The return of the child liberationist.

For a long time a child liberationist was the last thing anyone who spoke for chid rights wanted to be. Have they been vindicated?

Has there been a revival of the traditional child liberationist? After the influx of texts like those of John Holt, Richard Farson, Shulamith Firestone and the child liberation and deschooling movement, there was a slow process of deradicalization among those who wrote about the topic of rights for children. Child liberationists were deemed an aberration of a time past, and everyone started espousing the UNCRC restrictive model of child rights. Even the most “extreme” of those activists limited themselves on discussing children’s, always limited, “participation” in adult tailored systems. Child liberationist were imputed of the worst of the worst, including pedophilia apologism (even though it’s opposers have never been able to name as clear cut solutions to the problem of incest as liberationists did) and “ignoring children’s differences”. For a long time Holt, Farson, Firestone and some other lesser known names like Howard Cohen couldn’t be mentioned in academia. Certainly, in many ways the new childhood sociology represented the theory of child liberation, even if they are admittedly opposed to the practice. Jens Qvortrup defined new childhood sociology as a conceptual liberation of children, and then promptly assured his respectable white adult middle class readership that didn’t also imply their political liberation. But while complete approaches like that of Holt are no longer common, the more recent years have produced a lot of writing that could be classified as representing a liberationist mindset. Levine and Angelides on the topic of sex, Alderson on the topic of medical autonomy, Liebel on the topic of work, Wall and Cummings on the topic of politics. The importance of their writings can hardly be overstated. Some of these names do actually disavow child liberationists in their works, but they will never admit that Holt would have hardly found any objections with the things they have to say. Perhaps the reason why the topical approach has seemed more approachable to academics in the recent years is that it sounds less angry. Child liberationists had the bad fame of being often quite furious, Shulamith Firestone penning down “CHILDHOOD IS HELL” in her infamous chapter on the abolition of childhood that the feminists who abandoned child liberation would rather ignore. Part of the reason why they gained such a bad reputation was the angry attacks towards the “sacred” institution of the nuclear family and of political power as the historical preserve of adults (the way this came to be is chronicled in “By Birth Or Consent”), calm, subdued pleas for children to be beaten less hard tend to be received quite well by enlightened liberals. But maybe today we cast away some of the fear of uncovering why Firestone was so mad. A new generation of child liberationists, among whom you could name people like Yves Bonnardel and Samantha Godwin, has been born. New books have been written. Unschooling, the more recent and common term for deschooling, is being spoken about more and more each day. And, child liberationist ideals, now named under the more inclusive name of “youth liberation”, have become a core tenet of contemporary anarchist thought. How easy it was for this ideas to spread among anarchists proves that integrating children into the adult democracy maybe after all fruitless, like opposers of child liberation claimed, the only way to attain liberation for children might as well be the total destruction of the state. I wonder why those insisting on (highly hierarchical) politics of difference would react to that. Those surprised at the way child liberationist ideals reached the mainstream during those years, so much so that child abuse prevention manuals kept quoting them in the 80s, would be even more surprised to see how youth liberationist ideals are reaching the mainstream now. Ferocious critique of the education system “Don’t Stay In School” currently has 46 million views on YouTube, and on the Internet teenagers routinely navigate spaces where youth liberationist ideals, even if maybe not explicitly called that, are spread. There is also been lots of reaction, but so there was to the original child liberation movement, this reaction not just from older people but often from teenagers themselves, who spit “minor” at each other and cultivate age hierarchies that feel sometimes as strong as those you could expect in a British boarding school of the late nineteenth century. But it is encouraging to see that a lot of people can come to the same conclusions as those of the child liberationists without even naming the movement. The opposite phenomenon is also true, the increasing popularity of the term has made some people confused in regards to the difference between youth liberation and “child rights” like the “right” to be forced into schools or the “right” to be owned by a family, defined by adults and granted by adults. But this could have been seen as unprecedented only a few years ago. Youth liberationist ideals have left their niche and no one knows what will happen next. And in many ways, the politics of youth liberation seem to be one of the leading causes of conflict these days between conservative and leftists. Issues like banned books can be watered down to how much you think young people have a right to know, and issues like access to transition for trans youth can be watered down to whether or not you believe in young people’s medical autonomy. I have an hard time believing that the tide of youth liberation can be stopped once again by simply being branded as dangerous, when those same enlightened liberals are seeing the same ideals that they sprouted to contrast child liberationists being upheld by fascists. Paradoxically, contemporary conservatives are forcing your average liberal to go take the dust off their copy of “Escape From Childhood” when they talk of the innocent children being indoctrinated into being defiant and queer. In fact, only recently a Teen Vogue article called «The Youth Liberation Movement Fought for Rights for Young People» in praise of the 70s child liberationists has came out, to my great surprise. Young people have so few rights that it’s easy to act as if things are static and never moved neither forward nor behind in the years, but even if they can’t still vote, contemporary young people are indeed living some interesting times where the issue of their independence and autonomy is again at the forefront. And where maybe it’s cool again to want to abolish the family and flee childhood, no matter what Laura Purdy said.