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Every week until my new book It’s Not Fair: why it’s time for a grown-up conversation about how adults treat children is published on 20th June, I’ll be sharing a short excerpt from a chapter along with some discussion of why I wanted to include that particular topic.
Just a reminder before I begin that It’s Not Fair is available to preorder now. Preorders are SO important (you can read why here) and make such a big difference to how well a book does, especially for a small author whose book is with an independent publisher. As a thank you to everyone who preorders, I’ll be creating some special perks to send out nearer the time (so hold on to your receipt or order confirmation!)
In the UK, you can preorder online from any of the ‘big’ bookstores like Waterstones and Foyles, from Bookshop.org which supports independent bookstores, or directly from gorgeous indies like Pages of Hackney or The Feminist Bookshop in Brighton.
If you’re in the US, Blackwells in the UK offers free shipping to the States (and lots of other countries too!) and there are a few different options to preorder if you’re in Australia including Booktopia.
Today I’ll be sharing an except from chapter four of It’s Not Fair, titled Body Politics.
(You can read an excerpt from the introduction here, from How We See Children here, from Adultism here, and from Understanding Children’s Rights here.)
This chapter took me a while to get right, and I ended up cutting a lot from it as it grew overly long. It was always going to be tricky; many of the topics I’ve only been able to dedicate a paragraph or two to, such as fat children or queer children, could easily fill an entire book by themselves. I also ended up having to cut a big (but fascinating!) chunk of writing on the racist origins of statistics, and an interview with the wonderful Nicola Haggett.
As a writer it’s frustrating to cut things you’ve spent a long time researching and writing - especially when someone else has given you their time too - but I think that pace is really important in nonfiction books. It’s a really fine line between giving readers lots of fascinating information which they can draw connections between, and overloading them and leaving them with a headache. A lot of the ideas in It’s Not Fair will be new and/or challenging to readers, so it felt really important to keep the writing as clear and focused as possible (while still allowing for the little rabbit trails and anecdotes which bring books to life).
What I hope this chapter does is to provide a way of thinking about children’s bodies as deeply political. Children’s bodies are at once sites of intense adult control and interference, and children’s resistance, and we too often remain blinkered by the idea that there is one ‘good’ way for children’s bodies to look and behave.
Here I am writing about the concept of ‘normative’ bodies:
One of the first experiences of a child’s life is being measured. It’s so normal that it’s one of the standard questions new parents are asked: ‘How much did she weigh?’ My daughter hadn’t even been born for an hour, and I already knew her exact weight (and which centile this put her in), head circumference (ditto), and whether she’d been born ‘early’, ‘late’, or ‘on time’. Before we left the hospital the next day, my daughter had had her hearing tested, her eyes, heart, and hips checked, and been declared ‘perfectly normal and healthy’ by the midwife on duty.
This measuring, monitoring, and categorising starts in utero. During my pregnancy I had at least four scans, alongside regular midwife appointments where my growing bump was measured. And monitoring and measuring don’t end after the prenatal and newborn checks. Throughout childhood, there is a clearly defined set of standards — around body size, development, behaviour, and intellectual, social, and physical ability — that children are supposed to meet by certain ages. We can call this ideal standard the ‘normative child’.
Practically every aspect of the child’s body is held up for monitoring and assessment, with suggestions made for children who don’t fit the standard developmental norms. Some monitoring is undoubtedly helpful: as a parent, you want to know sooner rather than later if your child has a serious illness or will need some extra support to help them thrive. Many children benefit from interventions such as speech and language therapy , occupational therapy, or an assessment that shows them to be neurodivergent. But it’s not realistic to expect every child to follow the same developmental path — and if we know that, then is framing children who differ from the normative child as ‘behind’ or ‘delayed’ really the best we can do?
Measuring children against the norm or statistical average is not just carried out at the behest of health professionals; most parents I know have spent tens if not hundreds of hours on online forums and health websites trying to find out if such and such a behaviour is ‘normal’ — and second-guessing their own parenting, and their children, in the process. The popularisation of models such as attachment theory and widespread access to simplified articles on developmental psychology means that parents can now assess whether their child is developing as they ‘should’ be. The thousands of parenting books that paint their own picture of the normative child all add to the enormous pressure parents can feel to make their children fit a particular mould, and to the isolation, guilt, and sadness of parents whose children are following their own path. It’s a lot.
The very idea that there can be universal standards of development — which so happen to have been mostly developed by white Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries — ignores much of what we know about the rich variety of children’s lives. Measuring children against a set of standards is a blunt tool if we are really seeking to make their lives better — and surely, this should be the aim of all this assessment, otherwise we have to ask ourselves what the point is. Instead, perhaps we would be better off looking at the wider social structures that disadvantage children as a group, and certain children in particular. Finally, in creating a picture of the normal — ‘good’ — body, this in turn defines which bodies are deviant, abnormal, and ‘bad’, contributing to the marginalisation of certain groups of children.
This idea of the normative child can be applied to so many things: the behavioural expectations so many people have of children, our one-size-fits-all school curriculums, the ways in which disabled children are seen as less precious than their non-disabled peers, the moral panic we feel about children who question their gender identity…
The normative ideal has been the cause of much harm for children whose bodies and brains do not align with it. It’s not all doom and gloom though! We can create a society where there is space for all kinds of people.
Childhood can be death by a thousand cuts when it comes to our relationships with our bodies. We learn when we can speak out, what we can eat, what our bodies should be doing, and what we should look like, and — too often — we learn that we can’t trust ourselves or listen to our instincts. But it doesn’t have to be.
We might not be able to change laws and institutions directly — though we can campaign, write to our representatives, and agitate for change in children’s childcare settings and schools, join PTAs, and be active within our communities — but we can make a difference to how the children in our lives view their bodies.
The messages children receive from the world around them can either be challenged or reaffirmed by the adults around them, and having just one or two positive role models and allies in their lives — a teacher who uses their preferred pronouns, a parent who never brings up dieting, an aunt who sticks up for them at family dinners — can make a huge difference.
Body liberation is intimately tied up with children’s liberation, and I truly believe that change is possible on both fronts.
I hadn't made that connection before about the almost obsessive measuring of our babies in utero and newborn and the conditioning affect this has on new parents to do all they can to keep kids on a 'normal' track/trajectory. Looking forward to reading your book in full Eloise! Thanks for sharing these little snippets in the lead up.