This is an issue of personhood in which I don't think children woukd qualify for moral rights.
more people seem to think animals qualify for moral rights than children. i think this is a travesty.
if you want to get into details, young children demonstrably learn all kinds of things, showing they do have minds, while animals never learn anything. i know this is controversial. do you want to get into this stuff?
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,
good. parents should teach with reason, not authority.
of course this issue seems to be solved if the grandparents' are required to give consent to it to
of course the grandparents have to consent for Susie to live with them. she can't just move in with anyone in the world she feels like. she isn't their responsibility, unless they want her to be and consent.
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.
parents make mistakes all the time. SO DOES THE GOVERNMENT, TOO.
all sorts of mistakes can be very harmful.
it's better if parents decide than the government because then there's diversity and freedom. it's worse if the federal government forces a mistake on you than if it's a family matter. if a parent does, the kid can argue back, explain his complaints, etc, whereas the government won't listen. and the kid knows the parent loves him, but the government doesn't love that kid.
by allowing freedom on a family level, if there is a popular parenting idea that's a very harmful mistake, some people can parent a different way. and new ideas can be tried out. and some will be mistakes, but others will be improvements and will catch on. having the government decide stuff for everyone suppresses this trial-and-error, and suppresses OUTLIERS both good and bad ones, and suppressing the good outliers completely ruins progress.
Now if all other rights were open to such individual judgement, we would see a great deal more prejudice and denial of rights.
in the big picture, i'm saying instead of the govt treats people more like individuals (2 classes: adults and children), it treats them more uniformly (1 class: people). this is the same reform from (2 classes: blacks, whites) changing to (1 class: people).
now on a completely different level, this means more individual treatment in some ways because instead of having a racist or ageist policy like "if you're a black and you went in a white-only store, and now they claim to be missing money, therefore you're guilty of robbery and go to jail" you have to deal with individual cases and have a trial. removing blatnat racism or ageism from a system can require more individual attention to some cases that used to get glossed over IN A BAD WAY, so this is an improvement for the people involved (now they have a chance instead of being guilty due to their group).
look at it this way. you're 15. would you rather the government says you absolutely can't drive no matter what, or the government sends some guy to see if you can drive who doesn't do a great job and might be ageist? you'd rather have the individual treatment, even if it's not that fair, because then you have a chance instead of no chance. you have nothing to lose here, you only gain.
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?
nothing. who cares? if men choose to put more effort into learning to drive earlier – or even are genetically safer drivers – so what? and if some individual woman doesn't like this, she can work on her driving earlier.
if you mean: what if it's cuz the driving testers are actually biased? well, that sucks. try to advocate reform. still, letting some men who aren't quite 16 drive makes the world better, that helped some people. not letting them drive either won't make the 15.5 year old competent female drivers in a better situation.