If we made it illegal to expose children to religion until they reached the age of adulthood - and made enforcement viable and effective - religion would become extinct within two to three generations.
There is a reason why every religion out there places so much emphasis on proselytizing to children - because evolution has primed children to trust adults implicitly. They are the perfect brainwashing subjects because over the last few million years those who listened to adults and obeyed them without question were most likely to make it to adulthood themselves.
I’m on the fence as to whether telling your child they are a girl or a boy is similarly harmful.
Telling them that they are developing physically as one or the other isn’t the problem.
The real problem is forcing cultural baggage onto them that pigeonholes their development. Or worse - that tells them that any discrepancy between their outward appearance and internal being means their internal being is the problem.
Being in tune with who and what you are has never been the problem. Learning about differences and realizing that your physical phenotype puts you in a particular group is also not a problem. Children will always be curious, and feeding their curiosity is always a net benefit.
The problem occurs when the outside world forces you to think and behave in ways that don’t align with your real self. That is the true evil.
Yes it is, and parents have a duty to prepare their children for the world, evil as it is. It’s very difficult to navigate. For example, there’s some credibility to the argument that raising a machiavellian child is in their own best interests and therefore moral. A more trivial example is purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection. Somewhere between those two (probably) lies the moral ideal, if such a thing exists.
purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection
Vaccines are infinitely safer than doing that. Your premise a bad example to give, as it’s the riskiest possible path to immunity, and an example of exceptionally harmful parental care given the vaccination options.
If we made it illegal to expose children to religion until they reached the age of adulthood - and made enforcement viable and effective - religion would become extinct within two to three generations.
There is a reason why every religion out there places so much emphasis on proselytizing to children - because evolution has primed children to trust adults implicitly. They are the perfect brainwashing subjects because over the last few million years those who listened to adults and obeyed them without question were most likely to make it to adulthood themselves.
Telling them that they are developing physically as one or the other isn’t the problem.
The real problem is forcing cultural baggage onto them that pigeonholes their development. Or worse - that tells them that any discrepancy between their outward appearance and internal being means their internal being is the problem.
Being in tune with who and what you are has never been the problem. Learning about differences and realizing that your physical phenotype puts you in a particular group is also not a problem. Children will always be curious, and feeding their curiosity is always a net benefit.
The problem occurs when the outside world forces you to think and behave in ways that don’t align with your real self. That is the true evil.
Yes it is, and parents have a duty to prepare their children for the world, evil as it is. It’s very difficult to navigate. For example, there’s some credibility to the argument that raising a machiavellian child is in their own best interests and therefore moral. A more trivial example is purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection. Somewhere between those two (probably) lies the moral ideal, if such a thing exists.
Vaccines are infinitely safer than doing that. Your premise a bad example to give, as it’s the riskiest possible path to immunity, and an example of exceptionally harmful parental care given the vaccination options.