I know people who are poor and therefore were too poor to have their learning disabilities addressed early on with unsupportive families inflicting childhood trauma which results in them smoking weed as a teenager because there are no structures to support them towards health, but fuck them right? It’s so easy to judge people making seemingly bad decisions. Teenagers are still children whose behaviors are caused by their environments.
Frankly I believe people always make reasonable decisions once you account for their circumstances(this includes the circumstance of being too mentally ill or poorly socialized to make better decisions). If you want people to make better decisions then you must incentivize appropriately.
Bitterness and finger pointing are easy cognitive shortcuts using the just world fallacy. I’ve decided not to use easy logical fallacies to simplify the behavior model of other human beings.
Given that we don’t consider minors to be “individuals” for legal purposes until they become adults, waiting until they’re adults to assign responsibility seems like a reasonable first blush for a standard.
(More flippantly: we all know kids are stupid, even the smart ones. We also all understand, intuitively, that strong support systems are some of the best predictors for social and economic success in children. It doesn’t make any sense to sentence future adults to lives of indigence and poverty because someone else hasn’t given them the support they require.)
