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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. If you can, please order your copy soon - and then spread the word with friends, family, colleagues, and book-clubs!
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!)
You can preorder online from any of the ‘big’ bookstores like Waterstones and Foyles or from gorgeous independent bookstores like this one near Edinburgh and this one in Bath - or, if your local independent bookstore doesn’t show it online, you could pop in or phone them to ask them to order it in. The more we shop with independent booksellers, the more likely they are to stay open.
Adultism: the thread which ties everything together
Today I’ll be sharing a short except from chapter two of It’s Not Fair, which is simply called Adultism.
(You can read an excerpt from the introduction here, and from chapter one here.)
This chapter is - to my mind at least - the most important one in the whole book. It’s the chapter that I’d most like people to take the time to sit and engage with; the one that I’d ask people to choose if they could only read one.
I think it’s part of the reason the book has been described as ‘groundbreaking’, ‘paradigm-shifting’, ‘transformative’, and ‘possibly the most important book you’ll read all year’ by some early endorsers.
I’ll talk about why I think it’s so important in a moment, but first I want to share this short excerpt from the book with you:
Throughout history, those with power have used it to infringe upon those who have less. Many political movements around the world have sought to redress these social injustices, although there is still a long way to go. As men infringe on the rights of women and girls, as those racialised as white oppress and mistreat those racialised as Black, as disabled people are excluded from opportunities and the care they need to thrive, people speak out and fight back. Unlike misogyny, racism, or ableism, however, we lack the language to adequately talk about how adults use their power over children.
Philosopher Miranda Fricker has developed a useful concept that she calls hermeneutical injustice: injustice that occurs when people don’t have the language to talk about, describe, or understand what is happening to them. This can lead to our individual and collective experiences being obscured through a lack of shared language with which to interpret them (the word ‘hermeneutic’ simply means to do with interpretation). Fricker highlights that unless we can name an injustice it’s difficult to call it out and stand up against it, even if we have the strong feeling that something isn’t right. The example she gives is of sexual harassment in the workplace, something that women didn’t have the language to describe until the 1970s, despite knowing they hated it when their boss stared at their chest or slid a hand over their knee. Naming things is important: being able to say ‘I am experiencing sexual harassment’ matters a great deal, both for the person who is experiencing harassment and also so that their harasser can know without question that their actions are unacceptable.
Viewing children’s experiences through this lens of hermeneutical injustice shows us why we desperately need shared language to talk about the harm that children face. If a synagogue is vandalised, we are able to name it as an act of antisemitism; when a Black person is stopped and harassed by the police, it’s important that we can call this out as racism. Just think about how hard it would be to discuss and challenge antisemitism or racism if we didn’t have the specific language with which to do so. But when children are oppressed, abused, or harmed by adults, we lack the language to describe that this is an attack by a member of a powerful group (adults) against a member of a group which suffers prejudice and discrimination (children).
Naming the injustices children face is an important first step in challenging those injustices, so let’s find the language we need. The power imbalance between adults and children can be summed up by the term adultism, which I use to refer to the structural discrimination and oppression children face from adults, and society’s bias towards adults.
The chapter goes on to look at some ways of defining adultism, why language matters so much (and why I write about adultism rather than using the term childism), the structural nature of adultism, and how adultism affects children in their everyday lives.
But given that this book is for a general audience, rather than academics - I hope it will be read by parents, teachers, and all people interested in politics, social justice - why did I spend most of a chapter writing about a concept most people haven’t even heard of?
Well, the longer I do this work the more urgent I think it is for all of us to be able to name, understand, and fight against adultism. It’s a crucial missing part in the conversation about social justice, and without grappling with it I simply don’t think it’s possible to build a fairer, better world.
Adultism can be thought of as the thread which ties together the multiple injustices experienced by children.
Rising levels of child poverty. Violence against children. The abysmal funding offered to childcare providers and schools. The lack of mental health and specialist support services for children and their families, and the years-long waiting lists. The lack of compassion certain children face - Palestinian children, refugee children, disabled children for example - compared to others. Children’s lack of political power. Coercive parenting and education practices. The climate crisis.
I argue that none of these things can be properly tackled if we don’t understand the role adultism plays in causing them in the first place.
We’re getting better now at spotting the role of capitalism, or of patriarchy or racism, in creating a deeply unequal society. But unless we get to grips with adultism, we’ll always be missing a crucial part of the picture - and we’ll continue to view these issues in isolation, rather than seeing them as interconnected parts of a bigger picture.
Understanding adultism is vital not only for helping us understand how children’s experience the world now, but in making sense of our own childhoods. It’s also really important - and, I think, reassuring - for parents to realise how much harder adultism makes it for them to enjoy their relationship with their children, and to recognise that there is an alternative to the top-down, adult-child power dynamic so many of us were raised with.
Adultism is all around us, but it’s not the only way.
As I go on to write,
Understanding what adultism is and being able to start spotting where and how it shows up in children’s lives is the first crucial step towards dismantling it and working towards what might be termed children’s liberation.
And really, that right there is the reason I wrote this book, the driving force behind all of those late nights and missed family celebrations. Because I want to contribute, in whatever small way I can, to building a children’s liberation movement.
Children’s liberation is not some crazy concept I’ve come up with myself! As I write in the chapter,
Children’s liberation is not a new idea. It first took shape as a movement in the 1970s, with a series of books by writers such as John Holt and A. S. Neil that argued that ‘the rights, privileges, duties of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them’.
The children’s liberationists of the 70s were bold, exciting, brilliant thinkers. But the idea does, I think, need some updating - these writers were sharing their ideas before well before the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - and in the book I’ve offered some suggestions for what a modern children’s liberation movement might look like (with the acknowledgement that I am writing as an adult, and that this is a subject where we need to turn to children’s leadership).
I’m excited to see where this might take us, which ideas and connections it might spark, and how people respond to it.
So this is my invitation to you: buy the book (or ask your local library to order it for you), read the book, and come and join the conversation.
And if you’re excited by what you read, send me a message - and let’s figure out how we can work together to make this world a better place for children, and for all of us.
I've just pre-ordered from Bookshop.org and am looking forward to reading the book.
I remember a conversation I had with another mum when our kids were little. We were talking about friends and friendship and I was saying something about my children being my friends. She said that parents can't be friends with their own children and her reasoning was basically that parents need to have authority over their children - for their safety and welfare... and I guess so they grow up "correctly".
Perhaps it's because I'm autistic and don't really "do" hierarchy, but this makes no sense to me. My children have always been individual, autonomous people to me, each with their own feelings, interests, personalities, as much as any of my adult friends.
Children are oppressed in so many ways, from arbitrary school rules to the Cass review, from the Prevent programme to the thousands dying from imposed starvation and bombing in Gaza. And "child protection" is invoked to deny children their rights.
I recommend everyone to read John Holt's "How Children Fail" and John Taylor Gatto's speech/essay on what schools really teach children, in "Dumbing Us Down", as well as getting your book!