On the Children and Whether Anybody Will Think of Them, Part Two:

The War on Children

Consider these two stories from March.

In early March, conservative author Bethany Mandel appeared on The Hill’s Rising program with Briahna Joy Gray. At one point in the conversation, Gray asked Mandel to define “woke” as the word had come up in the conversation several times and Mandel had dedicated an entire chapter to the concept in her book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation. Mandel struggled with this seemingly simple question and in real time she predicted that the moment would become viral. 

Spoiler Alert: It did.

Later in the month, the Tallahassee Classical School in Florida forced its principal to resign over showing sixth graders a picture of Michaelangelo’s David without prior warning to parents. A few parents complained to the school that their children had been exposed to pornography. Tallahassee Classical School specializes in classical education, a particular pedagogy that focuses on the great art and literature of the Western Canon. It’s affiliated with Hillsdale College and its network of K-12 charter schools that promises an anecdote to “woke” public schooling and to protect parents' rights. In this case, these two goals appear to be in conflict as some parents exercised their right to shield their children from the most famous fictional dick in the world. 

These two stories are mostly trivial, completely hilarious, and most importantly they are indicative of how the reactionary right’s fight to protect children is progressing. Tilting at undefinable windmills while eventually eating its own. That’s because this fight isn’t really about protecting children but rather generating moralistic cover for bigoted attitudes. Woke is just another word for the same social progressive liberalism that has existed for decades and has yet to destroy the concept of childhood. 

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a war on children. There is, and it's as old and American as apple pie. 

The Parents are all rights

There is a particular tension at the heart of the “protect kids” discourse. That is the tension between the role of the state in protecting youth and developing responsible citizens and the rights of parents to have a say in their child's development. This is a worthwhile debate to have. There are plenty of things that I wouldn’t want my child to learn in school, like the idea that capitalism is the best economic system in the world. However, I see my responsibility as a parent to talk to my child and help them process concepts they may encounter in the real world that I don’t agree with. Personally, I don’t want the state to prevent me from having those conversations. 

Others may disagree but there actually needs to be a real conversation as to why some parents’ rights trump the rights of others, such as the right for the parent of a trans child to send them to a school that doesn’t treat them like a disgraceful aberration. However, a quick trip through the history of “parents' rights” as a rhetorical point of political formation reveals that there is something else driving it besides a simple concern for child welfare. 

The first uses of “parents' rights” as a political talking point can be found in opposition to early 20th-century laws in England and America against child labor, child cruelty and neglect, and laws that established secular public education. These laws were meant to establish children as a protected class with rights as opposed to the chattel property of their parents. There was significant pushback from these proposals, mostly from religious figures sensing a threat to the patriarchal family structure. This initial invocation of parents' rights was not about protecting kids from sensitive subjects and predators but preserving the rights of parents to neglect, abuse, and sell their kids into labor without state interference. 

Parents' rights soon became the moral backbone of pro-segregated school arguments. Not incidentally, the right of parents to save their children from interacting with Black kids was the genesis of the private religious school industry and the concept of school choice. Once we get to the 1950’s we find ourselves fully in the Red Scare and parents demanded the right to make sure their kids weren’t exposed to books and lessons that didn’t fully and unequivocally denounce communism as pure evil.

And we can keep this up with issues like the Satanic Panic and Ebonics. The overall point is that the traditional use of parents' rights as a political rallying cry has been to represent a minority of reactionary parents demanding the state reaffirm reactionary worldviews on their behalf. The actual interests of children are made invisible behind the politics of people who happened to have procreated. What is more damaging to kids, a drag queen story hour that most of them will never attend or watching their parents full of deranged anger threatening their teachers over inclusivity?

Political fights based on parents' rights are, almost by rule, always astroturfed and funded by reactionary political projects and capitalist elites looking to erode democracy at every level. However, it’s important to note that the war on children is not so simple as disingenuous parents using their kids to enforce their perspectives on everyone else versus an honest state looking to protect the best interests of kids and nurturing productive citizens. 

The Government Hates Kids Too

On February 17, a Black Family of seven was traveling home to Georgia through Tennessee when they were pulled over for a minor traffic violation. A cop searched the vehicle and found five grams of weed, which is a misdemeanor in Tennessee. Deonte Williams was arrested for the offense, while his partner Bianca Clayborne was cited and allowed to follow officers back to the courthouse to bond Williams out of jail. Unbeknownst to Clayborne, Tennessee child services had requested and received an emergency court order to remove her children due to “serious neglect”. Her five kids, including a breastfeeding 2-month-old newborn, were forcibly removed from her care at the Tennessee courthouse. 

Williams and Clayborne have been fighting to get their kids back ever since. 

Much as the political discourse around parent’s rights has been geared toward enforcing the view of some parents on everyone else sending kids to school, the conversation around child welfare has often been a mechanism for the state to punish Black and poor parents, and by extension punish their kids. 

This dynamic occurs at the intersection of good ole fashioned American racism and rugged individuality. Systemic problems affecting the development of children are ignored in favor of punishing parents for their poor choices and perceived irresponsibility. And as is the tradition in this country, rules and laws around child welfare are always disproportionately enforced on marginalized communities and surplus labor populations. 

While early parents' rights movements fought to keep children as the chattel property of parents, the state saw the children of poor and minority people as little more than future fodder for the crushing gears of industrial production at best. And at worst, a surplus population that needed to be contained or else become a drain on polite society.

The practice of convict leasing has become more prevalent in historical conversations around racism in recent years. Convict leasing functioned as slavery 2.0 in the post-reconstruction south, with Black people, including children as young as 12, arrested for breaking laws clearly designed to trap them in the legal system where a coterie of local officials and business interests could exploit their labor under the guise of law and order. There was a moralistic component to this practice that made it more palatable and easier to ignore for wealthy white people conditioned to reject slavery as an acceptable practice but were nevertheless inclined to believe that subjecting people to hard labor and abuse was an effective method of reforming potential criminality. 

Journalist Josie Duffy Rice put a human face to this dehumanizing practice in her investigative podcast on the Mt. Meigs Reform School in Alabama. Initially called the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers, residents of Mt. Meigs were often taken straight from a courthouse to the school, sometimes with their parents unable to learn where they had been taken. Once there, the kids were subjected to brutal labor working the school's farmland and both sexual and physical abuse. Far from reform, many of the children suffered trauma and were deprived of healthy socialization leading to many legal and psychological issues for those who eventually left. 

While the example of Mt. Meigs may present as a racialized extreme example of perceived juvenile delinquency being used as cover for abuse and exploitation, the reality is that this has become the norm for kids coming from poor and marginalized backgrounds. In 1964 15-year-old Gerald Gault was living in Arizona and because he was living in Arizona, he was bored. He and a friend decided to call up a neighbor and prank her with lewd comments. The neighbor called the police and Gault was arrested, and taken before a judge without a hearing, lawyer, or even his parents aware of his detainment. His habitual delinquency was established by citing one example of associating with another kid who had committed petty theft and he was sentenced to a prison-like reform school until he was 21. 

Because this was Arizona in the 1960s, children had no right of appeal in legal sentencing. Juvenile justice was considered to be a purely civil matter. Gault's parents took his case to the Supreme Court where they won and children accused of breaking laws were finally granted basic legal protections. Despite this well-earned victory, social attitudes toward “delinquents” and their parents remained quite reactionary and cruel. This eventually became a central part of the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the 80s and the neoliberal revolution in the Democratic Party of the 1990s. Here is where Hilary Clinton’s infamous super predator remarks come into the conversation as well as Kamala Harris’s gleeful prosecution of parents with truant kids. And of course, the birth of the school-to-prison pipeline.

The systemic abuse of problem children became a commodified industry with private corporations jockeying for involuntary residents and state funds for their newly built juvenile detention centers. All industrial complexes are inherently destructive but the prison industrial complex with its insatiable appetite for destroying lives has been particularly gruesome for the kids caught in it. In 2011, two Pennsylvania judges were charged and convicted in what became known as the Cash for Kids scandal. Through a mutual friend who owned and operated private for-profit prisons, the judges received cash kickbacks for sentencing minors to time in juvenile detention centers for ridiculous offenses, including one girl who was sent away for making negative comments about a vice principal on social media.  

It’s more than worth considering this history of the state's zeal for removing kids from parents when government officials spend their time attacking the supportive teachers and parents of trans kids. 

For the Kids

Let's wrap up this conversation about kids by briefly talking about parents. Welfare reform has done more long-lasting and serious damage to kids than any imaginary cabal of trans-friendly educators and drag queens could ever hope to achieve. Lost in the conversation about entitlement spending and how to pay for the social safety net is the effect of cutting welfare on the kids living in dependent households. Research has shown that providing material assistance to families struggling with poverty and precarity results in the children of those families being more likely to stay in school, graduate, and find employment, and be less likely to require government assistance when they grow up. 

The war on drugs, founded on a racist political strategy, has separated countless kids from their parents on extremely specious grounds as evidenced by the aforementioned case of Deonte Williams and Bianca Clayborne. School underfunding and privatization has deprived kids of accessing a quality education much more so than tepid social justice initiatives and DEI administration.

Any conversation about the welfare of children that ignores their material needs in favor of abstract moral hazards should be treated as deeply unserious. And yet here we are with children drinking lead-laden water, living in insecure housing arrangements, starving at school, stressed out by unnecessary standardized testing based on pseudoscience and eugenics, and attempting to learn in dilapidated buildings with nonfunctioning HVAC systems, with nowhere near the same level of news coverage and political energy currently devoted to a few peoples weird hang-ups with queer identity. 

We need to be clear that ignoring the real needs of kids in this country is a bipartisan effort, from Republicans making student’s menstrual cycles a matter of public record to Democratic politicians dismissing their very substantive fears about climate change. While my personal opinion on gun reform is complicated, it remains baffling that our politics cannot muster any agreement on simple gun reform when kids keep getting murdered. 

The good news is that these bad actors in the discourse on protecting kids are a minority. A vocal minority with an outsized platform, but a minority nonetheless. Across the country, both elections and polling show that most parents aren’t interested in a culture war for the minds of their kids. They just want to send them to a functioning public school. 

That is energy that needs to be nurtured by the left used to advocate for the material needs of kids, rather than the ideological whims of their parents. And hopefully one day we can translate “thinking about the children” into actually improving their environments and giving them a real chance to grow and become the people they want to be. 

Solidarity Forever.