{"id":98,"date":"2008-12-24T15:09:21","date_gmt":"2008-12-24T23:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=98"},"modified":"2013-05-25T18:45:28","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T01:45:28","slug":"children-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/24\/children-youth\/","title":{"rendered":"Children & Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Childish<\/a>One thing you will probably notice in my prose (including the language I use throughout this blog) is my minimal use of the words \u201cchild\u201d and \u201cchildren\u201d while substituting for both with words like \u201cyouth\u201d or \u201cyoung people\u201d or the more colloquial \u201ckids\u201d. I have become more and more uncomfortable with the \u201cC Word\u201d since its varying forms are often used to describe immature or unmediated behavior, dependence, or otherwise convey a derogatory context. Whenever you hear, \u201cYou are behaving like a child!\u201d or a description of \u201cchildish behavior\u201d, you can bet there is a criticism involved.
\n
\nIn conventional usage, any person who is not an \u201cadult\u201d (generally a person eighteen or over) can be described as a \u201cchild\u201d (non-adult). Of course, if you say that, \u201cA child walked into the room\u201d, no one is going to picture that a seventeen-year-old just entered. Luckily we do have the words \u201cteenager\u201d and \u201cadolescent\u201d to describe the older non-adult, though those words have their own connotation issues as well.
\n
\nThe more positive connotations of the \u201cC Word\u201d I think of in its use in terms like \u201cchild of the universe\u201d, \u201cchild of God\u201d, \u201call my children\u201d or \u201cinner child\u201d. The first three focus the word on the concept of progeny, while the last describes a pure (generally perceived as good in this mostly post-Calvinistic age) primal state that one builds an adult personality on top of.
\n
\nIn the Unitarian-Universalist community I am involved with, we do a kind of semi-formal definition of \u201cchildren\u201d as people from birth to the age of about seven to nine, \u201cyouth\u201d as ages above that to 17, with \u201cyoung adults\u201d and just plain \u201cadults\u201d at age 18 and above. So where other people might say \u201cchildren\u201d to refer to all people under 18, we UUs often say instead \u201cchildren and youth\u201d, differentiating those under 18 that have moved beyond the dependence implied in childhood.
\n
\nBecoming increasingly uncomfortable myself with the negative connotations of the words \u201cchild\u201d and \u201cchildren\u201d, I have come to avoid using these terms wherever I can, and have mainly relegated the term to identifying progeny. So for example, I would describe \u201cmy two grown children\u201d to identify their connection to me as one of their parents. I have otherwise adopted a protocol of referring to any multi-age aggregate of people under 18 as \u201cyouth\u201d (plural) and a single young person roughly old enough for kindergarten as a \u201cyouth\u201d (singular).
\n
\nMy take is that being described as a \u201cyouth\u201d engenders more respect than being referred to as a \u201cchild\u201d, with its connotations of immaturity and dependence. The word \u201cyouthful\u201d has generally positive connotations when applied to an adult where \u201cchildish\u201d has the opposite.
\n
\nI won\u2019t belabor this much more, hopefully you get where I\u2019m coming from. The words we choose to use can have hundreds of years of convention behind them, and I try more and more to choose them wisely and try to appropriately acknowledge myself or the other person I apply them to.
\n
\nAll that said, I applaud others fighting to rehabilitate the words \u201cchild\u201d, \u201cchildren\u201d and \u201cchildhood\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing you will probably notice in my prose (including the language I use throughout this blog) is my minimal use of the words \u201cchild\u201d and \u201cchildren\u201d while substituting for both with words like \u201cyouth\u201d or \u201cyoung people\u201d or the more colloquial \u201ckids\u201d. I have become more and more uncomfortable with the \u201cC Word\u201d since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[25,1793,26],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-including-between-adults-and-youth","tag-children","tag-including-between-adults-and-youth","tag-youth"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4236,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/4236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}