Streams of Agency
or, why kids nag
Many parents complain about constant nagging from kids under their care, but the main reason kids nag is because parents put themselves in the way of their agency. People make thousands of decisions every day. The more parents get in the way of that decision-making process, the more kids are restricted from accessing the means to actualize their agency, the more overwhelmed parents are going to be.
It's like putting yourself in the way of a river, insisting it not move, and then complaining about getting wet.
Humans are dynamic beings. When you filter someone else's agency through your own, you force them to encapsulate their desires into something you understand, to try to access more complex desires via half-truths, or, worse, simply to avoid seeking out those desires.
Parents, sometimes through genuine concern or ignorance, but disgustingly often also through a malicious sense of cosmic justice, refuse to let kids access the means to their agency. Instead of providing the support they need in order to use the tools safely, parents shun and chastise until they habitually restrict the kid's agency whenever they feel any apprehension. Thus youth becomes defined by rebellion: the kid realizes that their environment is a prison, recognizes the guards are never on their side, and decides how to achieve their will in spite of this. Any dam will break, if not given a path of release.
Realizing this, parents might restrict agency more tactfully, allowing it in more menial subjects but not in those important to their life. This acts as a release to prevent the flow of agency from overtaking the fragile dam. The parent hopes the kid becomes accustomed to this limit, accepting a controllable trickle of choice and surrendering the fight to let it flow freely. The parent's job then becomes maintaining the dam, punishing any attempt to extend agency past the permitted flow.
But parents are limited in their capacity to control. Maintaining the dam effectively takes an absurd amount of work. Limiting someone's agency isn't an easy task. So they spend most of their investment up front: beating (often literally) obedience into them so they can dam up agency as firmly as possible, hopefully preventing the kid from even considering breaking it.
This is also why particularly restrictive parents prevent kids from access to their peers, at least those not bound to the same extent they impose of the kids under their own care. They are terrified by the lack of control that emerges from knowledge of possibilities beyond the kids' prison.
A lot of this is not done intentionally. Or, rather, many parents have deluded themselves into thinking that this is what's best for their kids. Some parents realize this early on, but eventually fall into it over time. Sometimes one parent wants to avoid these pitfalls, but another pressures them into it. Whatever the case, the effect is the same.
Kids are often vulnerable in ways adults are widely able to avoid. However, the solution of simply placing them under unilateral control by another person or pair of people opens up the possibility for abuse and manipulation. Unilateral control is the last thing someone who needs help with basic needs of life. Instead, kids need support to extend their agency and gradually take more and more of it onto themselves. Kids don't need to be raised in order to believe a certain thing or conform to an ideal set of virtues. Instead, they should be valued for themselves and their own choices, and be allowed to become the people they want to be and be respected accordingly.
Obviously, this has major implications for the family, which I will explore in another essay.
If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.
— John Holt, Freedom and Beyond