Children are Property

Treating women as property is now frowned upon in the United State, but what about children? This idea that people own their child stems from not allowing people to tell them how to raise them, which then comes from not allowing people to tell you what to do. What how does this leave teenagers, who are far ahead of their peers? For example, let's take jobs. Before the age of 18, you cannot work for more than 20 hours at any given job, of which you can only get with the permission from your parents. This poses as a much problem to teenagers wanting to be emancipated. Without a job, they cannot prove themselves able to take care of their own lives. Another way, which involves custody battles, a minor can be told that they cannot talk to a judge until they are over the age of 14, or their parents files paperwork allowing them to. This greatly allows ownership of a child if they cannot tell people who they want to live with and can end up in rare cases of emancipation. I, myself, am treated by property of my parents. At the age of sixteen, I was still under a parenting plan, in which my parents agreed, and I have no voice in this case ever. I went up to the courthouse and asked who do I talk to in order to speak to the judge on my case. I was told that I was not allowed to talk to him/her without my parents signing and filing the paperwork. In my young mind, how was this fair to teenagers whose parent's sole role in their lives seemed to be taking it away. I spent years suffering because I never got a voice. I never got to say what I wanted, who I wanted to live and who I didn't want to see. People hear my story of my life, and look at me in wonder. How could I turn out the way I did with the crap I have to deal with on a daily basis. Survival. That was the only thing that kept me firmly in its grasp. Parents should not own their children. They are to help them, not own and repress them. Think of all the adults who should not have kids and yet they do. Should they be allowed to own their children, to make them slaves to their whims, or to abuse them like they are nothing but dirt? No. It is wrong. This should stop.