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Folks listen up and take notice! If you are a parent, teacher, caretaker of children, or at all interested in the welfare of children in any way, and you care about the future wellbeing of the world we live in, I urge you to become familiar with Elizabeth Young-Breuhl’s work on “childism,” or the systematic, structural oppression and exploitation of children. This month’s wonderful, important idea is “childism.” While not actually coined by Elizabeth Young-Breuhl, she goes farthest in articulating its importance and relevance in “confronting prejudice against children.” Based on the models of sexism and racism, “childism” conceptualizes how children are targeted as a group, and can “guide us to an understanding of various behaviors and acts against children as instances of stereotyping children and childhood.” Drawing on seminal/ovular feminist and anti-racist movements, anti-fascism, and Prejudice Studies, she grounds her theory of systematic  prejudice against children, “childism,” within a general theory of how prejudice works to legitimate forms of violence, exploitation and identity erasure. Young-Breuhl argues persuasively and compellingly that  adult individuals, acting within collective identities, project fears and fantasies onto children with the aim of manipulating them, exploiting them and eliminating them.

She is well aware that there might be some skepticism as to why we would need a notion of “childism.” Don’t “we” in general love children and want what is best for them? Yes, there might be a few bad apples that do vile things to children but those are bad people right? In general “we” love children and take care of them properly. “We” as adults are not in general against children as a group. But then there are the facts. Why does the United States of America imprison more of its children than any other nation in the world? Why does it medicate more of its children than any other nation in the world with anti-depressants, stimulants and anti-psychotics? Why does the majority of sexual and physical abuse happen within the child’s family? Why do today’s children spend so little time outdoors? Why do children seem to be increasingly enmeshed in a narcissistic net of social media, selfies, and consumer capitalism? Why do parents and schools seem to think it is okay to indoctrinate children into specific ideologies and belief systems? Why do we tolerate huge inequalities and disparities in educational opportunities and adequate healthcare for children?

So why do we treat children, who we ostensibly love and are concerned  for their wellbeing, so badly? Elizebeth Young-Breuhl isolates three elementary forms of fantasy that feed prejudice, “and shows how each is reflected in one of the three prejudice forms of which sexism, racism and anti-Semitism are representative. In brief, there are fantasies about being able to self-produce and own the self-produced offspring; fantasies about being able to have slaves, including sex-slaves; and fantasies about being able to eliminate something/someone who is felt to be an existential threat to one’s identity. Childism combines all three forms of prejudice in the form of 1) a narcissistic desire to erase the child’s identity and reproduce adult identities; 2) an hysterical desire to manipulate and exploit children for the “benefit” of perverse adult identities; and 3) an obsessional desire to eliminate children perceived as a threat to certain adult identities.

So when we incarcerate children at record levels and remove them from society without any comprehensive, skillful program of support and rehabilitation,, nevermind questioning  why these children came to be incarcerated in the first place, we are indulging in prejudice against children that figures them as wild, violent, out of control, and incorrigible. These children are figured, understood as, threats to the social order,  and they both deserve to be, and adult society requires, that they be “removed” from, eliminated from society (that incarcerated youth is predominately youth of color just shows the intersectionality of different forms of prejudice and power).

When children are sexually assaulted at a rate of 20% for girls and 8% for boys, and that 95% of these children will be sexually assaulted by someone they know and “trust,” we are living in a society where a prejudice against children legitimates the use and exploitation of their bodies for adult sexual desires ( the statistics around child sexual abuse are difficult to pin down but the general picture is horrifying : https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/12-confronting-statistics-on-child-sexual-abuse_us_587dab01e4b0740488c3de49).

And perhaps most problematically, since well intentioned adults seem to be blind to the problem, when we as a society (parents, schools, cultural institutions)  think it’s okay to indoctrinate children in belief systems antithetical to critical thinking, “self-determination,” and democratic decision making, we are participating in a society where prejudice against children legitimates a fantasy project of narcissistic control that makes children the property of their adult caretakers.

At the heart of Elizabeth Young-Breuhl’s account of childism is a willful ignorance, indifference and neglect of children’s needs and lives. In other forms of prejudice we probably don’t look carefully enough at how indifference and ignorance function in reproducing racial and gender inequality. But I think especially with children we shy away from the difficult work of both dealing with the messy needs of “immature,” dependent human beings, and providing opportunities for children to become autonomous, critical, creative adult subjects who can participate fully in democratic culture and society. I see evidence of this form of childism in the massive over medication of young people, in sterile, non-progressive schooling, in the corralling of children in schools,  and in the passive handing over of children to the dream factories of the culture industry.

childism

Noun

1. A prejudice and/or discrimination against the young 
2. A systematic condition that promotes stereotypes of the young

Origin  child+ ism

Just as in other forms of structural, systematic prejudice, where it is not enough to simply be “against” racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, it is not enough to be against childism. We have  to learn about how it operates and functions in all aspects of child-rearing, education, inculturation, and socialization. We have to examine how each one of us, and “we” as different collectivities, participate in continuing to promulgate the negative effects of a systematic, structural “childism” that shapes the forms of life through which we raise successive generations. Ultimately, we have to dismantle the ways of thinking, habitual ways of operating, and the implicit assumptions of childism, and discover and create new ways of taking care of, educating, and being with children.

Specifically, we need to examine how we get sucked into legitimizing force and violence against children as a teacher, parent and member of society; how we participate in the exploitation of children by looking the other way instead of confronting the sexual, economic, and psychological exploitation of children; how we end up erasing the child’s identity and natality because we want to reproduce in them the ideological positions we feel comfortable with; and how we ignore and are indifferent to children’s lives because we are caught up in our own egotistical projects and desires.

There is a lot here to explore, discuss and act upon. While there are many ways to misinterpret and misapply the insights to be gained from a robust  understanding of “childism,” (many of which Elizabeth Young-Breuhl anticipates and discusses), the importance of the concept of “childism” in fighting the oppression, exploitation and neglect of children is indisputable. Young-Breuhl situates her work in the history of efforts to advocate for children’s well-being, and protect children from the rapacious desires of the adult world. She cites the  1959 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the emergence of psychoanalytic and developmental psychological knowledge about the “best interests” of the child, and child advocacy organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund, as touchstones in the struggle against childism. In particular, she cites the guidelines of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child that highlight the three P’s: Provision of basic needs, Protection from adults and other children who would do them harm, and educational opportunities and life experiences that would allow children to Participate in political and cultural life. She describes her book as a manifesto and a “working paper for all who who are fighting against the oppression of children, both those who recognize it as a result of prejudice and those who do not.” 2019 being right around the corner, 30 years after the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, isn’t it time we as parents, teachers, child welfare advocates and concerned, enlightened adults take action and fight for the welfare and wellbeing of all children?