Why antiparent?

I didn't have a good childhood.

Don't get me wrong - I'm aware of the privileges I did have: growing up in rich neighborhoods in the country with the largest economy in the world, going to some of the highest-rated schools in my state, getting to travel to some cool places, not having to worry much about going without food or clothing. My childhood looked pretty idyllic, and by all accounts, I should've been grateful for it. But my parents were also physically and emotionally abusive, and in my efforts to get away from them, I landed in some really bad situations before even getting to 18.

All of this to say that I wanted to do better by my own kids. I wanted to create a childhood for them that they didn't have to run away from. I wanted to be a cycle breaker! I went to years and years of therapy. I went no-contact with my parents. I read dozens of gentle parenting books. I followed all the parenting expert Instagram accounts. I came up with diagrams (hello, engineer) for how I'd handle various tough parenting situations, planning well into my hypothetical kids' teen years. I thought through all the ways my own parents survived their own tough childhoods and all the ways they tried to do better by my sister and me. I analyzed all the ways they failed us and all the things I could try instead.

And it wasn't enough.

As my first kid grew and started doing totally normal toddler things like throwing tantrums and occasionally disobeying me, I found myself unable to handle them the way that I wanted to. I didn't hit them the way my parents hit us, but I did raise my voice or freeze up/withdraw way more than I wanted to. I kept getting overstimulated at every loud noise and shutting down or reacting as if they were the problem, not me. The books and diagrams and scripts helped some, but I still kept realizing mid-conflict that I sounded just like my mom. And I hated it. I realized that if I kept acting like this in the long term then it would make my kids felt just the same way as I did growing up.

I didn't even understand why it kept happening most of the time. I knew from the beginning that I didn't want perfectly obedient and well-behaved children. I wanted children who could think critically and advocate for themselves. And I knew that pretty much every behavior that kept aggravating me so much was a normal thing for toddlers to do, and that it wouldn't go away if I kept freaking out about it, it would just make them feel unloved and erode the trust I'd worked so hard to build between us. So, even knowing all of that, why did I keep reacting like this?

I think this is a pretty common experience. This is what my parents were talking about all the times they said "someday you'll understand." And it wasn't like I was struggling with this all the time, not even close. The vast majority of the time I found parenting to be deeply fun and rewarding. This is where a lot of parents develop newfound empathy for how their own parents handled things and come to just accept these types of behaviors as inevitable to some extent.

But I remember so clearly what it's like to be on the receiving end of constant frustration and yelling and abuse and bigotry. To know in my heart that there's a mold I'm expected to conform to. To feel deeply unloved whenever I dare to step outside of it. And most of all, to know I have no other real choice. If I don't put up with this treatment, I risk losing my source of food, shelter, medical care, education, and other basic needs. I started making plans - detailed ones - to run away from home when I was 7 years old. I revised them every year based on what aid and employment I'd be eligible for. And every year I knew: if I did this, there's vanishingly few ways I'd be legally allowed to care for myself, regardless of what I was capable of.

After I gave birth to my second kid, the pressures of having a toddler and a newborn dialed my cognitive dissonance about this up to 11. I loved being around my kids and watching them grow, but I didn't like the massive power imbalance that made any slip-up on my part potentially traumatic to them. I started looking into ways to try to even it out a little: leaning more on daycare so I could have some time to myself and show up as a better parent, enlisting the help of friends so that my kids would have a bigger network of trusted adults to rely on. And then I got curious.

Why is everything set up like this? Why are my partner and I effectively our kids' legal owners, with so few other options for how to set up our relationship? Had it always been this way?

Why, when so many US-American parents are struggling (and failing!) to make ends meet and handle all of our children's varying physical and emotional and self-actualization needs, are we still forced to do so much of this alone?

So I started reading, and reading, and reading some more. I read blogs and forums and even more parenting books and textbooks on the history of childhood and monographs on social reproduction theory. I started talking directly to children and young adults about their experiences in childhood. And more recently, I started drawing connections between what I learned. I've been working on it as an independent research project for the past year and a half during whatever free time I have between my full-time job (RIP), 2 kids, 9 pets, and several chronic illnesses. Here's what I found.

Individualistic

Most of the time when we talk about families and parents and children in the US, we paint a very glossy picture. Parents have children for a variety of reasons, but love them deeply once they have them, and do their best to take care of them and raise them to be good people with good values. Parents who fail to do this are bad parents, and bad parents are out of the norm. Good parents look out for their children's best interests, which they often know better than the children themselves. Good parents make mistakes sometimes, but ultimately have good intentions, and deserve a lot of leeway (from the government, society, and their children) to try to do what they think is right. Bad parents need to be pressured into being rehabilitated (by the government or society), and if they're still bad, they deserve to get their kids taken away and have them placed with good parents. And so on and so forth.

The main idea here is that growing up with good parents will keep children safe and make them good people who are grateful for their upbringing. If something goes wrong under this system it's more or less chalked up to one of these three things (or some combination):

1. The parents were actually bad. Their approach to parenting was wrong. If they'd been better parents, they would've been able to anticipate whichever of their kids' needs were going unmet and worked proactively to fix the problem. Everything would've been fine if the parents had just been good parents.
2. The children were actually bad. There was something inherently deficient about the child that made it impossible to raise them as good people, even though the parents were good parents. Everything would've been fine if they hadn't been so disobedient/rebellious/disabled/gay/trans/etc.
3. There's nothing anybody could've done to stop it. Whatever went wrong was just the result of unfortunate circumstances. All anyone can do is try to be good parents moving forward.

This might seem like an oversimplification, but a mind-boggling amount of discussion around parenting boils down to these narratives. I've seen it applied to such a variety of (real or perceived) social ills, like:

• Screen time
• Disobedience/rudeness
• Declining literacy rates & test scores
• Conversion therapy & the troubled teen industry
• Rape culture
• Going no contact with relatives
• Declining leisure time, free play, and risk taking

There are some efforts to use systemic perspectives to address some children's issues, such as child hunger or educational outcomes. But too many of the interventions still depend on parents to implement or access them on behalf of their children, which feeds into the same individualistic system I outlined above. Despite how universal these individualistic narratives are, when it comes to children's well-being, I don't think they come close to covering the full story.

Systemic

A lot of children struggle even with parents who try their best to meet their children's needs. A lot of children feel misunderstood, infantilized, powerless around the adults in their lives, especially their parents. A lot of children go with their basic needs unmet at no fault of their own or their parents'.

On the other hand, a lot of good parents (as defined by their communities) treat their kids very poorly without any consequences. A lot of children are harmed by the style of parenting and the family structure that are not only accepted but encouraged by US society. I would go so far as to say all of them are. Being subjected to such an intensely high level of control, surveillance, and isolation for around 2 decades is a difficult thing to go through. Even if the parents mean well, knowing (as I did) that the choice is between

• putting up with however they choose to behave and whatever rules they choose to implement, or
• risking their primary source of food, shelter, medical care, education, and affection

can be a huge source of mental pressure even for a young child. And the lack of transparency into family life lets all kinds of abuse continue unchecked.

If we truly care about improving the well-being of all children, there's two main things we have to do:

1. We have to stop viewing children as the property of their parents and start viewing them as full people in their own right.
2. We have to analyze & address the sources of children's mistreatment systematically, and not just chalk them up to "bad parents" or "unfortunate circumstances."

The second one in particular involves looking at historical, political, economic, legal, and social processes that shape the experience of childhood. Childhood depends on so much more than whether the parents are good (or well-intentioned). It is deeply affected by the massive systems that control everyone's lives.

This is what I aim to analyze in antiparent.

I break down concepts best through mind maps, so I made one to represent what "antiparenting" means to me:

Here are the main points:

• Antiparenting is a systemic analysis of the historical, political, economic, legal, and social processes that shape the experience of childhood.
• It is a commitment to building bigger and better systems of care beyond the family.
• It involves prioritizing young people's political, social, legal, and economic autonomy.
• Most importantly, it seeks to denaturalize the subordination of children.

Systemic Analysis: Looking at the Bigger Picture

As I said before, individualistic approaches to children's well-being are not enough. We live in a society where people live under the near-universal control of their parents for the first two decades of their lives. Any individualistic approaches to parental education or parent-led interventions are going to leave the most vulnerable children behind. The solutions we use to ensure children's well-being have to be much broader than that, and before we can implement systemic solutions, we have to conduct a systemic analysis.

Beyond the Family: Why We Need Bigger Solutions

The family is a closed system - or as close as you can get in our global society. There is a sharp divide between public life (work, shopping, recreational areas) and private life (home). The family has total control over children's private lives and a huge amount of control over children's public lives.

In order to make sure that all children can have their physical, emotional, and self-actualization needs met, we have to give children options outside of the shadow of the family. We have to assume that there will always be abusive and neglectful families, and we have to care about those children's well-being more than we care about preserving the reputation of those families.

Youth Autonomy: Letting Youth Control Their Own Lives

Creating larger systems of care doesn't just mean transferring control over children from parents to the government. It means giving young people autonomy: the ability to control their own lives as much as possible.

So many of the things that make the larger world unsafe for children, especially young children, did not come into existence on their own. They were choices made by people in power like politicians and business owners, often to further their own interests. Think of:

• Car-centric infrastructure
• War and genocide
• Sexual abuse by religious, political, etc. leaders
• Radicalization into white nationalist, sexist, transphobic, etc. groups
• Gun violence

All of these things occur as a result of choices that adults make over children's lives. Children's own interests are not represented in any of the discussions where these decisions are made. If anything, other adults say that they're working in children's best interest - but that's not the same thing as actually getting children's input on these matters and treating them as full, independent actors.

Giving young people political, social, legal, and economic autonomy means giving them an actual voice in the matters that affect their lives. It means giving them power and leverage in low-level and high-level decision-making processes. It means making established systems of power justify their existence to young people as well as everyone else, instead of forcing children through a two-decade-long process of indoctrination focused on teaching them not to challenge authority.

Denaturalizing Subordination: Children as Lesser

The dependent status of children is so universally accepted that we hardly question it. But whenever we need them, we have tons of excuses:

• Children are fresh, blank slates (or sinful and animalistic creatures, depending) that need guidance to know how to become respectable members of society
• Children are incapable of meeting their own needs
• Children actually thrive under intense control ("strong boundaries") and too much autonomy makes them anxious and upset
• If left to their own devices (i.e. away from parental control), children make risky and self-destructive decisions that lead to societal decay
• This is how things have always been done; children have always been subordinate to adults. It's the natural way of things.

Even leftists who recognize the harm and resist these types of narratives for other marginalized groups (Black and indigenous people, LGBT people, etc.) often still believe they apply to children.

We need to recognize all of these as stories we tell ourselves about children, not natural truths exclusive to them. Each of these narratives has a long history tied deeply to ideas of racial supremacy, eugenics, and Christian doctrine. Each of these excuses have also been used to deny enslaved Black people their freedom, ethnically cleanse Native people off their land, and keep women subjugated within the household. This rhetoric has been used by one group to justify their oppression of another - over and over and over.

This is not somehow different or more justified when it comes to adults and children. Each group in power came up with biological and psychological justifications for their behavior towards marginalized people: phrenology, drapetomania, IQ, hysteria caused by the wandering womb. When we come up with biological reasons that children are incapable of acting in their own self-interest and of learning how to contribute to a community without being disenfranchised for decades, we are engaging in the same oppressive process as the white supremacists and eugenicists and imperialists before us.

We need to connect youth liberation with other struggles against oppression. Everything is connected! Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism - it all becomes more intense when facing it as a child with hardly any way to fight back. (On the flip side, marginalized people being "childlike" is often used to justify oppression of adults as well.) And when it comes to children perpetuating bigotry, we need to view that under the lens of systemic oppression as well, instead of saying that the individual actions of "bad parents" are entirely responsible for their behavior. That logic might be an attempt to hold bad parents accountable, but it really ends up protecting systems of oppression from scrutiny.

Most of all, we need to recognize that everybody needs care and support to survive. This is such a basic idea but so often forgotten when it comes to discussing children's autonomy. Of course babies are not able to survive without someone else helping them with food and hygiene and comfort. None of us are. Even the most able-bodied and independent adults are dependent on a highly complex network of care work and commodity production to survive. It's just that the work that goes into supporting the lives of able-bodied adults is made invisible or accepted as the baseline, and their dependence on care generally isn't used as an excuse to deprive them of autonomy. Yes, children are incapable of meeting all of their own needs; no, that has nothing to do whether they should be considered the property of their parents and denied the opportunity to organize in their own interest.

This part's mainly aimed at parents who might be worried about this: antiparenting isn't saying your children should be taken away from you. For one, that means that there's some bigger power (like the government) taking control over your children. The logic of "bad parents should have their children taken away" is already used by the family policing system, also known as the child welfare system, to disproportionately target Black, indigenous, and low-income families for separation. There's also a long history of that same logic being used to kidnap indigenous children and send them to abusive residential schools. When the definition of "bad parent" is left up to society and the government, more often than not, it'll be implemented in a racist and classist way.

Antiparenting isn't interested in taking sides in the minor arguments that fill up page after page of every online parenting forum: purees vs. baby-led weaning, breastfeeding vs. formula feeding, stay-at-home moms vs. daycare. As far as I cover these topics at all in this newsletter, it'll involve a systemic and historical analysis of what drives people to choose one over the other. I found these conversations to be really stressful especially in my postpartum period and I have no intention about moralizing about them. (And after a while I found them to be deeply repetitive and boring. Let's talk about something new, please!)

Antiparenting is very supportive of youth liberation! But youth liberation should be a youth-led movement. I'm in my late 20s now, I materially benefit from my position as a parent, and I'm no longer subject to the level of youth oppression that minors are. I don't want to speak for those who are.

My focus with antiparent is to identify and counter the specific role of parents and other adults in youth oppression, so I came up with a term to represent that without portraying myself as the voice of youth liberation.

It's very important to me that the content of this newsletter is accessible to youth as well as to parents, educators, and other adults. I'm going to aim for a 5th-6th grade reading level for most of my writing. If I write something more complex than that, I'll rewrite a version of it to be more accessible as well. Please leave a comment if you're having trouble understanding a concept - I can try my best to explain it better!