Now, now, child labor laws, mandatory educational, health and nutritional standards and assistance for those that need it - including free public education and school lunches, minimum driving and drinking and smoking ages, age of consent, marriage age, illegalization of all manners of abuse including molestation, legal rights beyond mere property - these are all values Liberals have imposed upon today's youth and society.
People forget that at the dawn of the 20th Century, pre-teen children forced into labor and marriage was legal. In fact, in that era cherished to the point of mythologizing - the rapid and mass expansion into the West - adult women tended to be in short supply, and pre-teen girls in everything from labor to marriage to brothels was a little too commonplace to be highlighted in history books and with those nifty statues in public squares.
The concept of teenage itself was a liberal one, one that expanded childhood into an age where women had been expected to be bearing children and with little more in status than as chattle to their much older husbands with no recourse for violations of their person nor escape other than a higher mortality rate which made middle age seem elderly.
As the OP herself reminded me the other day, marriage in certain traditionalist areas of America is higher at younger ages, a factor which has lead to their higher divorce rates, which is a helluva lot better than the hell they would have been saddled with in a bygone era when they had no choice but to settle for it, no matter how bad,,,
The progress that Liberals have wrought - the shame of it!
