftists (I realize I’ve got some generalizing going on here but I trust your self-reflectiveness, you know if I’m talking about you and I trust that you’ll keep reading either way). Every one of these little worlds takes diversity, inclusion, and strict political correctness quite seriously. Every ism in the universe is deconstructed and bashed around and spent hours upon hours of potluck time rapping about it all. Each group expects the culture to change according to their seemingly common sense of equality and human rights. What’s so funny is that ultimately, raising children equates to this: you, child, need more than I do and I am willing to give you what you need first. Meeting children’s needs models what these groups ask of the world: care for others especially when others have less. Yet these very groups all too often exclude children, perhaps not always consciously but so often by way of disregarding simple things like event times or spaces and their kid-friendliness. Excluding children by default excludes the parents tied to them.

Just a couple excerpts from a really important post.