Reimagining Childhood

It's hard to overstate how central the concept of childhood is in our social and political lives. It informs how we treat children, how we conceptualize ourselves as adults, how the landscape of our entire lives is shaped (parent or no). Childhood is idyllic: the good old days when we didn't have to worry about grown-up things like bills and taxes. Childhood is precious: it needs to be preserved through cultural institutions and protected from corruption by the outside world. Childhood is simple: all your needs are met by someone else; you don't have the intellectual capacity yet to understand how twisted and complex and cruel the world is, and you don't need to. Childhood is scary: there are strangers and/or perverts around every corner, just waiting to exploit you.

There is a massive divide between the perception of childhood and the reality of it. This gap is not new by any means: it has been through many iterations throughout global history, and in many ways, it's as old as childhood itself. But before I get ahead of myself, let me outline what I'll cover in this essay, largely from a US-centric perspective:

Perception

Childhood is the stage of life before the age of majority (in the US, 18 years old). Sometimes childhood is treated as distinct from adolescence (childhood ranging from 0-12, adolescence from 13-17), but this is context-dependent, and generally children are not allowed full rights of adulthood until they reach the age of majority.

Children are perceived to be not yet fully developed people compared to adults. Because they are not fully developed, they need to be constantly supervised and directed by the various adults and institutions in their lives. Instead of being incorporated into public life, children need segregated spaces to thrive: schools, playgrounds & parks, corporatized versions of both. As part of the undeveloped stage, childhood (especially before adolescence) is a pre-sexual state. Adolescence is somewhat of a proto-sexual state, but that sexuality needs to be highly surveilled and controlled by adults. Children don't know what's good for themselves or the people around them, and do not deserve autonomy until they have the capacity to understand. The decision-making power over their lives is better handled by their parents.

Children are also pre-workers. Their primary role is to be educated by their schools (and extracurricular institutions) as well as their families. The type of education they are offered differs based on their class, race, gender, and ability/disability, among other factors. The education is not considered labor in itself; it's merely practice for "real" labor in the future. In exchange for not having to worry about meeting their own needs, they are free to practice and learn how to become morally upstanding citizens.

Reality

Children are the most disenfranchised and systematically oppressed population in the world. They are considered to be the legal property of their parents or the state, and as such are often governed by property laws. They have little to no social, legal, or economic autonomy. It is incredibly difficult for them to access food, medical care, stable housing, education, legal representation, and other fundamental needs without them being facilitated by their parents. This is highly socially normalized and even biologically naturalized: the disenfranchisement of children is so fundamental that it rarely needs to justify itself. This supposedly self-evident character of children's oppression leads to a state of forced dependence, which is then a self-fulfilling prophecy: children need to be controlled because they are helpless, and they become ever more helpless because they are so thoroughly and overwhelmingly controlled.

Children are by far the most likely to experience abuse and exploitation (labor & sexual) at home by their families. Abuse and exploitation, especially that which is perpetrated by the family, is viewed as an anomaly instead of the norm that it is. The mechanisms that do exist to address abuse are often inaccessible to children themselves; and even if they are, they most often consist of transferring decision-making power from their parents to the state, not themselves. Children are subject to racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist violence every day with little to no recourse.

Society, especially US society, is not built with children in mind. Children have no freedom of movement if not sanctioned by their parents; whatever autonomy they do have is shrinking by the decade due to an unprecedented expansion of surveillance culture and disappearance of third spaces. They are largely removed from public life and funneled into age-segregated spaces; cultural shifts have led to a steep decline in the sense of social responsibility over children as well as a growing intolerance for age-typical behavior in public spaces. In much of the US, due to car-centric infrastructure, they are completely dependent on their parents for transportation. Due to various structural incentives, SUVs and trucks have been getting taller and taller (and much more prolific) over the past several decades, and consequently have massive blind spots directly in front of them that make it incredibly unsafe for children to walk even in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.

And yet this all-encompassing oppression is hardly ever acknowledged. To the extent that it is, it's treated as a joke. Children's oppression is deemed biologically and socially necessary. Above all, it is fundamental to capitalist reproduction. Capitalist economies (and the violence inherent to them) could not persist if children were not conditioned from birth, in this state of prolonged dependence, to accept and perpetuate them.

Perception

Childhood history/sociology is a relatively new field. Philippe Aries' seminal work, Centuries of Childhood, was first published in 1960 and is widely considered to be the most famous book on the subject. Other notable early works include Lloyd deMause's The History of Childhood (1974) and Erik H. Erikson's Childhood and Society (1950). Earlier theorists about the nature of childhood included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey. Many feminist theorists, such as Shulamith Firestone and bell hooks, also incorporated analysis of the roles of children within the family. Interest and activity in the field has exploded in recent years, especially following the widespread adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (notably excluding the US).

There is, of course, so much to say about the development of childhood through pre-agricultural, classical, and postclassical societies, as well as how to proliferation of world religions affected how adults conceptualized children. But I'm going to leave that for another time when I can cover it more thoroughly. The main takeaway is that the societal treatment of childhood has always been uneven and complex. In most societies throughout most of human history, the child mortality rate was 30-50%. There are many intersecting reasons for the high death rate, including lack of modern medicine and prenatal care (by far the most significant), infanticide, and a relatively high incidence rate of avoidable accidents. The ubiquity of child death certainly affected how adults thought of and treated children.

In many societies there were significant gaps between the ideals/conceptualizations that adults held about children and the realities that children actually faced. The details of these gaps change significantly based on dominant religion, class, race, et cetera (all the usual culprits). For example, early Christianity in Western Europe introduced the idea of original sin, which led adults to view children as inherently sinful and animalistic - traits that supposedly needed to be civilized out of them via strict education, physical abuse, and religious rituals. The construct of the child in literature, religion, and politics was not the same as an actual child. This continues to be true today.

Reality

The history of childhood is a history of care, love, death, hope, sexual & labor exploitation, and abuse. The way children have been viewed and treated throughout history in various societies is by no means static or uniform. Here is a short overview of children and their economic contributions throughout history:

In pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies, children were neither fully assets nor liabilities; they did what they could to help with foraging, childcare, and other tasks, but they were not considered full productive members of society until at least adolescence. The nature of the work meant that people were relatively less focused on producing excess (as whatever they produced, they would have to carry with them). This gave adults plenty of leisure time to spend with children. Children were integrated into the larger societies, not segregated into age-based spaces.

The agricultural revolution significantly changed the nature of childhood. Throughout the classical and post-classical societies, some trends emerged: elite children, especially boys, might have access to education, but for everyone else, a work-based childhood was the norm. Children were more readily able to contribute to agricultural work from a young age compared to hunting and gathering. Consequently, they came to be seen as assets; the birth rate in these societies exploded.

The industrial revolution significantly changed the nature of childhood *again.* Poor children did (and continue to) work in factories, of course, under dangerous and brutal conditions. But European industrialization was also around the time in which public schooling was established. Industrialization shifted adult workers from their home farms into factories where they worked for a wage; children became less and less central to the production their families depended on. Gradually - and of course unevenly - children were shifted from a work-based childhood to a schooling-based one. In doing so, they changed from immediate assets in their family economies to liabilities or deferred investments. Many children continue to work in industrial and agricultural settings to this day, but broadly, it is no longer the societally accepted/preferred norm.

Throughout this entire process, children have never been considered full members of any agricultural, industrial, or post-industrial society. In patriarchal societies they were broadly considered to be the property of their fathers, much like how wives were considered the property of their husbands before women's liberation movements began. But while able-bodied women have been able to claw their way out of property status in most societies to be recognized as full humans, children have not.

As I'm writing this section, I'm frustrated by all the caveats and exceptions that I can't include for space considerations. I will leave it at this for now: children's experiences differed dramatically by geography, class, race, gender, ability, and they continue to do so today.

Perception

While people can identify the structural mechanisms of class-based, racial, sexist oppression and violence, that same consideration rarely ever extends to children's liberation. Most adults are unconcerned with the disenfranchisement of children at all. Even social reproduction theory tends to focus on non-normative expressions of gender/sexuality or women's domestic labor. It largely ignores children's contributions to the family, economy, and state.

To the extent that children's advocacy appears in mainstream discourse, it is usually focused on the parents' rights movement. Parents' rights are an expression of ownership over (and denial of autonomy to) children. Parents as a class, especially those involved in these movements, are vocal about their sole authority over their children - often challenging state authority to intervene in the raising of children. A youth liberation movement briefly gained traction in the US in the 1970s, but never gained popular support, and is virtually nonexistent today.

Reality

This is the big question, isn't it. More questions: how can we support children's autonomy? What would our societies look like if that was a goal instead of a fear? How could we help encourage children to have healthy and safe lives without exerting coercion? How will children act if they are afforded autonomy? Who will stop them from drinking random cleaning chemicals from under the sink, staying up all night watching TV, or eating candy and chips for every meal? What biases and norms are reflected in those concerns?

These questions do not have easy answers. I'm not going to try to cover them in full in this essay. But I do want to point out the crucial links that children's oppression and liberation have to other systems of domination: to women's liberation, to police and prison abolition, to disability justice, to gay and trans liberation. All of these movements have had to contend with fundamental questions regarding autonomy and self-determination, care and love and reproductive labor, coercion and violence. All of these groups to an extent have been treated as children: they have all been told that their oppression is natural and necessary. All of these groups have been able to organize against structures of power to say no, it isn't, and I deserve to be treated better than this. Children deserve to stop being subjected to this paradigm, too.

What makes youth liberation uniquely difficult to organize around is the ephemeral and universal nature of youth itself. We have all been children at one point or another. We conceptualized our status as children differently based on all sorts of different factors. Many of us who had terrible childhoods knew that we just had to wait until we reached the age of majority before we could start to make our own decisions and pretend everything that came before that was a bad dream. Many who had good childhoods tend to gloss over or understate the difficult parts while focusing on the positives. By the time many children are able to articulate their own oppression and conceptualize how it operates (if at all), they tend to be just a few years away from the age of majority. And as I pointed out before: hardly anyone takes youth oppression seriously in the first place.

Despite the challenges, we have to try anyway. A thorough understanding of children's social reproductive labor is necessary to understand how capitalism persists. Regardless of demographic, it is in our own self-interest to do this: to leave youth oppression intact is to leave a mechanism of domination and repression that can again be extended to others. We cannot fight for our own liberation while continuing to naturalize the oppression of children. A commitment to youth liberation is fundamental to the fight for a better future.

• Childhood in World History 2nd ed by Peter N. Stearns
• Liberation and Caretaking: Fighting over Children's Rights in Postwar America by Michael Grossberg (chapter 2 of Reinventing Childhood After World War II edited by Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg)
• Children, Childhoods, and Capitalism: A Social Reproduction Perspective by Susan Ferguson (chapter 6 of Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression edited by Tithi Bhattacharya)