Are children more valuable than adults?

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It seems there is a popular sentiment in this era, that children are actually worth more as human beings than adults.

An example. Cute child, usually a little white girl, gets kidnapped. The entire country grieves, panics. The crime is considered worse than the Holocaust. Entire nation screams for the blood of the person/people who did it.

Compare that to say, a 40 year old mentally ill man who gets run over by a train. Was a nice guy, but a little bit naive and vulnerable. Much like a child. Aside from their family, nobody is really gonna care probably. A lot of people will probably make some cynical 'Darwin Award' joke about their demise.

Do you think this is justified because children are innocent/young/angelic and thus, we should love them more? Or is it shallow and superficial to care more about a cute kid than about an equally vulnerable adult?

Children (except for defective children) have more potential than adults.

ruveyn

Your examples show that where the lines are drawn for things like that sometimes baffle all of us.

Priorities on a sinking ship:

1) Dogs

2) Cats

3) Children

4) Adults

5) Infants

6) Rats

7) Lawyers

8) Politicians

In descending order.

Ballast:

1) Insurance agents

In no particular order.

Are we talking children and adults as a group? I hate to use a common phrase but "Don't count your chickens until the eggs have hatched." There are tons of kids with little to no potential who do not qualify as "defective".

Also, its not like children are scarce, but competent adults are. After all, any idiot can have a kid or 14 kids. Children are worth "everything" to their parents, yet surprisingly little in objective value.

Children are valuable yes but it is our job to protect them from harm keep them safe,

It's strange that while some people think that children have more value, more children nowadays are finding less value in themselves.

Last edited by snapcap on 03 May 2012, 4:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.

At a very young age they yet understand the meaing of value until they grow older and learn.

I agree that competent adults are a lot more valuable than children, who might grow up to be the next Hitler. If I was on a sinking ship with a bunch of people of all ages and Stephen Hawking, and with only a single three-person lifeboat available, I'd point at Hawking and say "get that man into the boat, together with two seaworthy sailors who can row him to safety. Screw the children, screw the women, and screw me".

What you are actually noticing is not that children are valued more than adults, but that certain news stories are valued more than other news stories. Every time a tragic news story gains momentum, some people will realize that other news stories have NOT gained momentum and then conclude that it is because those other news stories are about undervalued groups.

But I don't think that undervalued groups are the commonality. When the tragedy involves a cute little white girl (per your example) the assumption among some is because she is white and that's why the simultaneous news stories about little black children don't make the cover of people. example: Casey Anthony. But then time passes and a tragic story involving a black child makes the rounds. But this time, people don't wonder why it is only white kids getting reported on as valuable (since the kid is black) but rather why the simultaneous tragedies of white kids didn't make the cover of People: Trayvon Martin.

For any tragic news story that happens and makes the cover of People and is big in the news cycle, there will always be other news stories that fall off the radar instantly or don't even get reported as anything beyond the barely read police blotter section of the paper. And in every single instance, people who are not in the group of the privileged news story (whether by race, age, class or whatever) will seem to be undervalued by this ommision. It happens every time there is a big and tragic story involving one lone victim (as opposed to a giant group tragedy like 9/11).

But I don't think it is anything but the stories themselves that are getting valued. A tragic story about somebody from pretty much any group (yes, adults included) can blow up huge and gain momentum and crowd out all other tragic stories if the story has enough enough interesting dramatic elements. If a story doesn't hook us with the dramatic twists we have come to expect from being saturated in TV/movie/novel/videogame fictions. We will follow a news story as though it was a TV show- but only if it has those dramatic twists. Otherwise it falls off the radar or doesn't get reported at all beyond the police blotter of the local paper. Do we value only children? The news stories of Casey Anthony and Trevor Martin could make you think so. But the murder of a middle aged man can be just as riveting in the news cycle (and therefore making him "valued"- but only as a story, like Anthony and Martin) if there is something riveting about how he was murdered- think of Daniel Pearl who was news-worthily murdered by Pakistani terrorists and even had a movie made about him starring Angelina Jolie.


So I think that what people are valuing is not belonging to a particular group, but rather how closely a news story adheres to the plot twist conventions that writers use to keep people interested in fiction stories.

I've also noticed that charity ads and websites, such as the website of the World Food Programme, always show a lot of children and very few (if any) adults. Most people don't give a damn about starving adults.

Edited to add: I imagine that starving kittens would be even more effective. If we could magically turn all homeless people into fluffy kittens, very few of them would have to sleep under bridges.

Children are cuter than adults. Cuteness triggers people to save/protect/tend the cute thing. Babies, for example, are born with adult-sized eyes. People find big eyes cute (think Puss-In-Boots), and are so much more likely to care for big-eyed infants that evolution has recognized the fact.

Moral: Appearance matters.

Exactly That's also the reason that humans find kittens and puppies adorable. They have the same infantile facial proportions as human children, but to an even larger degree. Bigger and more far-set eyes, tinier little noses, pointier chins and so on.

Btw, if you compare the face of an 8 year old child, the face of an average looking, 20ish year old woman, and the face of an adult male person, the woman's face will be exactly in the middle in terms of infantilism. Female faces are more infantile than male ones, and female voices are also closer to the voice pitch of a child. Like children, women are cute. That's why men feel protective about women, become upset when women cry, act less aggressive towards women than towards men, and have a hard time taking women serious and treating them like intelligent adults.

Based on the improbable assumption that you can foresee the future.

ruveyn

When it comes to my little girl, most certainly. And I challenge any parent to deny that.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I don't need to know how any of the children in this hypothetical scenario might turn out as adults. I know for a fact that Stephen Hawking has greatly advanced human knowledge, and I can reasonably assume that he will continue to do so if he survives. I can't say the same about a child. I could try to calculate the likelihood that one of them will grow up to be another Hawking or Einstein, but that's not really necessary. Hawking is a genius, the kids are currently not. Let them drown and save Hawking.

But to be honest, I might feel different about Hawking's importance to mankind if there were a few kittens on board