My American friends here think I am crazy and illogical for proposing that the following argument applies to ear piercing. Making decisions for your children which you could without harm postpone so that your children can make those decisions is reducing the number of opportunities your child will have to feel self empowered. I will use circumcision and ear piercing as examples.
Circumcision is not reversible, or at least you can't get those nerves back even if you can grow more skin. The only medical benefit is a slightly lower chance of getting aids while having unprotected sex, based on one sole study. The cleanliness argument is a farce. So why have your boy circumcised? Maybe it will make him feel more normal in the gym shower (although that assumes that more males are circumcised than not). Maybe it is better to get all painful things done to your baby at an age where they will not consciously remember them. Do painful subconscious memories sound healthy to you? Maybe it is a family or religious tradition. If it is, then won't it make the boy feel more committed and apart of the family or religion if he makes a conscious choice to make the painful sacrifice to join the tradition and symbolism of the group? The problem with doing it when he is a baby is that it is not reversible. If he decides he as an individual feels more inline with a different religion which does not require circumcision, or just wants that extra pleasure back, there is no way to go back. He might even be bitter that you as a parent made that arbitrary decision about his body before he could give his opinion. The advantage of waiting and letting him make the decision is that he will feel empowered and respected. He will know what he is giving up and why.
Ear piercing may seem completely irrelevant, because it is all but reversible. The advantages of piercing your girl's ears when she is too young to make that decision are no conscious memory of pain, and perhaps a feeling of normal if you live in a society where most girls pierce their ears. The advantages of waiting and letting your girl choose if she wants her ears pierced are: she will realize that you respect her body as her own and feel like a self determined individual; she will gain an awareness of the fundamental structure of choices, in this case some pain is traded for the ability to decorate her ears. "But even if I pierce my girl's ears when she is 3, she can later choose to let the holes heal up". The choice to undue an arbitrary decision your parents have made for you is somewhat less empowering. Instead of realizing her newfound power as an individual, she unavoidably becomes focused on how many things have been decided for her, the power that you still have over her. She will always have those small bumps in her earlobes to remind her of the decision you made but did not have to make.
The reason this argument initially appealed to me is that there seems to be some correlation between choice, self empowerment, freedom and success. The ability to examine and question the world that we live in needs to be fostered. The things that women wear often strike me as examples of choices that are made without fully examining the reasons and assumptions behind those choices. Yes, dressing up is fun, a way to show confidence, get attention and feel beautiful. But if you cannot feel beautiful, confident and normal without wearing makeup, a short skirt and high heals is that ok? I have made a huge assumption that some women cannot, but then why do they dress up every day, putting up with blisters on their feet, barely able to walk, chemicals on their faces and in their hair, and clothing that shows or hides? Is it ok to feel ugly without makeup? Is it ok to just feel prettier with makeup? Is that really who you are? Can clothing and decoration be part of your identity? Are you happy and satisfied with the person under the clothing, makeup and fancy walk? Ironically, extremely skimpy clothing seems to be both proof of self confidence, and an attempt to gain it by drawing attention. "I'm beautiful, don't you think?" How many of these actions are fostered and supported by parents? These behaviors seem unexamined and perhaps have more impact on a child's future than seems apparent. Thus I am curious about such small things as the clothing that you buy your children and if you pierce their ears or not.
Random thoughts on parenting and choice. I want to thank my parents for always giving me choices rather than having an authoritarian system of laws. I was always made aware of the consequences of my choices, but it has provided me with a viewpoint that is somewhat different than most people. I notice choices that I make. Many people do things without realizing they have a choice. Realizing alternatives is the first step toward a critical examination of my life and a questioning of the options that I have. This has lead me to find that happiness itself is essentially a choice. Since I am aware of the choices I make and their consequences (at least I can guess some possible consequences), I can do things that have a higher probability to make me happy. If I am not happy, I can with careful thought figure out why, and then trace those reasons back to certain choices that I have made, and re-evaluate based on the other options I have for those particular decisions. What an empowering viewpoint! I can decide whether to be happy or not.
I have also discovered another way to be happy without necessarily changing the choices that I have made, but instead examining the outcomes within a different set of parameters. I identify what in one particular unhappy moment what is making me unhappy, and then I examine other sides of that same thing to see what parts of it are making me happy. This could be applied to time by myself. The occasional unhappy loneliness can be immediately flipped to show the unprecedented time to think and reflect, time which I have never had before in my life other than the occasional hour in meeting. Self reflection while cleaning my apartment, cooking, reading, playing violin or working on my balcony garden becomes meditation when my surface train-of-conscious thoughts are used up and I my head becomes quite and focused. At least I think that's what meditation is, it's good enough for me.
