@SuperMouse So you would have held back that joke? You would wonder whether a person of age 13 would get that it’s a joke?
I think you would be patronizing the 13 year old if you did so. Hell. A seven year old would get that that is a joke, I think. But I don’t know. I started teaching my kids at a younger age than that to be skeptical of what people are saying. People lie. They tell jokes. They may be ignorant. My kids understand this and for me, expecting anything less of other children is talking down to them. I’m not going to do it. If I talk to someone, I’m going to treat them like a person, or I’m not going to talk to them.
I don’t know who all the kids are here on fluther, but I think we owe them the courtesy of talking to them like adults, no matter how old them may be. I will not disrespect children by presuming to know what they are capable of better than they do. It saddens me when I see other people treating children as less than human, but it happens all the time. It’s quite normal, in fact.
People think they are protecting kids. I think it is the opposite. I think adults are protecting themselves, usually from embarrassment, but also from the responsibility for raising kids that can actually handle themselves in this world. I believe kids need more information, not less. I know this is an unpopular view. But I think it is a very serious problem in our society that people think kids are kids, and should not be respected in the same way they would respect an adult. It is this kind of attitude that leads to child abuse, which is ironic, since I think people do it because they think they are protecting kids. It makes me kind of ill, actually. Well-meaning people on the exact wrong track. Innocence is a dysfunctional myth, and a deadly one, at that.