I don’t think it’s particularly unique to the Left that children hold an uneasy place in activist spaces. We live in an excessively competitive, resource-scarce society that demands time from working people to the exclusion of generations that don’t do paid work – kids are supposed to be in school or daycare, the non-working elderly in nursing homes, the unemployable in prisons. I do not mean to make this an accusatory piece – obviously, much of the work done by the social justice community revolves around making the world better and safer for children and future generations. This piece serves as an exploration of why, as conscious people and communities, we need to purposefully pursue inclusion of children in our activities, communities, and spaces.

One of the most insightful conversations I’ve had in the last year was with a close friend who recently became a parent himself – he noted that our society discourages inter-generational contact (full disclosure: that friend started this blog). Maybe this is an obvious statement to most readers, but it strikes me as worthy of reflection. I’ve heard a good amount of adult friends, including committed activists, who almost proudly proclaim that they “don’t like children” or “are not good with children”. I don’t know many people who would say the same thing about other groups of people – ethnic groups, religious denominations, the handicapped. I don’t think it could be an acceptable statement about other aged-defined groups, like the elderly. So why is it okay to say towards the young?

Part of the Left’s uneasiness with children may be a backlash against propaganda techniques of the Right – racist, classist attacks on social services, individual rights, and minority communities are so often shrouded in “family values” rhetoric. We are brow-beaten, told repeatedly that there is one acceptable way to live – the nuclear family – and those outside this limited framework don’t count. Also, because of the limited time we have, and level of commitment activism requires under current conditions (and without progressive institutions), many activists are aware of how often activists-cum-parents “graduate” from regular participation to the aforementioned bubble of the nuclear family. But, I think it is less important (at least for this piece) to identify the barriers to a fuller participation by the youngest our activist communities. More importantly, I want to discuss why the Left needs children.

There are numerous reasons we need to seriously approach child-inclusive spaces.

We need our children to grow up knowing the politics of inclusion, of organizing, and of community; and not only knowing about such beliefs, but believing in positive social change. Some reasons I’ve identified:

• Many of the most disenfranchised have children. Generally, in our experience, a lack of diversity in self-identified activists results in a relatively young, upper middle-class population of activists speaking on behalf of oppressed communities. We create unbalanced political movements when kids are excluded and the norm of attendance is from the privileged without children.
• Childrearing is a political act. Our political acts and the fact that some choose to rear children are not separate. We need to collectively recognize that parenting, mentoring, raising children, is not done in a vacuum, nor is it the sole responsibility of those that have chosen to parent children. All activists should take the time to interact with, be around, and teach our young.
• Actively including children makes it desirable for families to participate. In our family’s experience, we have been much more apt to attend meetings and events where childcare is announced as available. Our neighborhood social justice group always ensures childcare will be available; we often make a point of attending not only to attend the “adult” part of the event – a forum, documentary, etc. – but with the knowledge that our daughter will have a chance to play with some of her friends.
• Children bring unique and creative energy to movements. During a visit to Palestine, one of my most inspiring experiences was attending a children’s protest at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus. Many of the village children got together at a community center and drew posters, practiced songs. With their parents and supporters looking on, this group of kids created an incredible moment of resistance.

This post is a very rough start in my effort to consider the relationship between the Left and children. I’d love to get feedback and perspectives to continue this conversation.

It’s an idea that’s pretty easy to chuckle at: unrealistic, potentially chaotic, and probably something kids themselves aren’t even that interested in. We all agree, after all, that children haven’t reached the age of reason, and if democratic politics require one thing, it’s that citizens’ make political choices based on reason.

But what is reason, exactly? As early as 1781, Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, was pointing to reason as both the most fundamental and most vexing concept in Western philosophy. In politics, “reason” stands in, all too often, for “the way I think, but not the way that those other people (with whom I disagree) think.” An even darker part of reason’s history in the West is its use to create a dividing line between those who are treated as full persons and those who aren’t: women, blacks, non-landowners and colonial subjects have all been considered unable to reason, and thus unworthy of the vote-dangerous to democracy, even. It should go without saying that, to an Englishman in, say, 1869 (the year John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, his radical call for sexual equality), many of these ideas seemed as natural as children’s lack of suffrage seems to us now.

If you look at suffrage throughout history, you often see the real story of political power buried under the rhetoric of equality. Right now in the United States, the fact that prisoners can’t vote shows how little incarceration has to do with rehabilitation for reentry into society, how much it has to do with the creation of a space where people, overwhelmingly black and brown males, feel the effects of the law but don’t have any say in writing it.

Not that reason is always about identity and exclusion. The argument for excluding “unreasoning” people from the vote rests on the dream of a perfect democracy, where every voter deliberates and makes choices that are based logically on the evidence presented, even if interpreted through particular values and interests: a Detroit autoworker, for example, may vote differently from a Seattle environmentalist even when they are both being reasonable. The reality, however, is that in modern democracies most of us tolerate (grudgingly, perhaps) not only interests, but also types of reasoning, that are different from our own, perhaps even “impaired” by most definitions. Few people argue for taking the vote away from elderly voters who may occasionally forget what year it is, or what war is going on. They’re citizens, and the law applies to them, so they should have a vote even if that vote is somehow flawed or unreasonable. Why doesn’t the same argument seem to apply to kids?

Children are different from women or colonial subjects, some will say, because they are by nature, not merely by health or social position, dependent on others. The danger of child voters is not just that they will be capricious, but that they will merely vote how their parents instruct them, conferring more political capital on a Utah Mormon with 10 children than on a Boston banker with only one. This argument has some truth to it, but it is also remarkably similar to the old belief that a husband could be trusted to vote in his wife’s best interests, so why bother to let women vote?

As Mill pointed out in his defense of women’s suffrage, the problem with what we might call the “dependence” theory is that it creates the very reality to which it claims to respond. If women in Mill’s day seemed unprepared to get involved in politics, it was because they were confined to the home and the kitchen, kept from reading the newspaper, given less education than their male peers. They were nurtured, not natured, out of politics. Youth voter turnout, in the United States and the democratic world at large (acknowledged by the United Nations in a 1995 report) is low, giving young people disproportionately little voice in politics. But what exactly do we expect when, for the formative first 18 years or so of their lives, we deliberately box them out of the political process? We don’t wait until age 18 to buy our children an iPod and see if they’ll take to music; so how could we think that, after 18 years without the basic right of political participation, they’ll passionately enter democratic culture? Isn’t encouraging a life-long interest in voting and politics worth the cost of some immature votes?

Another way to dismiss or ridicule the idea of children’s suffrage is to compare it to children smoking, driving or any of the other generally harmful things adults can do and kids, at least in theory, can’t. But the analogy is a false one. One of the important distinctions in democratic theory (which, despite some reservations, I won’t be deconstructing in this particular post) is between a privilege and a right. A privilege, like driving or smoking, is something that makes your life more convenient, happier, perhaps more profitable in financial as well as other senses. A right, on the other hand, is one of the preconditions of living life within the political community. If you can be tortured, imprisoned without charge, spied on (how sad that these words now immediately evoke thoughts of my own country rather than somewhere else), then you don’t live in a democracy. You may live under a democracy: under its boot, or under the layers of secrecy it uses to cover its undemocratic spaces. Because democracy is a political system whose principle tool is the vote, there is perhaps no clearer difference between those who live in and those who live under democracy than the right to vote. I don’t see why it should be more “natural” to us for children to live within our borders and subject to our laws without voting rights than it is “natural” for women not to vote, or for inner city blacks to wait in polling lines for four hours while white suburbanites cruise through the voting process, as is the current situation in many states. Show me someone who wants to vote but isn’t permitted, and I will show you someone whose life in a democracy is a geographical, not political, fact. That will be true for my son sometime soon.

In a recent Harper’s article, Mark Shapiro chronicles the chemical lobby’s gutting of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and the US government’s continued badgering and undermining of the EU’s attempts to protect people from dangerous chemicals.

In 1976, the United States passed the first bill anywhere to regulate the safety of chemicals. While this was a potentially revolutionary act, it was undermined by chemical industry lobbying that fought for an exemption for 62,000+ chemicals that were already in use. Today, that means that only 5% of chemicals in products we consume and are exposed to have been tested for safety.

In a disturbing study from 2005, the World Wildlife Fund tested three generations of European woman. As you might expect, the oldest generation had the highest level of chemicals in their blood. However, in a close second was the youngest group-their grandchildren. This generation, on average, had 59 different toxic chemicals in their blood.

When the European Union moved to test and regulate the huge quantity of untested chemicals because of this study and others, the US has used its muscle to block any attempt to do so.

Furthermore, US toy companies are quick to scapegoat China for their own errors. In their drive for profit, they turn a blind-eye to dangerous design flaws, not to mention safety and workers’ rights in production abroad. And in one of the largest recalls, Mattel apologized to the Chinese government after it turned out their was not high levels of lead in the toys and the recall was because of US-side design flaws. A recent study by Hari Bapuji and Paul W. Beamish concluded,

…that the number of recalls and the number of recalls of Chinese-made toys have shown an upward trend. However, an examination of the reasons for the increase shows that the number of defects related to design issues attributable to the company ordering the toys is far higher than those caused by manufacturing problems in China.

A recent NPR report (I couldn’t find the link) mentioned, in passing, that many of the workers at a particular Chinese toy factory had no idea that the products they were making contained lead. And why would they? Management certainly doesn’t want them to know that they are inhaling toxic fumes on a daily basis. Although we view China as a monolithic, repressive state, workers‘ and peasant struggles occur, often over environmental issues. Supporting workers’ rights in China and other places our toys and clothes are made would go a long way to making them safer. Strong, independent trade unions would be a first-line defense against toxic chemicals.

If we’re serious about toy and product safety for our children, we should pay attention to what happens in China. Perhaps more importantly, though, are the chemicals that our government doesn’t want to test, for fear of hurting chemical companies’ profits. We should demand that the NSCA is strengthened, that EU chemical legislation is not gutted, and that Chinese workers are able to freely organize for safer workplaces.

Just this month, in Ohio, an undocumented Honduran woman was arrested during a house search and separated from her exclusively breast-fed baby for 11 days. Her baby, who would not take a bottle, did not eat for three of them. Anyone who breast feeds or has a partner that does also knows what happens when you stop suddenly-It is an extremely painful.

About an hour’s drive from my house, in Taylor, TX, is a prison run by Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit company. Hutto prison is notable because, aside from being a “non-Mexican” facility, they incarcerate immigrants and their children who are not accused of any crime. Even worse, Hutto was given a childcare license exemption by the state, allowing the prison to care for children 24/7 without any childcare expertise. Kids get only one hour of recreation a day and rarely enjoy the outdoors. I recently designed a website for a documentary about the prison, Children in Jail. Please check it out for more information.

As an Alternet article points out, conditions in Texas are particularly bad, where the state has only one attorney for 500 incarcerated immigrant children. Many just fall through the cracks, often separated from their families by INS agents at their time of arrest.

In Texas, there is a growing movement to close Hutto. You can visit the “What can I do?” section of the Children in Jail site here. There is also an upcoming demonstration at Hutto on December 16 at 2:00 at the prison. This is certainly an issue that parents should care about.