Writers abhorring being a child or going through puberty a second time

[DiabolicGod]

Now, sorry if this is just another rendition of the same old thread that appears every week, I didn't check.

I get that a good portion of people writing stories likely isn't the most extroverted, popular, social butterfly that is always hanging out with someone, and that some people haven't had the best experiences during their puberty or childhood (or no experiences at all ^^).

But why is it such a common thing to see a few sentences and the sentiment in lots of stories where the character reincarnates / transmigrates or whatever and can either choose their age or complains about their age as if puberty is a horrendous suffering forced upon everyone?

Is this even more prevalent in NSFW stories on this site because any NSFW content including minors is censored so heavily?
E: There is a stark difference between pedophiles abusing children and consensual content between minors, even if I get that it could be awkward / frowned upon to read/write NSFW content featuring children.
I also don't think it is right to censor stories unless it really crosses into untenable territory, a sentiment I think this forum agrees with.

The only real objection to being a kid again is if because of the plot or whatever you need to do some things you have a harder time to as a kid, but that would be story specific which these complaints aren't.

I also don't know how things are in GB or the USA, but where I grew up, while there was bullying around the fifth to eighth grade, only around one in twenty to one in ten at most got bullied. Also not that tragic, people aren't stupid and they got transferred classes or changed schools when it didn't abate after a stern talking to from the teachers (to the whole class/bullies (that one time got suspended)).

Anyway, as a grown man I can absolutely not understand adults who get the chance at another life somewhere being so consistently repelled by the thought of being a child or going through puberty again.
In fact, I would love to go through life a second time with my current experiences. Doesn't matter whether it is a redo or a whole new life.

What do you think?

 

[EmmaCruzader]

Being a kid sucks for many different reasons beyond just what happens during that time. Personally, I had a fun childhood, but if I had to choose, I prefer my life as an adult. It's simple: once you're autonomous, going back is like regressing, and nobody likes that. And well, hormones exist. Imagine being an adult with a well-defined personality and emotional base, and suddenly, just because you're a kid again, everything that was once "stable" is completely messed up.

Disgusting as hell, right?

Not to mention all the disadvantages that come afterward. In short, being an adult or almost an adult is always more suitable.

Regarding NSFW, everyone has their own morals about it, so I won't get into that.

 

[Nerevar]

Consider the narrative tropes you get with your Eternal Child vampire characters and the angst they get from being stuck like that. It's the same general "adult mind in a child's body" thing. And they're usually engaging in criminal activities to sidestep the worst of the issues while still having plenty of shit to angst about.

Being a child essentially means having a set of physical disabilities (being too short to reach countertops and gas petals, physically weak enough that it would be classified as a disability in an adult, sterility, erectile dysfunction, etc.) and on top of that, you are legally and socially treated as essentially property. Sure, there are laws against abuse, but a well treated slave is still a slave, and folks tend to chafe when subject to another person's whims even in the (not at all guaranteed) scenario where they have your best interests at heart. You don't decide when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear, when to bathe, who to associate with. The main distinction you might point to that differentiates it from slavery, child labor laws, in practice mean that you are legally barred from earning money that you could use to live independently.

Schools are structured very similarly to prisons in many ways, right down to needing to get permission to take a piss. And they are notoriously bad at dealing with kids who are significantly ahead or behind their peers in terms of the material. It isn't like college where you take classes that interest you and you can test out of classes you've already mastered the material from. You will be spending hours a day on extremely basic spelling, grammar, and math, bored out of your skull and anything you do to try and avert that boredom will be treated as "disruptive". And you'll be lucky if it's just boredom, since you might well find yourself actively disagreeing with the material being taught, whether that material is an oversimplification you've just moved past needing or because it is actual propaganda that with your adult experience, you are able to recognize as such, if only because the propaganda we feed children tends to be similarly dumbed down like everything else we direct at children.

And then we get into the other kids. Physical violence is much more common coming from children than it is from adults, and we spend a lot of time and effort socializing kids not to hit eachother. Your peers are not going to have that socialization and while as an adult, it's easy to dismiss the violence children inflict as a non-threat, that's because they're so much smaller and weaker than an adult. Since you're a child too, these assaults are coming from someone just as big and strong as you are. And unlike when an adult strikes you these days, the person who just committed physical assault against you is not held criminally responsible and you will lack the autonomy you would have as an adult to leave the situation and avoid interacting with people who are violent toward you. That is the real problem with school bullying, that because we force students to remain in close proximity, the escape and de-escalation strategies adults use with one another are not available to kids attending school alongside their bullies.

Non-physical bullying is also a concern. Nothing makes you a target quite like being weird, and as an adult mind in a child's body, you are going to come off as weird. And if you think you can avoid this problem by not caring what those dumb kids think, remember that humans need social interaction to remain sane. This is why shunning was an actual criminal penalty in some societies.

You think you'll just get your social needs met by talking to "other" adults? How many adults do you know that hang out with unrelated little kids and are not in a direct position of authority over them, be it a parent, a teacher, etc.? Do the ones you are aware of strike you as particularly well adjusted adults that you would be happy to get the majority of your social needs met from? Do they strike you as the sort of people you'd be allowed to interact with at all? Since, again, zero autonomy.

And then after all that, we can get into issues of puberty and body dysmorphia. If you're an adult, you're used to your body being a certain way. Puberty messes with the proportions of the body, not just its size. Breasts being present or absent is just one of the most obvious manifestations, but your hips won't be where you expect them to be, your head will be out of proportion to the rest of your body, your limbs will stop. Before you expect them to. All those things that lead to teenagers being clumsy and tripping over their own feet or knocking things off a table you now have to deal with all over again, both when first showing up in your new child body you're not used to using when you hit puberty again. You will be spending a lot of time with your body feeling *wrong* in a way that's going to be annoyingly hard of put your finger on.

And of course, there's the bit that gets more play than any other issue: your sex life. Your peers are children, so if you're not a pedophile now, you won't be attracted to them. Any adults who are attracted to you will be pedophiles themselves and are extremely likely to be keeping the fact that they find you hot to themselves. And the ones sufficiently maladjusted to make their interest clear to you are also the sort of maladjusted to be way less likely to take "no" for an answer, so your options are either a soul crushing level of invisibility and quiet rejection by everyone you find attractive or drawing the attention of a child molester who's noticed you don't have many friends…

And if you are a pedophile and thus attracted to your new peers, you're still not out of the woods. If you're not one of the maladjusted child molesters I mention above, you have internalized on some level that you should not be engaging in sexual behavior toward children despite your interest and that's not going to go away instantly once you're in a child body, even if you are of the (not at all universal) view that an adult with the body of a child fucking kids doesn't have the same moral/ethical issues as it would if they had an adult body. And if you're someone who was only held back by fear of external consequences that would indeed be less in the case of "peer" molestation, you've still got to deal with your own biological dysfunction and the aforementioned issues related to having no autonomy or privacy.

So yeah, angst makes sense unless you've got enough super powers as part of the package to get around these problems.