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| Adults have been hostile to kids for a long time. |
When it comes to undermining young people, I have grouped adults into three main categories: well-meaning adults, indifferent adults, and hostile adults. This is about hostile adults.
Who Are Hostile Adults?
Hostile adults don’t like young people. They have a great deal of antipathy towards young people simply because of their age, and are genuinely and overtly determined to maintain over-controlling relationships with children and youth.
Generally bound by distrust and misunderstanding of young people, hostile adults’ attitudes and behaviors are assertively anti-child and anti-youth. They routinely strive to make young people feel like infants who are incapable or subhuman, no matter what their age. They lock doors, code language, and choices made for children and youth that often force adult will upon them. These people frequently use abusive manipulation to domineer over young people, and rely on straight-forward hostility to enforce their way of being.
Changing Times
We live in a time when brutally overt undermining of young peoples’ well-being appears to be waning, with practices like corporal punishment and behavior modification schools becoming less favorable. However, at the same time more children and youth routinely face food insecurity, poor schooling, no health insurance, and blatantly anti-youth legal and economic systems,, than ever before. The simple fact of the matter is that the institutions of society are still largely hostile towards young people.
Unfortunately, these people occupy all stations throughout society. A growing number of parents are hostile adults. So are other people who are supposed to directly serve children and youth, including teachers, childcare workers, youth workers, store clerks, librarians, and others. Indirectly or directly responsible for upholding the well-being of young people, hostile adults also occupy the ranks of police officers, politicians, school principals, mental health counselors, and family doctors. So many of these individuals interact with young people every single day that its no wonder how youth discrimination is relayed from generation to generation.
In order to ensure that adults remain powerful over young people, almost all young people everywhere are frequently and ultimately undermined throughout their childhood and youth, whether by well-meaning adults, indifferent adults, or hostile adults.
Read Some Evidence
Read Some Other Writers’ Assessments
Adam F.C. Fletcher 
It’s an awful cycle of harm and abuse of our young.
And those blogs and hashtags?!?
Outrageous!
It seems the only two segments of society open discrimination is allowed (and, sadly, somewhat encouraged) are the read of children and the obese.
It’s time for it to stop.
Time for children to be treated with the basic common courtesies and respect each I us deserve!
Great post!
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There’s so much more to say about this, too, Kate. Children are routinely targeted by adults in subtle and explicit ways, both condoned and admonished by society, and forgotten and remembered. Aggravating, and yet, honest, because as an adult in our society today, I’m both a beneficiary and perpetrator of this reality. We all are.
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