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Childhood as Serfdom

An analysis

(Or: I'm on my soapbox, enjoy/suffer the consequences)

I was gonna write a funny post about how being a child is kinda like being a medieval serf, but then I thought about it longer and actually it's not funny. So, be prepared.

People have a lot of resistance to the idea that children, legally and societally, are serfs. There is a visceral unwillingness to put together and see what the whole of laws and customs concerning minor persons actually amounts to, and I actually think that unwillingness is at the root of what makes so much "think of the children/protect the children" right wing rhetoric so effective.

In English, the word "serf" mostly brings to mind medieval peasants, but in Dutch it touches a little more on what it actually is. Lijfeigene, literally translated, "body-owned-one". A serf is not the same as a slave -he is not considered a tradeable good or personal possession, and cannot be murdered or raped with impunity. He can have property and this property is protected by the same laws that protect the possessions of free people. But similarly to a slave, a serf does not have self-determination over his own body, freedom of movement, or ownership of the fruits of his own labour. He is not legally considered an individual person so much as a part of an estate, a condition we'd still commonly describe as "unfree". In the medieval system of serfdom (at least in England) a serf had to pay for a "license" from his Lord to do just about anything, from marrying to repairing a fence. So we can say that medieval serfdom was a system where fundamental freedoms were paywalled rather than fundamentally denied, as in the case of slavery. There were ways to receive permission to do things, but the necessity of receiving (and, in the medieval use case, paying for) this permission was a fundamental aspect of the system.

Now.

Let's entertain this thought. Does childhood meet the criteria of serfdom?

Well.

Children have no freedom of movement.

You perhaps wouldn't look at the permission slip to go on a school trip as something in the same vein as a medieval serf's license to visit a cousin on a neighbouring estate, yet that is exactly what it is. "Where are your parents?", local police in suburbia giving a child a ride home if they get spotted walking alone, "No unaccompanied minors", parents being sued for leaving their kids home alone, the entire concept of "familial kidnapping" and the fact that custody is a matter of legal regulation when a couple divorces. Children's lack of freedom of movement is everywhere if you care to look.

When people get annoyed at "loitering" teenagers, they are contesting children's right to be in public spaces, unaccompanied and without specific purpose or permission.

When people judge parents for their children being a nuisance, they are explicitly acknowledging that the child's movements could be curtailed and controlled by the parents -indeed, they are stating such control to be the correct course of action.

Explicitly and implicitly, our society accepts and supports children not having natural freedom of movement, and places -for better or worse- the responsibility for their movement on the parents. In this, the parents are the Lord of the estate, and the child is a serf attached to this estate. Additionally, as the entire concept of custody shows, we have in fact codified the rights of parents to continued access to any children that were part of an estate that was legally split between them in a divorce.

Children do not have right of self-determination.

Children have precious little protection to their bodily integrity. From birth, they can be circumcised, have their genitals surgically "corrected" if they look too ambiguous to the eye of parents and doctors, have their ears pierced, be baptised or initiated in a religion, have cosmetic surgery performed on them, etcetera.

I am specifically not listing life-saving medical measures here, because yes -children are different from mature adults, and especially babies have no capacity to self-determine in matters of their own survival. We will address this matter of capacity later on. For the purpose of this exercise however, it is worth pointing out all the non-life-saving, non-essential actions that would be considered highly invasive if performed on an adult, yet can be freely performed on the body of a child with zero input or consent from the child itself.

Compared to that, all the less invasive ways in which children are typically allowed little to no self-determination, from choosing their own clothes to eating when and what they want to, seem less impactful. But they add up, and you should keep them in mind.

(And even in the context of life-saving measures; there are some hotly contested legal cases of parents wanting to deny life-saving or life-improving medical intervention to their children for religious reasons, that illustrate just how important our society considers the rights of the parent over a child's body. If these rights weren't considered almost inviolable, there would be no contest between them and a person's survival.)

When we look at what things children can and cannot do legally, the underlying assumption is always that children are in a form of diminished capacity with regards to self-determination, and must therefore be protected from decisions made in this diminished capacity. Hence we have concepts like statutory rape, child labour prohibitions, and laws that protect children from, for example, signing contracts. Most people will agree that children are not adults and do not have the same capacity to make fully informed decisions for themselves. So, it makes sense that there are laws that protect them from being taken advantage of.

In the context of childhood as serfdom it is more interesting to consider the conditions under which these protections can be circumvented.

Let me elaborate:

In the US, parents can take out loans and credit cards in the name of their child -while a child cannot legally sign a contract, a parent can essentially sign for them and saddle a child with debt long before they can even comprehend what that is. In some circles it even gets recommended to take out a credit card in a child’s name and diligently keep a good credit score with it so they can have a better financial start when turning 18.

In 37 states of the US, child marriage is legal if a parental waiver is provided, and in 20 of them there is no minimum age for marriage at all under these conditions. (Look, there it is again, the serf's license!) So while legally a child cannot consent to be married or sign a valid marriage license, a parent can consent for them. For additional context here; the "statutory rape exception" that allowed underage sexual activity if the participants were married was only amended in federal law in 2022, and similar exceptions are to this day still encoded in US military law.

But…Child labour is still actually prohibited, right? Right?

Well… no. Not really.

Children in the US can be employed in non-agricultural jobs from the age of 14 with parental permission, whereas for agricultural jobs the allowed age of employment varies between states and isn't federally determined, but can be as young as 10. Additionally, minors of any age may be employed by their parents at any time in any occupation on a farm owned or operated by his or her parent(s).

There are technically laws about how many hours and in what type of labour children can be employed, yet in practice there are a lot of potential exceptions, and these laws are (unfortunately) continually under attack. Which leads to my next point…

Children do not own the fruits of their own labour

Children can own property, in the legal sense. They can "hold title", as one says, of most items (except motor vehicles in some states in the US -remember this in connection to freedom of movement!), be the beneficiary of an inheritance, and receive gifts.

However.

Holding title does not mean they have the usufruct of the property, nor that they cannot be denied access or usage of it by their parent. More importantly…

In the US, a child does not have an automatic right to their own wages. Let me share you a couple excerpts of law:

Banks v. Conant, 14 Allen 497:

Whatever therefore an infant acquires which does not come to him as a compensation for services rendered, belongs absolutely to him, and his father cannot interpose any claim to it, either as against the child, or as against third persons who claim title or possession from or under the infant.

Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure:

As a general rule any property acquired by the child in any way except by its own labor or services belongs to the child, and not to the parent

Wheeler v. R. Co., 31 Kan. 640, 3 P. 297, 300:

As a matter of law a minor may own property the same as any other person. He may obtain it by inheritance, by gift, or by purchase; and there is nothing in the law that would prevent even a father from giving property to his minor child. A father may also so emancipate his minor child as to entitle him to receive his own wages.

So…

A child can be employed, with an employment contract signed by their parents, and any wages they earn automatically belong to their parents.

That is literally what it means to be a serf.

I am not saying that all children are exploited in the manners I described above. But it is an illustration of the culture we live in, that all these types of exploitation are in fact legal.

Almost any attempt to legally protect children in their developmental condition of diminished capacity leaves loopholes for parental exemptions. The right of a parent to make decisions about a child's life, body and movement is entrenched in our society and legal system.

Which leads to… "protect the children".

What we talk about when we talk about protecting the children

Endeavours to "protect children" come in multiple shapes.

There are the initiatives to improve the legal framework that protects the rights of children - such as the Californian law that forces parents of child actors to keep the child's wages in trust rather than automatically own them, or the amendments that removed the marital exception from the statutory rape law. They can be characterized as movements to chip away at the serfdom status of children, while still respecting the fact that children are in fact a vulnerable class of people who require protection.

Then, there are initiatives that aim to protect the rights of parents over children. Lately, many of those are essentially extensions of children's current serfdom status into the plane of the immaterial. Think, laws that aim to limit children's freedom of movement in cyberspace as well as public space. Laws that dictate what information children are allowed free access to. Laws that limit children's privacy from their parents, under the guise of protecting their privacy from strangers.

This latter category will often wrap itself in a layer of fearmongery anecdotes and moral panic language in order to gain support and justify exerting additional power over children. The reason this works is that to have a meaningful defence against it, someone has to consciously acknowledge the serfdom status of children, and consider it harmful.

Now, most parents aren't actively exploiting their child's labour, racking up debt in their name, or arranging their underage marriage. But almost all parents have exerted power over their child's freedom of movement, denied them privacy, taken their possessions as punishment or simply out of convenience, and forced their will on them in a million unimportant ways where letting the child self-determine would not have had any real impact on their wellbeing or safety. Acknowledging the serfdom status of children means acknowledging all of that as a kind of authoritarian lordship rather than benevolent custody.

Clearly, people have resistance to seeing themselves as -even mildly- villainous in any story, and the urge to defend one's parenting decisions is a strong one. As such, it's easy for someone to defensively think, "This power I have over my children is good, actually. I should have more of it, for their own good." And that is, at its heart, a fascist idea.

We will never dismantle fascist rhetoric as long as we remain comfortable with categories of people who are unfree for our convenience. And that doesn't just include children -I'd posit that it actually starts with children.

(Have mercy on me, I wrote this at work. Will add sources/bibliography later.)

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here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.

so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.

It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.

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Do me a favour and reblog this with a show you like that was cancelled after only one season. I don't mean shows that were always meant to be miniseries or shows that work perfectly well as a standalone story, or shows that might still get renewed. I mean shows that are and will forever remain unfinished. The more obscure the better.

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Okay now that this growing playlist of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Quick Start videos are out,

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Financial Status Update August 1st 2025

Alright so we did not hit our income quota for July but we did get enough for me to still make a little above minimum wage at least.

But not hitting our income quota last month means we REALLY REALLY need to hit it this month.

It is currently $0/$3,454.82.

We will be refreshing the whole Eureka product line on itchio later this month, including the itchio release of the Eureka adventure module Murder at the Belle Nuit which has been patreon exclusive so far while we continue to work the bugs out of it.

Please consider checking out our Patreon, itchio, and/or ko-fi. Even just sharing our posts and talking about us is really great for us if you can't afford to help us out directly. You can download all out stuff for free on itchio and play it there even if you can't afford it.

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i had assumed OP's point was that you have to include the fact that the chatbot's answer cannot be trusted in your initial anti-AI argument, because if you try to make an energy cost argument purely on a "one x is more than one y" basis, you're obviously ignoring the usual reason that rational people would choose to do one (1) energy-intensive thing instead of ten (10) low-energy things

but that might've been me reflexively steelmanning their argument for them ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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here's my own take on argument simplicity vs. nuance:

it's true that simplistic takes are bad by definition, because "simplistic" is a pejorative term that means "treating something complex as simpler than it actually is."

simple takes, however, can be either correct or incorrect, depending on the facts of the matter. just as a nuanced take can either be the most accurate representation of the facts or it can be using complexity to obfuscate a simple truth ("nuance-poisoned").

the frustrating reality is that there is no "one neat trick" to discernment. you have to actually know things about the world if you want to be able to tell whether an opinion is good or bad.

simplistic takes are basically always wrong btw

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an underrecognised tragedy of AI slop isn't just that any piece of contemporary art could be AI, any news reel could be AI, it's that now just any video of something vaguely nice and whimsical happening in the world could be AI

this is about the trampoline bunnies

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🥲

i love when fantasy novels are about 35 year olds…why is everyone in books 20 or 16 all the time

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do not let up the pressure

https://yellat.money/

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I still find it funny when people think Merthur was just another “hot guy” ship and not an attempt to avoid the tragic narrative established by Arthurian legend.

Like, if you watched the show knowing anything about the lore, you knew from the first episode:

Gwen (Guinevere) would be Arthur’s wife but famously fall in love with Lancelot, cheat, and be sentenced to death

Morgana was his secret half-sister

Merlin was the safe option

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The more that I (trans dude) participate in "men's things" the funnier it is to me to realize so much of ostensible 'the way guys are' is shaped socioeconomically.

Men "care less about their appearance"? Men's clothing tends cheaper, sturdier, but also more boring and featureless. You have to work a lot harder to find interesting cuts or styles or vibrant colors. Shorter hair is far more forgiving to style- I can roll out of bed and examine myself in the mirror and think 'hey, that bedhead look is pretty solid and workable'. Cosmetics 'for men' tend packaged for bulk and convenience and seldom will tell you what their scents actually are so if you like smelling a certain way you have to work harder to think about it.

Even down to men's underwear has a much thicker waistband so it's more likely to show above your pants! I can dress the same way in the exact same pants with different underwear and one of them shows above the waistline and the other doesn't.

And sure we can argue the idea that this marketing exists because it's what men want (IMO, a bit naive considering how large and powerful corporations are / the very sorry state of the ostensible invisible hand) but then I can point to experience working at a daycare and tell you that every three year old boy wants ponytails and his nails painted and likes purple or pink, wants to be a princess, wants to wear costume skirts and dresses, because those things are exciting and pretty- and when those boys turn four or five and start to shy away from them, their response is not a refinement of taste nearly as often as it is one of anxiety and dread- that he has learned those things attract him unwanted attention or admonishment or scolding.

Boys are taught what is safe to want, what they 'should' want. And as a man who intends to enjoy being a man with exactly as much color and glitter as I please, the hollowness of the facade has never been more obvious. Nor more aggravating, considering how much genuine harm and misery comes from it. Manly dudes who really like being "conventionally masculine" aren't going to crumble into dust if walmart stops differentiating some shampoo brands as 'womanly' and some as 'manly'- and he might decide he really likes the way this fruity sparkle body wash makes him smell.

One of my still most-popular posts is about how gender of choice should be universal, and this is another chunk of it- social forces that, if we're being bluntly honest, are mostly after our money, have a vested interest in trying to tell us what to want. That men 'should' want this, and women 'should' want that, and the vast beautiful sphere of human experience is carved up haphazardly and each half flicked aside, here, this is for you, in casual ignorance that what we may literally need to survive wasn't in our allotted chunk. "Aberrant" men- men of color, disabled men, queer men- are forced to see this more and more dramatically, but it affects even the most normative socially accepted men. And this is men- the people who, in patriarchal, misogynist societies are getting ostensibly the better deal!

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The other reason I'm generally annoyed with the "Abolish X" crowd who actually DO mean "abolish X" and not a watered-down version is that ime they very rarely have fully thought out the implications of what they're demanding and then get angry when other people ask about it.

"Family abolition means completely removing legal ties for family units and allowing all children the choice of where they live" okay. So if I see a three-year-old throwing a fit because she doesn't want to leave the park, and I go over and tell her if she comes home with me she can stay as long as she likes and then we'll get McDonald's on the way home, that three-year-old should have the ability to make that decision? The parent or guardian has no legal recourse to stop me from taking her? Cause if the answer's no, that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

"I'm done talking about what we'll do with rapists and murderers after we abolish prisons, it's all anybody ever wants to talk about!" Well yeah man! 98% of people just interpreted your words as "we're going to let murderers roam around killing people at will"! You need to explain very clearly what plans you have that will stop them that aren't incarceration or you're not going to make any headway! And if your answer involves any form of "well of course SOME people can't be allowed total freedom" - that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

I'm not even gonna touch the number of people who think we should abolish the police and replace them with what are essentially roaming squads of vigilantes dispensing "community justice", whatever the fuck that means.

Like these aren't "gotcha" questions, they're legitimate problems you're going to have to contend with. And if you wave away all these questions with "you're just making up ridiculous scenarios" and "we'll think of something to fix that once we destroy the current system", then yeah actually, I DO think you care more about sounding radical than about making any kind of change.

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What is a fantasy heartbreaker? I looked it up but I'm struggling to map my findings onto your reverse heartbreaker post.

(With reference to this post here.)

In this context, "fantasy heartbreaker" is a colloquial term for when an aspiring new indie tabletop RPG designer decides they're going to Fix What's Wrong With RPGs; however, because their actual experience of the hobby is almost entirely limited to Dungeons & Dragons and very close imitators of Dungeons & Dragons, their revolutionary new game ends up just being a lightly modified version of Dungeons & Dragons.

(Some folks whose actual objective is to produce a lightly modified version of Dungeons & Dragons will ironically describe their own project as a fantasy heartbreaker, but to be a proper example of the type it needs to be unwitting.)

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starting to think it's not a coincidence that the only job that could plausibly be replaced by ChatGPT is "fortune 500 CEO" - like, of course this is the Next Big Thing the MBA-brained techlords seized on, that's what they think a job is. a machine that doesn't need to be capable of substantive understanding of its subject matter, but is great at spouting bland plausible-sounding word salad that's more-or-less adjacent to whatever prompt it was given, confidently doubling down when challenged, making a whole bunch of pretty promises it doesn't even have the object permanence to know it's about to break, deleting your entire production database on a whim too inscrutable to articulate, and slurping down hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege

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"found family (horror)":

found family horror: the queer person who keeps projecting their unmet deepest childhood attachment needs onto you