Informed, yes. Allowed to make critical choices as children? No.

I'm with you, people act like children don't exist when they're talking about serious matters. But you do have to remember that they lack critical reasoning (partly) and make bad choices based on hormones. Walking the line between autonomy and protection is very very very difficult as a parent. Most people struggle or fail at this, I believe.

We have to trust that parents generally make the best decisions they can for their kids. Society has gone too far towards prescribing what a parent must or must not do. We’re in a world now where in many places a parent can’t let their kids walk to school by themselves, or can’t let them sit in a car for 5 minutes while they run into a store to pick something up. Sometimes it is better for a parent to shield a child from something that would scare them, and it should be up to the parent to decide where that line is.

> or can’t let them sit in a car for 5 minutes while they run into a store to pick something up

Unfortunately, you get headlines like "child / dog died or sustained serious injury because they were forgotten in a car" pretty damn frequently, and the frequency is increasing.

The reasons are manifold IMHO. For one, way more people are always on edge, working multiple jobs and highly stressed, which makes errors and mistakes much more likely. Then you got the "working homeless" crowd that just can't afford housing any more, and yes, way too often that includes children. And then, cars have gotten smarter and "safer" as well. Your old 90s era car likely still had manual window rolls and door locks. At least a child can be guided to open the door from the inside or can operate the window roller. Modern cars have electric window lifters that don't work without at least the basic car systems started, and (too many) parents disable the interior door unlocks on the rear doors.

According to this link https://www.kidsandcars.org/document_center/download/hot-car... (and I’m guessing any bias would be to overcount given the goals of the organization), 1125 kids have died in this way since 1990. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the hundreds of millions of people in the US, it’s vanishingly small.

Regulating this way leads to a straitjacket society where we are not allowed to take any risks whatsoever, no matter how minuscule. We’re not banning kids from being around kitchens, stairs or bicycles, which all present greater danger. Meanwhile, we are creating an environment where kids can only venture outside the home in highly regulated and supervised situations and wondering why things like social anxiety are rising off the charts.

If we wanted cars to be capable of letting kids out, car manufacturers would have to do it, much like they have to avoid creating all the other dangerous situations a car can create. The question is “should parents be given discretion to parent their kids”, saying no because car windows don’t roll down isn’t really engaging with that.

It's always the same in the end - the thing with a low-trust society vs a high-trust society.

When an ever increasing part of the population is cognitively impaired, (massively) under-educated themselves and/or doesn't have the time and money to properly take care of their children, a lot of implicit and explicit assumptions just go straight out of the window. The fact that car dependency and car centrism makes a whole lot of other assumptions (like, that you can let your child outside unattended because nothing will happen to them) go away as well doesn't help either.

And lawmakers and executive agencies like CPS? They only see that "numbers go up" or get blasted for high-profile cases where the shit really hit the fan, but as addressing the root causes goes far out of their scope (both legal and financial), each uses the tools at their disposal to try and keep up.

I don’t know if it’s quite a trust issue. Maybe it’s more a low- v high- responsibility society. It seems more like people want responsibility removed from people and given to the government. In my experience people become more competent when they have responsibility, so the removal of responsibility seems (to me at least) like it will train people into incompetence.

Well, European countries have (more or less) strong governments and strict regulations, but as a result of these, our children mostly can walk to their schools, and they certainly don't have to fear school shootings.

You’ve dodged the difficult question (“how to respect kids’ medical rights”) by presenting an elegant solution (“it’s always up to the parents, what they say goes” — I’m doing my best to paraphrase faithfully here). I _love_ elegant solutions to difficult problems, so your solution appeals to me! However, if you look at it more closely i think you’ll see that the elegant solution doesn’t work well enough in this case. Consider the following examples:

- what if the parents had decided that Molly should only receive treatment from their shaman healer? Should this decision be allowed?

- some parents don’t want their kids to be vaccinated. Should they be allowed to make this decision?

- some parents may want a sex change for their 1 year old, because it’s more fashionable to have a baby boy/girl/etc. Setting aside legal restrictions that presently exist, should this be allowed?

I bet you’d object to some of the above, as would I. Reasonable people can disagree over exactly what rights kids should have, how they are enforced, how they change with age, etc. Nobody will ever be fully happy with the laws we enact. But a solution which tries to be good is imo better than saying “anything goes, as long as the parents consent”.

To be honest I suspect that you never believed “ anything goes, as long as the parents consent”. I suspect your view is perhaps more like “parents can decide whether to accept novel treatments for children with life-limiting chronic illness”. Is that maybe closer to your view?