On the front lines of our double-standards
Children's autonomy & resistence, and the way adults shield and expose them.
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I want to write a bit more expanding on last Monday’s post, because I’ve had so many more thoughts since then!
I think that when we talk about the ways children are victims of the violence and war of adults, we risk portraying children as helpless and powerless, and reinforcing the very same ideas and assumptions that our oppressive systems support. And then rather than empower children, rather than demonstrate how truly capable they are, how worthy of respect, this in turn legitimizes our control of them - because if they are helpless, then they need us to help and protect them. If they are innocent, then we know best.
Don’t get me wrong - children are very often victims of adult violence, in so many different ways. But they are not innocent or helpless. They are not voiceless or weak.
And I have been reminded of this once again this week, hearing my children talk about war and injustice and noticing how clear-sighted they are, how they are capable of holding multiple points of view at once, how they are able to listen and also to speak up.
I see this every single day, not only in my own children but in those we share space with at our co-op, and in the young people I am now regularly checking on who are bravely recording their own bombing and displacement in Gaza.
And it reminds me that children and youth have been at the forefront of radical movements for a long time. This is not new.
In 1951, 16 yr old Barbara Johns led a protest about the tough conditions in her Virginia high school, paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education which declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. The de-segregation of schools in much of the United States happened because of Black children and young people who showed an inordinate amount of courage and steadfastness in the face of racist bullying and all manner of individual and institutional discrimination.
School cheerleaders in Crystal City staged a walkout in 1969 over racist policies in their school district, kickstarting the Latino Rights movement in the US.
We all know about Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai and other young people who have led and are still leading their own movements.
More recently, during the Black Lives Matter protests, children were organizing and participating in marches, and youth of all backgrounds have been crucial in the movement for increased gun control and against gun violence in the US.
Once you look into it, the history of children’s activism is rich and goes way back.
Youth have been at the forefront of so many huge movements, from the Tiananmen Square protests to Indigenous Water Rights in North America, to the Vietnam War protests.
Schools and institutions have often been the focus of youth activism. In 1507, students at the university of Padua in Italy, rioted after professors cancelled their equivalent of Spring break.
Although youth activism solidified and became more organized and global in the second half of the 20th century, there is evidence that children and young people did organize and protest throughout history.
Most movements of children and youth centre around social issues, but at the core of every one of them (whether this is spoken or unspoken) is resistance to adult domination, and the decisions that adults are allowed to make for young people rather than encouraged to make with them, because of our history of domination.
At the root of most youth movements is the very basic issue of power - who holds it and exercises it, and who doesn’t.
Children have always resisted adult domination in so many ways, except we have often ignored or re-named their resistance to de-legitimise it. From refusal to comply with parental demands, to skipping school, to all sorts of other creative ways to rebel to adult authority, children and youth have made their voices known - and adults have so often labelled their resistance as “bad behaviour,” or chalked it up to there being something wrong with the child in question, rather than with the system. Rather than with the ways we, the adults, control children.
In her book A Different Way to Learn, Naomi Fisher speaks to this eagerness adults have to label any behaviour that veers from the desired behaviour, to label difference as deficit. In their chat below,
and talk about the ways we read children’s resistence to the norms of society as a character failure, rather than a statement about what is wrong with society, or as an intentional way to rebel and push back.
We love to talk about ‘rebellious teenagers’ as if rebellion were merely an inconvenient developmental phase, rather than an intentional, purposeful act. Perhaps rebellion deserves to be honored or at least heard, rather than immediately dismissed as a character flaw or ‘just a phase’.
Children and youth are marginalized by patriarchy, adultism and the intersection of other forms of oppression, but they are not powerless or voiceless. They do not need us to save them, or tell them how to get free.
They do need us to stand by them, hear them, be responsible for their care, be in solidarity with them, and centre their autonomy and consent.
I also think it’s worth remembering that children are not quite so powerless everywhere, and that stripping our children of autonomy is actually not something that all communities or cultures routinely do.
In some communities, children hold real power.
In some parts of India, children’s parliaments have made real changes to communities, working on improving living conditions and education. This documentary tracks the progress of some of these parliaments.
In many communities around the globe, children hold power because they are either breadwinners or contributing financially to their family. In a study of children who work in Peru and Portugal, one finding was that children were afforded more autonomy because they worked to help support their family.
And while I am not saying this is necessarily viable or desirable (although the conversation here is definitely full of grey areas, and perhaps one for another day!), it does point to the way that adults will in fact defer to children, and will listen to and be more willing to honor children’s decision-making when children hold more power within the family.
It does lead to a lot of thought around the ways that our protection of children can often result in their removal from everyday life (for example, by spending most of their time in school or child-centre spaces), and as a result in their disempowerment and in some ways shielding from participation in society, and as a result from being able to make decisions that matter.
Which leads me to believe that our ideas around children not being capable to make their own decisions, are partially derived from the fact many of our children don’t get to make their own decisions! It’s a self-fulfilling dynamic.
I feel like there is a whole lot of tension in the conflicting ways we relate to young people, and it all sits within us as adults and within the systems we’ve constructed.
One of the most obvious tensions to me is the way children have, thanks in large part to Rousseau, been seen as innocent, born fundamentally good, and therefore in need of shielding and protecting against the corruption of the world.
Portraying children as innocent is another way to silence them and keep them isolated and uninformed, much like the patriarchy has done and keeps doing to women. In fact, some of these very same points were used to keep women oppressed: our brains weren’t developed enough, we were too fragile, too innocent, incapable of making our own decisions.
These stories are a way to strip children of the inherent power and abilities they do in fact possess, and of their right to make sense of the world and play a part in society.
There is also tension between the ways we shield children and over-expose them, the way we want to take away all the pain and also believe they should suck it up, and the ways we use their pain as headlines but then fail to actually consult them on how to make change, to include them and their opinions in policy and decision-making.
Meanwhile, we feel okay exposing children to advertising and media that is designed to influence them, sometimes beyond what they are able to resist (much like it does to adults, in fact).
We expect them to face challenges and threats that are often borderline traumatic because how are they going to learn to live in the ‘real world’, then we ban books we think aren’t ‘age appropriate.’
We talk to them about war and death, and don’t allow them to choose what to wear and eat.
We over-schedule and control their days from fear that they will make decisions that will somehow ruin their lives (or that are, basically, at odds with the decisions we think they should make), while at the same time routinely making questionable decisions ourselves. Because we’re human. And that’s what we do, even as grown-ass adults.
Children are on the front lines of every war, conflict, and issue - or so it seems. They are often the first casualties, the pictures we parade in front of the world: blown to bits by bombs, stuck under rubble, killed in school shootings or by police.
And yet they are also on the front lines of our double-standards: banning abortion to ‘protect’ hypothetical future children while also gleefully putting 7 year olds in a jail’s solitary confinement in order to discipline them (and traumatize them for life); arming teachers to ‘protect’ their students, while also pathologizing and gaslighting children when they tell us they will not, cannot, go to school.
We are all complicit in this.
We home educate our children to allow them to live in the world, but then we only expose them to the sanitized, comfortable bits of the world.
We send our children to school so they will socialize and presumably learn things, and we ignore the ways school culture sometimes silences, dehumanizes and diminishes kids.
We want our children to be wild and free, but we don’t push for wildness and freedom to be accessible and affordable to all children.
We put our children’s faces on our social media for likes, but we don’t allow them to actually BE on social media, or access online spaces where they might feel seen.
I don’t think I’m navigating these tensions perfectly. I’m most definitely not. It feels almost impossible to, frankly.
But I am opening my eyes to them, and I am trying to point them out to my children (when they don’t point them out to me first! which happens way more often than I’d like it to).
Perhaps we could all begin to open up to the ways we manipulate our ideas around who children are, what they are capable of, and what they should be doing or seeing or knowing, to serve our own beliefs and agendas.
Perhaps that could be a start.
What do you think?
I think you would love this book:
For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State by Erica R. Meiners