From the child's first days, he or she is typically condemned to a process of control that becomes progressively more comprehensive as the years pass. From potty-training, to denial of sexual feelings, via the institutionalized drudgery that is schooling, the child comes to learn that the priorities and demands of adults must take first place, and that it is right that this is so. But the adults world is not content with the mere control of the child's physical surroundings and behaviour, the child must submit to the moral and imaginative priorities of the adult's world as well. The taboo on personal sexuality that exists in most homes is only the most obvious sign of control, but the even more pervasive demands of the mass-consumption society are also present for the earliest years, demanding that the child sacrifice his or her own creative impulses and imagination to the crazes and trends of the current fashion.
But the adult's world is also a world of coercion and conformity, both facts of social suboridination to the needs of mass-consumption. The pressures on parents, for example, to train their children to a strict routine of eating, sleeping, and playing to a timetable is partly the result of the economic and social pressures on the parents. Similarly, whatever individual school teachers may wish to do with their children they are hamstrung by the demands of curricula designed to serve the needs of the industrial economy, producing malleable workers willing to sacrifice basic freedoms for small, usually monetary returns.
However, it is not just contemporary economic and social pressures that make adults willing oppressors of children, for learned patterns of behaviour play the greatest part in that oppression. Adults inherit child-rearing beliefs and techniques, and they often seek to avenge their own suffering as children on that are now in their control. The sexually-abused child becomes the child abuser, the moralised child becomes the moraliser, the "smacked" child becomes the child "smacker".
Both children and adults suffer from the denial of the individuality of the child, from the denial of unconditional love for the child. Children suffer, their personalities distorted by adults determined to impose their ways, and those children continue to suffer as adults, albeit with the outlet provided by their denial of children's rights. Children never learn the happiness and responsibility of freedom, and they rarely learn that love of freedom as adults, conditioned as they are from the earliest age to conform, to be moulded to the plans of others, and to mould others in their control.
If we are to achieve a society built upon love, upon free co-operation, free from authoritarian assumptions and constraints, then we must free the children. Return childhood to children, listen to children, respond to them, talk to them, ask them what they want and why, give them the space to be themselves, love them and learn freedom from them. That way the adult world will change too. Treating children with respect and love will mean abandoing the priorities of industrial society, of mass-consumption capitalism, and focusing instead on the freely arrived at priorities of each child, each individual. A new way of treating children will prove to be the key to a new type of society, a new type of economy -- something the world in the late twentieth century sorely needs.