Phrase young people when we mean children

Thesonglastslonger
Thats a bit of an extreme comparison to calling a teenager a young person though!!

I get it OP.

There is a group of men who work rather hard to change the language used about children. There was a document leaked about it a while ago, for example they’ve successfully persuaded the media to refer to “child prostitutes” instead of “rape victims”. Puts the responsibility and blame on the child. Similarly “paedophile” is slowly being replaced by “minor-attracted person”.

Language is important.

I wonder why those men are doing this 😕

My feeling this happened because the earlier you class children as adults, the earlier you can target them directly as consumers, but it has carried with it a lowering of guard regarding safeguarding and the acknowledgement of immaturity.

Marketing happened when the term 'teenage' was popularised after the war and roughly in the 50s and after that.

The Albemarle Report on the Youth Service in England and Wales (1960) uses the term 'young person'. It's not new.

www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/albemarle1960/#02

21 ceased being the age of majority in 1969 when it was revised to 18.

My feeling this happened because the earlier you class children as adults, the earlier you can target them directly as consumers, but it has carried with it a lowering of guard regarding safeguarding and the acknowledgement of immaturity.

Traditionally, you came of age at 21. This was the case in eras when some actual children were in the workforce, life was short and if you see photos or portraits of what we'd call teenagers, they dressed like their parents and many were in work.

So why lower that to 12 - 'young adult', in publishing, 'student', previously a term for university undergraduates, in schools, 'young person' elsewhere? If anything, today's teenagers are far less mature and independent than their grandparents' generation (the ability to watch graphic 'adult material' online or be given lots of spending money by parents does not make you an adult).

Pupil, schoolgirl or boy, teenager, youth are fine. Anything else and you think why the rush to bunch them in with people older and more worldly?

I agree OP, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. It's too small to complain about I agree, but I also agree that this just another incremental change. Too small for most to notice or care about, but we're all frogs in the same pot, unaware that we're slowly being boiled alive.

The language has been used for decades and pre-dates the current debates. Check out old youth work manuals for evidence.

I worked on some government guidance. We asked children for their views on the language, and the older children were very clear that they didn't appreciate being described as children and felt that the guidance didn't apply to them when it talked about children.

My son tells me he's not a child any more at 14.

My brother couldn't understand why I was involved in some work on preventing radicalisation when I work on children's policies. Of course teenagers can be radicalised, he was thinking children=primary age.

They are children but are also young people. A fourteen year old will not want to be called a child. I’d say leave the school to it- they’ve enough to get on with!!!!!!!

This is such an interesting discussion. I’m a social worker and I have noticed a shift back to talking about children rather than young people in my area. I use the words child or teenager when talking to parents about keeping children safe. I find it helps them to understand how vulnerable their 16-17 year olds are to exploitation (and what their responsibilities are). There’s a real narrative around ‘oh well they are 16 now, what can I do?’ I do also use ‘young people’ when I am talking about the choices older children are able to make for themselves e.g. consenting to sex at 16+, becoming more independent. (Little people is awful! Have never heard a social worker using that phrase.)

So, OP what happened?

I think pupils or students is better, incidentally.

I agree OP, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. It's too small to complain about I agree, but I also agree that this just another incremental change. Too small for most to notice or care about, but we're all frogs in the same pot, unaware that we're slowly being boiled alive.

It is expected teenagers know what they are doing for the rest of their life at 16-18 but regardless I don't see a problem with the term 'young people' for any age

If someone used the term young person, I would assume they were talking about someone under 18 - legally a child.

A young adult I would assume to be over 18- legally an adult.

11-18.

of course it isn’t appropriate!

Children, adolescents, young adults.

Pupils, students.

Never ‘young people’. It’s an erosion of the very real boundary between childhood and adulthood (18th birthday onwards = adult).

HTH.

It's worth noting that KCSIE has changed the terms "peer on peer abuse" to "child on child abuse." Which is to age 18 I think? Certainly 16.

Yes, except you said:
I don't think it is right for my daughters (aged 12 and 14) to be called young people. It assummes they are responsible for what happens to them or that they are possibly 18, 19, 20 years old. and
I'm going to email the head about this

So originally you were objecting to it being used in the context of a school letter.

Various things. All connected to shifting ideas of childhood, the creation of new markets for commerce, and the extension of education etc.

Back when leaving school and being in work at 14 was standard for working class kids, there wasn’t any real need for the concept.

Concepts like ‘teenagers’ and ‘adolescence’ emerged to serve particular purposes (see also the more recent differentiation of the later part of middle childhood as ‘tweens’). Teenagers were a market to sell stuff too from the 1960s onwards. Adolescence was a largely developmental concept.

Young people started to emerge from debates around children’s rights and a whole set of increasingly influential (yet tiresome and problematic in so many ways) academic debates that wanted to position developmental psychology as some sort of evil bogeyman and to claim childhood for sociology/anthropology/cultural studies etc. This is something of an inflection of the rejection of biology across the social sciences and humanities. So the term young people came to be the preferred term across a whole swathe of society.

There are still cult like parts of children and childhood focused academia in which social constructionism is repeated like some a mantra, and the idea that you might want to consider adolescence as a period of important developmental immaturity will see people insisting you’re a dreadful person who sees young people as lesser humans. It’s tedious and unhelpful.

And the role that marketing categories play in all this stuff is swept under the rug. Obviously.

I’m not sure the term is that problematic really. The qualifier ‘young’ makes a huge difference - it radically shifts the ways in which rights, responsibilities and expectations are framed.

People should be able to make decisions about things that affect them. Young people should be able to too but with the understanding that they are young - they are inexperienced, their brains and bodies are immature, and so on. So the fact they are young people means the are necessarily treated differently from the larger category of ‘people’. We make special provision for them and, sometimes, adults make decisions on their behalf because the best interests of the young person (child) is the guiding principle.

The children/young person distinction is a way of making this more palatable for the young people while retaining the idea that (while they may be considered more capable than younger children/people) older children still don’t necessarily have the capacity to know what’s best (or good) in a holistic and long term way. They simply have not developed sufficiently.

The fact that mermaids use the term is only a reflection of how widespread it is. It’s not indicative of anything more sinister. There’s lots of other pretty ordinary language that mermaids use too.

The issue is where people seem to disregard the effect of young in the phrase. Because they don’t want recognition that young people need protection from gender ideology (and from themselves in this regard). Mermaids and their counterparts want us to treat them as ‘people’ without considering the effect of them being young. While still mobilising the moralising effect of ‘young’ to prevent people looking more
deeply into the hyperbole around these young people suffering without (hugely medicalised) intervention.

TL;DR - the problem is mermaids and the whole ideological project, not the term young people itself.

It’s just a bit twee and nauseating when HT’s go on about ‘our young people’ etc.

To provide a different perspective, my mother insisted I was a 'child' up until 18 YO (and beyond to some extent). She asserted (or tried to assert) her parental rights to me as a 'child' and these included not being able to have my own favourite colour, to dictate what clothes/shoes I wore, the way I wore my hair, what I studied at school, when I left school (early) and what my destiny in life would be. I was forbidden to learn to drive and only through sustained protest was I allowed to wear trousers. I was not permitted tampons (only pads) or deodorant. In her view, these were 'fads' and tampons were for married women only. Her decisions were neither feminist nor benign and they were based on my 'child' status. I am pleased that young people (usually defined as older children 13 and above) have more rights and decision-making capacity today.

14 year olds and up don’t want to be referred to as children.

My understanding and d or turn e if the of the phrase is very much within a safeguarding context: that young people beyond ‘childhood’ are very much to be protected. As are ‘vulnerable adults’.

Language is so important. Young people just means youth to me so 16 plus.

Language is indeed important. In general, if you refer to ‘children’ in a safeguarding policy, many people would not assume it covers 16 or 27 year olds, for example. And surely that is very dangerous.

When your DD’s are a little older you may find they resist the title ‘child’.

Children’s Theatre does not include plays for teens.
Children’s Fiction is not the same as that aimed at teens.

Etc.

Young people suggests children are just younger versions of adults and not a separate developmental category.

It's an argument that can be made and many societies have viewed childhood in this way or at least moved children into the young person category at a much younger age than we would now.

These societies have generally engaged in practices we'd view as child abuse.

Our categorisation of child as very separate and different to adult (not just younger) has been a deliberate decision to protect children.

The use of young people is blurring this distinction and it does have an impact on how we think.

I don't like the term much either, but it's everywhere.

I suppose my question is what did 'young people' used to be called? I wasn't referred to as a 'young person' in the '90s. It was child, pupil or teenager as appropriate.

I don't remember being mortally offended by being called a pupil or a teenager.

A 'young person's' Railcard is available for anyone up to the age of 24, I believe. I'm not sure a 14-year-old can be put in the same bracket as a twenty-something.

I agree OP.
I think the ubiquitous use of young people has blurred the boundaries around the fact that people under 18 are children within the law.

I think it impacts on things such as the grooming gangs where the fact those girls were children was obfuscated by the idea of their agency as young people.

I think it impacts children in Care where they are not sufficiently protected because the fact they are still a child at 16 is not being stated.

I think it's allowed to insidious gender ideology to take hold because if you don't say this is being done to children it seems more acceptable.

I don't think referring to a group of secondary school pupils as children would work. I think pupils should be used. Students is just another attempt to prematurely mature them.

Pupils go to school and most of them are children.

Students go to college and uni most of them are young adults some of them are still children.

Context is everything.

I work with very vulnerable children and young adults (0-25). It can be important to highlight the significance of the role of adult guidance, by highlighting that we are talking about a child, or alternatively, it can be important to highlight a growing need for autonomy by highlighting we are referring to a young adult. When we are talking about a child in the context of a school, the term pupil is useful.

It is important that we have and use a variety of terms that are fit for discussing different issues. It most important that we have laws and safeguards if practices that protect children and young adults .....and all vulnerable people.