America Hates its Children (and maybe Europe does too)
Plus mother rage, Dungeons & Dragons, night-owling and schoolishness.
(Hello! You can listen to the audio version here.)
Happy Friday people!
I don’t know about you, but this week I am SO TIRED. So tired.
I think the main reason is that we are in a season of the kids going to bed late, and waking late, which is fine except that I end up going to bed late too, and waking up early because I like to have some quiet time in the morning. Something is going to have to give.
And is it just me who can’t actually fall asleep until everyone else in the family is also safely tucked in? There’s just something really unsettling to me about going to bed while people are still milling about. I’m pretty sure this is a me problem.
It also doesn’t bode well for the teenage years. Any tips would be very welcome!
What do you do when your young people are night owls, and you kinda are too, but you also want/need to get up early in the morning?
A friend shared this article this week, and it got me thinking. It’s titled Why America Hates its Children, and I have A LOT to say about it, but I’ll try to distill it.
The author compares the way children are treated in Greece, to the way they are criminalized, marginalized, and controlled in the US. Some of the comparison is valid. I’ve never been to Greece with my children, but I can speak to the way my children are treated in Italy: like small, beautiful miracles.
That said, it’s not a utopia for children. Yes, children are integrated to a larger extent into adult life. They are welcome at restaurants and most public spaces, and people aren’t constantly asking me why they’re not in school. And yes, children are overall looked at with benevolence and tolerance - but both those things are not exactly the same as respect, and equity.
So yeah - I’m not convinced Europe is the solution to the pervasive hatred of children we see in America. There’s plenty of problematic parenting, devaluation of carework, oppressive systems and discrimination there, too.
Children are more easily invited into public life; but also, there is less that is catered specifically for children, or that is child-centered. This is both a good thing and a not so good thing. Personally, I think child-centered spaces like playground, soft-play areas, and kid cafes can massively backfire because often their existence is partly used to justify children’s unwelcome-ness in “adult” spaces (which are actually just everyone’s spaces, but anyway).
On the other hand, it’s also beautiful to have spaces that centre children when so much of the world is built for adults. It’s great to have restaurants that bring you colored pencils, and have large, child-friendly bathrooms and maybe even a play area. It’s amazing to have childcare facilities that revolve around a positive image of children rather than what adults think children should be doing.
The downside of tolerating the presence of children in all spaces is that those spaces are still very much designed for adult bodies, brains and pursuits, and children are simply expected to go along with that. Those spaces are not centered on all humans, but specifically around adult humans. I can see why we do need child-centered spaces - and I feel like some parts of Italy are really behind on this.
Europe aside, there are many issues in the US and it is not easy to be a child (particularly if you or your family hold marginalized identities). The article speaks about the crisis in foster care provision, and I came across this really interested piece by Koa Beck about fostering and how it’s like being a “nanny of the state.” Beck speaks to the ways the state imposes all sorts of conditions on individual parents who are struggling, while not supporting them in any way to actually achieve those conditions.
The issues, as always, are deeply embedded within our systems.
The article on why America hates its children speaks to the ways in which lack of affordable childcare and of paid maternity care keeps women at home, or struggling, and the way that care work is devalued across the board, whether it is undertaken by mothers, parents or childcare workers, is one of them.
Part of me feels that as long as we see looking after young children as something we can’t wait to hand over to someone else (usually a more marginalized woman who is not being paid a fair wage), then we will continue to equate progress and feminism with the ability to extricate ourselves from the work of the home, and enter the workplace. And the more we do this, the less men will actually be pushed (encouraged? motivated?) to take on their share of the care work themselves. And the more childcare and early childhood education (as well as teaching in schools, to a lesser extent) will be work that is undervalued and poorly paid.
To me, it seems like what we need is an elevation of the work of caring. “The devaluation of care work is by design,” writes Angela Garbes. This piece is behind a paywall, but for a much deeper dive I recommend her book Essential Labour.
We have created a system propped up by domestic and care work, and then made sure that care work is done by those who can most easily be exploited and underpaid.
I wish people would stop saying that our systems are broken, when actually they are working exactly as they were supposed to. They were never designed to be fair. Our economy was never designed to value the work of the home, because that work is historically women’s work, and it has historically been done for free.
A country that hates its children, also by extension hates the people who birth, feed, raise and educate them.
I haven’t even touched upon how guns are the leading cause of death for children in the United States, or how the US still refuses to sign the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child (can we talk about how parental rights are in direct opposition to children’s rights? Next week, perhaps!), how the US is sponsoring a genocide, how the US incarcerates more children than any other country, how mental health is increasingly an issue for young children, and last but not least, how 42 House Republicans voted down a bill to extend free lunches for school children into the summer months.
All of this and more, angers me, and radicalizes me to care not only about how to live in partnership with children, how to respect them and fight adultism, but also how to do all this while also advocating for children’s basic rights to be housed, safe, and fed.
I fail to see how a society that doesn’t put children and young people at least on an equal footing to adults, if not at the centre of every single piece of legislation, can actually care about its own future.
If you, too, wonder whether consent-based education and unschooling matter when the entire system seems designed to strip children of their most basic rights, I wrote a bit about why it all still matters here. I’m not ready to stop talking about consent and unschooling quite yet!
WHAT I’M READING
I’ve almost finished reading Twelve Moons by Caro Giles. It’s a beautiful read that feels a bit like a very sad, but hopeful song.
I read an essay Ann Lamott wrote about Mother Rage in 1998, after a chat with a few others about Minna Dubin’s new book Mom Rage, and suffice it to say that Ann Lamott says something fundamental about the very specific and irrational rage we can sometimes feel as parents, and the way it is always, inevitably taken out on children. She writes:
One reason I think we get so angry mad at our children is because we can.
Who else can you talk to like this? Can you imagine hissing at your partner,
"You get off the phone NOW! No, NOT in five minutes ..."? Or saying to a
friend, "You get over here right this second! And the longer you make me
wait, the worse it's going to be for you." Or, while talking to a salesman at
Sear's who happens to pick up the ringing phone, grabbing his arm too hard and
shouting, "Don't you DARE answer the phone when I'm talking to you."
I think she is spot on. In a way, its not even that we’re mad BECAUSE of our children, it’s just that we’re mad and they are the only people we can take it out on, because nobody (apart from the family pet, perhaps) is lower than them in the hierarchy of humans.
Head’s up: this essay is not an easy to read. There is some hard stuff in there, or rather, just really uncomfortable stuff. But the thing is, it’s true or at least has been true for many of us.
Top of my Substack reads list this week was Ayesha Khan’s post about choosing connection over silence and Devon Price’s piece about how his disability is manufactured.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
I didn’t do a whole lot of listening this week, but P and I listened to the Catherine the Great episode on You’re Dead to me, which was pretty good (but aimed at adults!). We’re excited about the newest episode on the history of Kung Fu!
I’m going back and listening to some older Fare of the Free Child pod episodes, and there is SO MUCH goodness there. This week I listened to Akilah S. Richard’s speak to Leslie Bray about going from schoolish to self-directed. They talk about knowing our children, navigating technology, unschooling ourselves, and what self-direction can look like, and more.
Akilah S. Richards also runs a course by the same name, it’s super accessible and self-paced, and I’m working my way through it this week! Check it out here.
I enjoyed this convo between
and about the link between misogyny and anti-fat bias.
WHAT MY KIDS ARE INTO
P has been having loads of fun playing Dungeons and Dragons with her online self-directed community. Do your kids play? This is yet another game/trend I am failing to understand, and frankly I may not even try!
We found this book at the library and have been poring over it at mealtimes. I love that my children aren’t over these big DK books yet, and frankly neither am I! It’s making us all want to visit some of the natural wonders it features.
As always, thank you for being here!
Chat to me - comment below or reply to this email. I am always up for more conversation and discussion.
I hope your weekend is full of joy and connection!
Fran x
I think so often about what you said about feminism being equated with extricating ourselves from the work of the home and all the implications of that. I LOVE the book Essential Labor. I wish more people talked about these things and I want to talk about them more myself.
As a full time caretaker/home educator/parent in a pretty progressive community, I find people so often are not quite sure how to think of me. I don’t fit any of their boxes/stereotypes. I also receive comments at times like, “oh wow! Good for you! I could never do what you do. I’d lose my mind!” And while it’s couched as a compliment, I find it a bit insulting - both to me and to children.
My older kiddos are usually up past me. It took some time for me to adjust, and to trust that they would be ok without me up with them. Giving them freedom of figure out their own boundaries with screens with me asleep was also a challenge, but we have great conversations about their bedtimes and they talk about wanting to improve their routines and ideas they have for how to help themselves get to be earlier or remember to brush their teeth etc. I’ve realized it’s all rich learning - learning about themselves, what makes them tick, figuring out screen boundaries.
With D&D, my kids played with their dad for a while, and it’s a pretty fun role-playing game - character development, working as a team and negotiating how to handle challenges in the story. It’s actually pretty awesome! (From someone who was told it was evil growing up 😂)
All your points about kids in the US and Europe are spot on. I’ve heard Europe is more kid friendly, but kid friendly is not the same as respecting children as full people. And the lack of openness to homeschooling is off-putting as well. Guess we’ll have to keep putting up with the US - sigh.