Thanks for the offer, I'll keep it to reddit for now but will check out that community in the future.

First for the examples of the 4-year-old. I think a side issue here is that younger children do not have their cognitive abilities developed significantly enough for them to be trusted to use reason. This is an issue of personhood in which I don't think children woukd qualify for moral rights. This is why the courts don't try a child for murder if they manage to retrieve a gun and shoot someone, because they haven't developed enough to properly understand the consequences of their actions.

Now to get into the giving the child freedom to choose their living situation. By giving children such enormous freedom, there is potential for these children to abuse this system as well. Say Susie wants ice cream but her parents won't let her. Now Susie can just decide to move in with her grandparents until her parents change their mind. These kind of freedoms remove the parent's ability to enforce any kind of authority necessary to teach kids proper behavior, parents who love their children would be subject to their children's will. Now of course this issue seems to be solved if the grandparents' are required to give consent to it to, but how would this system work? The child would obviously need to call their grandparents. So if Susie calls, her grandparents would obviously shut down this proposal, but what if she lies? Susie could claim her parents are abusing her to her grandparents or even the police. Now the truth would need to be determined, so somebody would have to determine if there was abuse, preferably somebody trained. So the CPS has to step in. Additionally, for cases of real abuse, the CPS is ideal for many situations too. Young children may not have the means to report abuse (like parents keeping them under close watch, not allowing them to contact anyone, etc.) so the only way to report the abuse is for a third party to notice warning signs and report them.

As for drinking and smoking, these kinds of activities can be extremely harmful to young children and irresponsible parents could end up extremely harming those children and suffer no repercussions for it.

Obviously these kinds of situations become less of an issue the older the individual gets. But even still, treating everyone as individuals still has its own extreme problems beyond the sheer amount of tests and manpower: more bias. I would like to take your example of black people statistically committing more crimes as a direct example of this claim. It has been shown time after time the racism our law enforcement and judicial system are prone to. They treat individuals with prejudice, sometimes to the extreme. Now if all other rights were open to such individual judgement, we would see a great deal more prejudice and denial of rights. If these issues were handled individually, what happens when statistically men were allowed to drive at an average age of 15.5 and women at 16? That's a small example, but what happens when whites are allowed to vote at an average of 16, and blacks at 21?

Thoughts?