In defense of children

Cross-posted at Feministe.

I was going to have a different post for you today but it’s been one of those days where I keep getting my Outrage Button jabbed so I’m going to have to write about child rights instead.

This morning I woke up to a three year old who had just brushed her teeth and gotten herself dressed and packed her own bag for creche (her father was up with her and had made her breakfast, but she did the other stuff herself because she wanted to.) She woke me with a kiss and a good morning mama and then I put the kettle on and opened up Twitter, where I was confronted by #youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom in trending topics.

You can check out the thread yourself, but I will say that these tweets could be loosely categorised as Intended as Gentle Humour (‘#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom Twilight’); Outright Bigotry (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom speaking/#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom any public places I can’t stand their screaming); Violence and Abuse (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom Everywhere except the gallows/#youngkidshouldbebannedfrom anywhere except a rusty cage); Slut Shaming (#youngkidshouldbebannedfrom wearing makeup/dressing slutty); Disdain and Erasure (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom the word love they don’t even know what it means/#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom thinking they are grown); Parent Blaming (#youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom going outside until their parents teach them manners/going anywhere if their parents can’t control them) to what amounted to Rape Threats and ‘Jokes’ about Sexual Abuse (I won’t quote those).

Now, I included the little preamble about my daughter this morning here for a reason. My reality is that I live with a child. My reality is that I parent a child. My reality is that this week, when my husband is home from work and I have paid child care arranged for hours I’m actually not doing paid work is an anomaly. I’m the primary carer for a small person. Excluding her from places excludes me. Saying she is less than human in any way (incapable of real love, not deserving of rights) erases what I do and belittles me, as well as her.

I don’t care about questioning anti-child bigotry only because I am a parent (it is certainly true that plenty of parents don’t really recognise that children are people) but also because I am a feminist. Misogyny and child hate are bound so closely together (partly because most primary carers are women so in practical terms excluding or vilifying children means excluding or vilifying women) that they feed each other. If you’re all for calling out misogyny, then anti-child bigotry ought to be on your list too.

The #youngkidsshouldbebannedfrom hashtag genuinely upset me, and not only because it included some violent, triggery stuff (although, making jokes about child abuse is on the same level as making rape jokes: that is, scores about a billion on the douchebag metre). It upset me because the bigotry was so blatant and yet it exists in a world where so many continue to deny that anti-child bigotry is A Thing. Substitute any group of people for the words ‘young kids’ in that hashtag and then tell me it’s not bigotry. Read through how many of the responses sound like stuff you’ve heard said about children and parents, even stuff you’ve heard said about children and parents on Feministe or other feminist sites, and tell me we don’t have a problem.

One of the issues is that children are so often erased in our culture. There are places you expect to see children (schools, playgrounds, maybe the supermarket, children’s books, movies and televison) and places you don’t expect to see them (a lot of other public spaces, as well as books, movies and television made for adults). And this means that many non-parents (and some parents) lack reminders that children are diverse, well-rounded, fully realised (though still growing and developing) people.

I’ve recently watched Season Four of The Wire (yeah, I’m really slow) and I found it particularly compelling because, unlike just about every other television series I’ve watched lately, it treated children and teenagers as characters in their own right. I had some pretty big misgivings about the potential for stereotypes (particularly with the ‘white teacher saves children of colour in rough school’ narrative) and there were many problematic elements (the ‘good’ mothers are white, and almost all of the mothers are blame-worthy) but on balance I think the show did a pretty good job of illuminating ways that systems like schools, welfare and foster care let children down, often precisely because children have no voices. ‘Kids don’t vote.’ But I don’t think that the (perhaps heavy-handed) political message was the most important aspect of the season’s treatment of kids. What mattered to me as a viewer was that they were there. They were interesting, they had personalities and internal conflicts and they were given some screen time in their own right.

More depictions of children and teenagers as individual human beings in popular culture won’t solve systemic problems like child abuse and neglect. But it would help, I think, if more of us asked why we don’t see children and teenagers in positive or at least nuanced portrayals in media that is meant for adult audiences. Why don’t we consider children to be fully realised characters, or their stories to be compelling?

What would also help make the world a better place for children (and ultimately adults) is if more people took it upon themselves to push against this insidious form of bigotry. You don’t have to be a parent to know that prejudice, hateful language, physical and sexual abuse and discrimination is not okay. And you don’t have to live with a three year old, as I do, to know that children are people. Those of us who care for children and practise feminist parenting could do with a little help on this one.

But the first step to dealing with a problem is acknowledging that you have one, right?

Take a step.

Further Reading:
Television’s Kid Problem by s.e. smith at this ain’t livin
Adult Privilege Checklist by anji at Mothers For Women’s Lib
The radical notion that children are people by me at Spilt Milk

(Comments closed for now at Feministe. Those of you who’ve seen past threads on this stuff know why. I’ll keep them open here though because I know some regular readers might have something to say.)

Get junked

Over at Discourse, Samantha Thomas has a post up about a nasty little stunt pulled by The Precinct.*

The ad agency has produced an advertisement depicting a woman offering her child a burger as if it is the same as her injecting him with heroin. Which it totes is, of course. A meal containing carbohydrates, protein and fat which can be legally purchased at any number of outlets and is cheap, filling and deemed safe for human consumption is so easily confused with breaking the law to score a highly addictive and sometimes lethal drug and then forcibly injecting it into the arm of a minor. I mean, god, they’re practically the same thing!

Or, um, not.

(For the full horror, you can watch the video at Samantha’s blog or read my description below**.)

There are so many things I could rant about over this but I’ll restrict myself to two related aspects of UTTER JAW-DROPPINGLY CRAP-ASS FAIL.

The first is the complete glossing over of the realities of food production, marketing, availability and consumption by whichever douche-bag came up with this metaphor and thought it was a clever idea. Setting aside for a moment the obvious fact that ‘junk food’ is not illegal, it is also not a recreational drug. It may not provide optimal nutrition but it is still food and it still provides the body with energy – and whilst we arguably don’t need to get high, we certainly do need to eat. Or we die. Simple. Not only that, but we need to eat what is available to us. We need to eat what food producers provide, what is available to us in terms of budget and location and yes, what is palatable and what we want. Even if there was any worth in the burger-as-drug analogy it would pay to remember not to get the dealers and the users  mixed up, right?

Which brings me to my second point. The Precinct obviously thinks it’ll gain industry cred for being all edgy and original here but there is nothing at all original about laying the blame squarely at the feet of the mother. This is a blame-the-mother narrative pure and simple. To borrow a Lily Allen line, it’s not big and it’s not clever. A mother who fails to feed her child to whatever standard The Precinct would approve is simply painted as abusive. Never mind the systemic barriers to ‘healthy’ diets that some families face, never mind that a burger is not a lethal drug, never mind that it is just one burger, never mind that her child appears to be otherwise safe and happy because a loving home is not enough, people. A loving home will never be enough when the OMG OBESITY CRISIS BOOGA BOOGA could come and kill us all at any moment.

Sure, mothers have a responsibility to their children. And that means feeding them. And hopefully, educating them about their bodies and encouraging healthful behaviours and even, in a perfect world, teaching them how to cook and shop and even grow their own food. That’s all fabulous, no argument from me there.

But what about fathers? What about other family members? What about food producers and retailers? What about regulators of advertising and marketing to children? What about health policy makers (whose current focus on weight loss promotion instead of lifting barriers to healthful behaviours like eating fresh food and moving around a lot isn’t helping anyone)? The Precinct doesn’t seem to care much about them.

I mean, why take on the multi billion dollar food industry, or government health policy, or men, when you can tackle the really difficult targets — like women who are just trying to feed their children?

• *They say to raise awareness and draw attention to the dire problem of childhood obesity: you don’t have to be a cynic to see it’s more about drawing attention to their agency and yeah, I’m giving them attention for it, so I guess it worked.

• ** Video Transcript: In a darkened and shadowy room, a boy aged about 3 sits at a kitchen table. He has short blond hair and wears a bright blue t-shirt. He has an open colouring book and plenty of crayons and is studiously drawing. A dark-haired, thin woman wearing a white shirt, knee-length printed skirt and over-sized blue jumper enters the room and sits down at the table. Ominous music begins to play. She opens a paper bag and begins to pull things out and line them up on the table. She has a teaspoon, a cotton ball and a syringe. The camera cuts to a shot of her son happily scribbling. She opens a small package of powder, presumably heroin. She uses a lighter and the spoon to prepare it for injection and fills the syringe. She then produces a black strip of cloth and ties a tourniquet around the boy’s upper arm: he looks worriedly at her but says nothing. She then pushes a napkin into the neck of his t-shirt and suddenly the tourniquet and drug paraphenalia are gone and they are both holding hamburgers. The boy looks at his mother as they simultaneously raise burgers to their mouths and take a bite. The screen goes black and white text appears. It reads ‘You wouldn’t inject your children with junk/ so why are you feeding it to them?/CHILDHOOD OBESITY. Break the habit.’ ‘

In your dreams, baby

Lately I’ve been dreaming I’m pregnant. When I’m asleep, that is. During the day I’m so very not-pregnant that no one even bothers anymore to say oooh, maybe you’re pregnant when I complain of nausea or tiredness. This could be because I’ve made it so abundantly clear to anyone who’ll listen that I’m Not Ready or perhaps it’s just that everyone knows I go to bed exhausted at about 8:30 these days and nobody believes in immaculate conceptions anymore. Where’s the faith, people?

I think there are three types of pregnant dreams. The first are just plain bizarre (the baby is a green martian with George Clooney’s face/the person having the dream is a man, or Paris Hilton.) Others are wishful thinking (the woman wakes feeling warm… then empty). And the third kind: nightmares (not really any need for explanation here, is there?)

I think my dreams have been a heady cocktail of the latter two types. Being pregnant with Little Bean was such a magical experience. If I conveniently forget the weeks spent more attached to a bucket than any other person or object, that is. But there really is something awesome about literally being pregnant with expectation. Reading all the books and talking quietly into the night about how little foetus is now the size of a walnut or a grapefruit. Musing over names and equipment and imagining future family holidays (back before I learned that Family Holiday is an oxymoron). Feeling utterly connected.

Honestly I think that the Bean’s decision to wean has increased my nostalgia for those womb days. I guess breastfeeding is a kind of dynamic umbilicus and feeling the loss of it can lead to yearnings. And tantrums muffled by a few litres of amniotic fluid might be a little quieter too. Is that why mothers of toddlers still bravely get themselves knocked up again? So they can at least have someone quiet in their family, if only for a few months?

Anyway, these dreams are simply that. Given that I still haven’t recovered from the emotional shock of the early weeks with The Bean, having two children is pretty much my nightmare scenario right now. And the possibility of having twins keeps me awake at night (counting days to see if a period is late takes time, you know.)

Deep down I know that the longing will win out over the fear sooner or later. Part of me can’t wait. Right now though, the other part of me is going to take advantage of nap time and make a cup of tea because we all know that if I have another kid that won’t be happening. Except in my dreams.