This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article was nominated for deletion on 5 January 2007. The result of the discussion was keep. |
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hmedforth1. Peer reviewers: Kr05077.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 21:13, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
STRONG KEEP No Reasons are provided for Deletion. This is a valid article on a irrational fear. I am removing the Deletion Tags
Theowannabe 01:45, 11 January 2007 (UTC)Chip
And poorly referenced. This article needs work.
"As mentioned above, social service, human rights, and social justice organizations have been tackling the fear of children for dozens of years" WTF? Where is the reference? I don't believe any of these types organizations primarily see themselves as tackling "pedophobia" at all.
Where is the description (and refs.) to do with obsessive parenting and overprotection? Of the terror of pedophilia? Pedophobia relates to a fear of all things concerning childhood, including a terror of childhood sexuality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.131.102.6 ( talk) 15:00, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Does anyone see a dichotomy here? If "homo" is used to mean homosexual, (and it's only meant "man" in strictly scientific language) and "pedo" is used to mean pedophile, then why doesn't pedophobia mean the fear of pedophiles or pedophilia, wheras homophobia is the fear of homosexuals and homosexuality? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.77.33.87 ( talk) 02:44, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
A pedophobia is a fear of feet; hence why pedestrian and pedophobia have the same root. If I recall correctly, peda comes from the greek word paidi, which means child. This is why the term pediatrician cites its roots while this article gives no mention of it. This article should use the term pediaphobia, as it describes a fear of children and not a fear of feet. I propose that this article be renamed to pedaphobia, that the new pedaphobia article states that pedofile has been popularly misstated in place of pedafile and that a pedophobia article be made stating that pedophobia is a fear of feet and not children, despite the widespread misusage of the term's foot that I am told started in the 1970s with the term pedofile being used in place of pedafile. Shining Arcanine 02:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
Would this article be better titled "Fear of children", similar to Fear of childbirth, for which the Greek word is "Tokophobia"? Would it be better situated than using either pedo- or pedaphoia? - Freechild 22:55, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what this would be called; not a fear of children as much as a feeling of disenfranchisement for adults in favor of a preference for children. Examples include the seeming ad nauseum amount of non-profit organizations who fund specific child-related causes, children's cancer, children's burns, children with autism. The idea is that on one's eighteenth birthday, there is a sharp decrease in social concern for your wellbeing. Other potential examples include cultural aversion to abortion but not to capital punishment, or a much stronger aversion to the murder or abuse of a child than to that of an adult. Popular culture has made some commentary on this subject, see George Carlin's "Fuck the Children" routine for an example. I'm asking for more examples of this as an established school of thought, a name for the idea, etc. Malenkylizards 19:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I moved this article from its previous location because of an ongoing conversation on its talk page regarding the disagreement scholars have over what the title of the fear is, and paying attention to Wikipedia:Plain English. - Freechild 06:22, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed the part about "R. Kelly's pedophilia" to "R. Kelly's ephebophilia". Pedophilia is a sexual attraction towards prepubescent children, ephebophilia is a sexual attraction towards adolescents. While the general public tends to confuse the two, considering that here at Wikipedia we have an article about ephebophilia and wish to publish accurate and unbiased information, things like that need to be corrected. Aoa8212 ( talk) 12:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
Fear of children and Pediophobia are about the same thing. They should be merged. Zodon ( talk) 06:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
The article on pediophobia has a much weaker citation base than fear of children, and appears to be a weakly studied phobia. As the reliable sources in this article illustrate, fear of children is a widespread phenomenon that is being addressed in a variety of literature and fields. If anything, pediophobia should be deleted, not merged. • Freechild 'sup? 16:21, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Article needs some work I think. One thing that confused me (and may confuse readers) is that "pedophobia" is apparently a term with two distinct meanings: a psychiatric medical condition, and a political ideology.
Should "Pedophobia" (a medical condition) and "Fear of young people" (a kind of ideology) be two separate articles maybe? They're pretty different things. I don't think so, because the "pedophobia" is used for both. But I do think that we need distinct sections to clarify the difference, and to spell out the two different meanings right up front. The medical-condition section is going to be much shorter, it looks.
Then we can vet the refs and look at tweaking the text in places where clarity can be improved, if any. Herostratus ( talk) 07:54, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I also wonder if the name of the article might be better as "Pedophobia"? It used to be called this at one time. Herostratus ( talk)
The current lede is
"Fear of children, fear of infants or fear of childhood is alternatively called pedophobia (American English), paedophobia or pediaphobia. Other age-focused fears are ephebiphobia and gerontophobia. Recognised outcomes of pedophobia include paternalism, adultism, and by extension, ageism."
I'm thinking that something like this might be better:
"Pedophobia (also paedophobia or pediaphobia) is term used to describe two distinct conditions: 1) A personal medical condition, an unreasonable fear of children. 2) An personal or social perspective encompassing a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward youths (which can include teens and young adults as well as children)."
Then essentially two sections, "Medical" and "Social", or something like that. (The stuff about ephebiphobia and gerontophobia and paternalism, adultism, and ageism can go in the body of the article, doesn't need to be in the lede). (I dunno about "ephebiphobia" being a separate term. It is if people use it. Our first ref tho is "Fear of teenagers is growing in Britain, study warns".... "it appears that an aversion to young people, or "paedophobia" so here a least the person is using "paedophobia" to mean fear/aversion to teens, and if that's how the term is used.... we'll see when we vet the refs. Herostratus ( talk) 08:31, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
What about splitting this article into two articles: Fear of children and Discrimination against children (see also: Discrimination against girls in India) with Pedophobia as a disambiguation page listing both? Biogeographist ( talk) 18:56, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I haven't read the refs yet, so I'm willing to be educated, but I have a hard time believing that there is much fear of children in the social/political sense (as opposed to the medical/psychological sense). I think there is plenty fear of youths (teenagers etc.) but that's an entirely different thing altogether. "Child" in idiomatic use means something along the line of "not a teenager yet" (its a human word, so there is not a precise age cutoff).
The article Child begins "Biologically, a child is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition of child generally refers to a minor..." and this is entirely correct. And we are not talking about technical legalities here; people who are fearful of, troubled by, or disdainful of youths are not concerned with the precise birthdays of people. Seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds are perceived in one way (for social/political fear purposes) than seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds, and the latter two are perceived similarly (for fear purposes) notwithstanding that one is a minor and one a major.
I mean, I am starting from that assumption (since it's true). If the refs say different, then that's different, but we're not compelled to use refs that are prima facie wrong.
So for instance the first ref is titled "Fear of teenagers is growing in Britain, study warns" and that either doesn't belong in this article or else the article needs a different name. I assume; we'll see.
There is an article Adultism already, so some stuff can maybe go there. Herostratus ( talk) 05:57, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
Herostratus, I don't feel that it was a good idea to create a Pedophobia (phobia) article and a Pedophobia (social phenomena) article. For one, "pedophobia (phobia)" is redundant. And like I stated above, we don't split articles like this. We include the social aspect with the medical aspect. Phobias often are partly social anyway. I don't understand splitting the matter this way. It's unnecessary content forking. I will leave a note about it at the WP:Med, and they will hopefully weigh in. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 23:25, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
OK I rewrote the article. I removed the entire section about voluntary childlessness, because that has little to do with the subject -- at least as written, although its sensible that pedophobes would not want to have children... if someone wants to rebuilt the section on that basis from scratch, fine. The section was also tagged as original research.
Other than that I didn't make major removals. I did move stuff around, mostly to facilitate the separation of the psychiatric from the social. I also rewrote stuff. And I added a short paragraph.
It's unfortunate that the same word is used for two entirely different phenomena, and I think the social-phenomenon use is usually sloppy and polemical. It is true that "-phobia" is used for a lot of non-psychiatric phenomena (Anglophobia, etc.) but not when there's a psychiatric condition with the same name.
It'd be unfortunate if "fear of flying" was to describe both 1) personal fear of flying in an airplane, and 2) opposition to air travel in general, for some reason (it over-homogenizes the world or whatever) as a political belief. And I haven't seen this, except for this word "pedophobia". Which is unfortunate. It's doubly unfortunate because a lot of times it's referring to people who are like 16, when "child" most commonly refers to pre-pubescent kids. But, it is what it is.
Altho, a lot of the social phenomenon stuff is a pile of pig lips, to some degree. Some of the refs are pretty fringe, and most of the others are academic papers written by people with a political ax to grind. Whatever. But I mean we have this article, we have the article Adultism, we have the article Adultcentrism, and we have the article Ephebiphobia and so on. A fair amount of this stuff is from people who are kind of polemicists, but oh well... that doesn't make it automatically unacceptable. But we could possible merge these four articles in some useful way. Because they more or less say the same thing in four different places, and probably in four different ways, and it'd be better to have it all together.
The words "fear of children" and "pedophobia" should possibly be made into disamg pages, and this article split. That's be fine is someone wants to do it. But I'd rather see a larger effort to merge stuff and see where that goes.
BTW I haven't been able to find evidence that pedophobia is in the DSM, but I probably don't really know where to look. Herostratus ( talk) 05:24, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
into two articles, this one ( Pedophobia (phobia) and a new one ( Pedophobia (social phenomena). Pedophobia alone is now a disambig page pointing to these two articles, and Fear of children is a redirect to that disambig page.
My work here is done I guess. Any changes that people want to make in the article names or contents is OK with me. Herostratus ( talk) 19:55, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
Fear of children, occationally called pedophobia, is fear triggered by the presence or thinking of children or infants. It is an emotional state of fear, disdain, aversion, or prejudice toward teenagers and other youths, or children, or both. These states provide the impetus for social and political opposition to youth equity and for insufficient concern for the rights and needs of children. Pedophobia is in some usages identical to ephebiphobia.
Have any reliable sources drawn a connection between fear of children and fear of overreach by parents, mandated reporters, and activists misinterpreting a situation? Damian Yerrick ( talk) 17:27, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article was nominated for deletion on 5 January 2007. The result of the discussion was keep. |
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hmedforth1. Peer reviewers: Kr05077.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 21:13, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
STRONG KEEP No Reasons are provided for Deletion. This is a valid article on a irrational fear. I am removing the Deletion Tags
Theowannabe 01:45, 11 January 2007 (UTC)Chip
And poorly referenced. This article needs work.
"As mentioned above, social service, human rights, and social justice organizations have been tackling the fear of children for dozens of years" WTF? Where is the reference? I don't believe any of these types organizations primarily see themselves as tackling "pedophobia" at all.
Where is the description (and refs.) to do with obsessive parenting and overprotection? Of the terror of pedophilia? Pedophobia relates to a fear of all things concerning childhood, including a terror of childhood sexuality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.131.102.6 ( talk) 15:00, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Does anyone see a dichotomy here? If "homo" is used to mean homosexual, (and it's only meant "man" in strictly scientific language) and "pedo" is used to mean pedophile, then why doesn't pedophobia mean the fear of pedophiles or pedophilia, wheras homophobia is the fear of homosexuals and homosexuality? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.77.33.87 ( talk) 02:44, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
A pedophobia is a fear of feet; hence why pedestrian and pedophobia have the same root. If I recall correctly, peda comes from the greek word paidi, which means child. This is why the term pediatrician cites its roots while this article gives no mention of it. This article should use the term pediaphobia, as it describes a fear of children and not a fear of feet. I propose that this article be renamed to pedaphobia, that the new pedaphobia article states that pedofile has been popularly misstated in place of pedafile and that a pedophobia article be made stating that pedophobia is a fear of feet and not children, despite the widespread misusage of the term's foot that I am told started in the 1970s with the term pedofile being used in place of pedafile. Shining Arcanine 02:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
Would this article be better titled "Fear of children", similar to Fear of childbirth, for which the Greek word is "Tokophobia"? Would it be better situated than using either pedo- or pedaphoia? - Freechild 22:55, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what this would be called; not a fear of children as much as a feeling of disenfranchisement for adults in favor of a preference for children. Examples include the seeming ad nauseum amount of non-profit organizations who fund specific child-related causes, children's cancer, children's burns, children with autism. The idea is that on one's eighteenth birthday, there is a sharp decrease in social concern for your wellbeing. Other potential examples include cultural aversion to abortion but not to capital punishment, or a much stronger aversion to the murder or abuse of a child than to that of an adult. Popular culture has made some commentary on this subject, see George Carlin's "Fuck the Children" routine for an example. I'm asking for more examples of this as an established school of thought, a name for the idea, etc. Malenkylizards 19:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I moved this article from its previous location because of an ongoing conversation on its talk page regarding the disagreement scholars have over what the title of the fear is, and paying attention to Wikipedia:Plain English. - Freechild 06:22, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed the part about "R. Kelly's pedophilia" to "R. Kelly's ephebophilia". Pedophilia is a sexual attraction towards prepubescent children, ephebophilia is a sexual attraction towards adolescents. While the general public tends to confuse the two, considering that here at Wikipedia we have an article about ephebophilia and wish to publish accurate and unbiased information, things like that need to be corrected. Aoa8212 ( talk) 12:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
Fear of children and Pediophobia are about the same thing. They should be merged. Zodon ( talk) 06:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
The article on pediophobia has a much weaker citation base than fear of children, and appears to be a weakly studied phobia. As the reliable sources in this article illustrate, fear of children is a widespread phenomenon that is being addressed in a variety of literature and fields. If anything, pediophobia should be deleted, not merged. • Freechild 'sup? 16:21, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Article needs some work I think. One thing that confused me (and may confuse readers) is that "pedophobia" is apparently a term with two distinct meanings: a psychiatric medical condition, and a political ideology.
Should "Pedophobia" (a medical condition) and "Fear of young people" (a kind of ideology) be two separate articles maybe? They're pretty different things. I don't think so, because the "pedophobia" is used for both. But I do think that we need distinct sections to clarify the difference, and to spell out the two different meanings right up front. The medical-condition section is going to be much shorter, it looks.
Then we can vet the refs and look at tweaking the text in places where clarity can be improved, if any. Herostratus ( talk) 07:54, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I also wonder if the name of the article might be better as "Pedophobia"? It used to be called this at one time. Herostratus ( talk)
The current lede is
"Fear of children, fear of infants or fear of childhood is alternatively called pedophobia (American English), paedophobia or pediaphobia. Other age-focused fears are ephebiphobia and gerontophobia. Recognised outcomes of pedophobia include paternalism, adultism, and by extension, ageism."
I'm thinking that something like this might be better:
"Pedophobia (also paedophobia or pediaphobia) is term used to describe two distinct conditions: 1) A personal medical condition, an unreasonable fear of children. 2) An personal or social perspective encompassing a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward youths (which can include teens and young adults as well as children)."
Then essentially two sections, "Medical" and "Social", or something like that. (The stuff about ephebiphobia and gerontophobia and paternalism, adultism, and ageism can go in the body of the article, doesn't need to be in the lede). (I dunno about "ephebiphobia" being a separate term. It is if people use it. Our first ref tho is "Fear of teenagers is growing in Britain, study warns".... "it appears that an aversion to young people, or "paedophobia" so here a least the person is using "paedophobia" to mean fear/aversion to teens, and if that's how the term is used.... we'll see when we vet the refs. Herostratus ( talk) 08:31, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
What about splitting this article into two articles: Fear of children and Discrimination against children (see also: Discrimination against girls in India) with Pedophobia as a disambiguation page listing both? Biogeographist ( talk) 18:56, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I haven't read the refs yet, so I'm willing to be educated, but I have a hard time believing that there is much fear of children in the social/political sense (as opposed to the medical/psychological sense). I think there is plenty fear of youths (teenagers etc.) but that's an entirely different thing altogether. "Child" in idiomatic use means something along the line of "not a teenager yet" (its a human word, so there is not a precise age cutoff).
The article Child begins "Biologically, a child is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition of child generally refers to a minor..." and this is entirely correct. And we are not talking about technical legalities here; people who are fearful of, troubled by, or disdainful of youths are not concerned with the precise birthdays of people. Seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds are perceived in one way (for social/political fear purposes) than seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds, and the latter two are perceived similarly (for fear purposes) notwithstanding that one is a minor and one a major.
I mean, I am starting from that assumption (since it's true). If the refs say different, then that's different, but we're not compelled to use refs that are prima facie wrong.
So for instance the first ref is titled "Fear of teenagers is growing in Britain, study warns" and that either doesn't belong in this article or else the article needs a different name. I assume; we'll see.
There is an article Adultism already, so some stuff can maybe go there. Herostratus ( talk) 05:57, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
Herostratus, I don't feel that it was a good idea to create a Pedophobia (phobia) article and a Pedophobia (social phenomena) article. For one, "pedophobia (phobia)" is redundant. And like I stated above, we don't split articles like this. We include the social aspect with the medical aspect. Phobias often are partly social anyway. I don't understand splitting the matter this way. It's unnecessary content forking. I will leave a note about it at the WP:Med, and they will hopefully weigh in. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 23:25, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
OK I rewrote the article. I removed the entire section about voluntary childlessness, because that has little to do with the subject -- at least as written, although its sensible that pedophobes would not want to have children... if someone wants to rebuilt the section on that basis from scratch, fine. The section was also tagged as original research.
Other than that I didn't make major removals. I did move stuff around, mostly to facilitate the separation of the psychiatric from the social. I also rewrote stuff. And I added a short paragraph.
It's unfortunate that the same word is used for two entirely different phenomena, and I think the social-phenomenon use is usually sloppy and polemical. It is true that "-phobia" is used for a lot of non-psychiatric phenomena (Anglophobia, etc.) but not when there's a psychiatric condition with the same name.
It'd be unfortunate if "fear of flying" was to describe both 1) personal fear of flying in an airplane, and 2) opposition to air travel in general, for some reason (it over-homogenizes the world or whatever) as a political belief. And I haven't seen this, except for this word "pedophobia". Which is unfortunate. It's doubly unfortunate because a lot of times it's referring to people who are like 16, when "child" most commonly refers to pre-pubescent kids. But, it is what it is.
Altho, a lot of the social phenomenon stuff is a pile of pig lips, to some degree. Some of the refs are pretty fringe, and most of the others are academic papers written by people with a political ax to grind. Whatever. But I mean we have this article, we have the article Adultism, we have the article Adultcentrism, and we have the article Ephebiphobia and so on. A fair amount of this stuff is from people who are kind of polemicists, but oh well... that doesn't make it automatically unacceptable. But we could possible merge these four articles in some useful way. Because they more or less say the same thing in four different places, and probably in four different ways, and it'd be better to have it all together.
The words "fear of children" and "pedophobia" should possibly be made into disamg pages, and this article split. That's be fine is someone wants to do it. But I'd rather see a larger effort to merge stuff and see where that goes.
BTW I haven't been able to find evidence that pedophobia is in the DSM, but I probably don't really know where to look. Herostratus ( talk) 05:24, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
into two articles, this one ( Pedophobia (phobia) and a new one ( Pedophobia (social phenomena). Pedophobia alone is now a disambig page pointing to these two articles, and Fear of children is a redirect to that disambig page.
My work here is done I guess. Any changes that people want to make in the article names or contents is OK with me. Herostratus ( talk) 19:55, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
Fear of children, occationally called pedophobia, is fear triggered by the presence or thinking of children or infants. It is an emotional state of fear, disdain, aversion, or prejudice toward teenagers and other youths, or children, or both. These states provide the impetus for social and political opposition to youth equity and for insufficient concern for the rights and needs of children. Pedophobia is in some usages identical to ephebiphobia.
Have any reliable sources drawn a connection between fear of children and fear of overreach by parents, mandated reporters, and activists misinterpreting a situation? Damian Yerrick ( talk) 17:27, 16 April 2023 (UTC)