I’ve noticed this phenomenon more and more the older I get.

I’ve also noticed that most people are cool with the idea that children are incompetent to make important life decisions, even when those decisions are fundamental to their well-being.

Now, I’ve never been a biological parent, but like all of us I was a kid. I was a queer kid raised in a conservative, fundamentally religious home. I knew how I felt about being gay from the time I was 11 or 12 years old.

I was competent enough to hide that fact from my parents and community, to be subversive, to educate myself as best I could, and to make an intellectual and emotional break from my religious background. All while I was still legally a child.

My church wanted to send me to conversion therapy, but my mother did not force me to go along with it. If she had, I likely would have had no choice.

So when I think about kids and asking them what they think, feel, and want, I believe I instinctively presume kids ought to be treated as free moral agents who belong to no one but themselves.

In fact my presumptions are so strong, it’s only lately that I’ve realized that many people disagree with me strongly. I think people who aren’t raised in an intensely toxic environment don’t “get it" the way I do. They don’t have the personal perspective maybe to understand that parents’ values and ways of living may sometimes be intensely bad for children, so they aren’t likely to advocate for children to be free of those values and ways of living.

I’m not arguing that children should be fully legally independent at all times. But I do wish that as a society we could give more weight to what children say they feel, want, and need. As a child, I could have given very accurate answers to those questions, and I wish somebody had asked them and taken me seriously.