Are children the most discriminated against group in our society?
The case for children's rights

On a rainy September morning, I drove a group of children from my daughter’s school to a nearby park for their gym class. Three of them squished into the backseat of my Honda Civic, shrieking as thunder boomed over Pittsburgh’s gray hills. I implored Elena, my daughter, to use her rain pants: an efficient but sartorially awkward piece of clothing.
“No,” Elena said. “ I don’t want to.” I insisted. Her pants would be soaked all day. She insisted in return. She’d be practicing long jump in rain pants? I gave in, warning her again about the unpleasantness of drenched leggings but letting her make the call.
The other students in the car were shocked.
“You should ground her!” One girl argued loudly. “If I ever talked back to my mom like that, I’d be grounded!”
“Yeah,” a tow-headed boy who’d requested I play “Hotel California, by the Eagles” chimed in. “I’d probably lose all my screen time.”
I turned up “Hotel California” and disengaged from this spontaneous roundtable of parenting advice, but it stuck with me. Was it really that radical to “give in” to my kid? Was she “talking back” when she said no? Was it a sign of parental weakness to honor her request not to long jump in rain pants?
Should I have “held the boundary,” as the parenting gurus say, threatening to deny her the pumpkin ice cream sandwich she would eat after school, or her play date with her friend Vera? Should I have demanded compliance?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. For me, in some situations, my daughter’s desires and input are largely beside the point. I don’t, for example, let her use any social media or have any screen time during the week. In the U.S., this is fairly radical. I’m adamant on these rules and there is no negotiation.
But in other areas, where years ago I might have insisted my-way-or-the-highway, I’m-the-parent and so on, demanding respect and obedience, I listen a little more carefully. I try and see things from her point of view. I try to imagine how I would feel if someone forced me to wear rain pants on my morning run, threatening not to let me have my coffee afterwards or meet my friend for lunch if I didn’t comply. I’d be outraged. I’d likely hate them at least a little bit, even if they professed they were doing it “for me.”
Once, I invited Elena to give me a consequence if I said a curse word. (I was trying to curb a bad habit, and failed.) When I slipped up within minutes, she said, “You can’t have any coffee tonight. And no beer.” Even though the challenge had been a joke, I was offended. And a little angry.
I felt in my body how infuriating it would be to be controlled, and to have things taken from or given to me completely at others’ whims. So I used my adult power and gave myself back the coffee, and the beer.
This new awareness, at times a blessing and often a great challenge, comes largely via the work of the writer and children’s rights advocate
. Rickman’s latest book, It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation about How Adults Treat Children, is a heartfelt, carefully researched, and clearly argued cri de couer for children’s liberation. The book makes the case that “collectively, children are the most discriminated against group in our society.”Rickman defines “adultism” as “the structural discrimination and oppression children face from adults, and society’s bias towards adults.”
She delineates many ways in which adultism functions. Children are the only people who can legally be hit. They are much more likely than adults to live in poverty and to experience and witness violence. They are completely dependent on adults for legal representation and access to services and healthcare.
They lack property rights and cannot vote, in spite of the fact that they are the citizens most likely to be impacted by political decision-making (or lack thereof) on issues like climate change. They are often systematically denied bodily autonomy: forced to wear, eat, sleep, move, or do things against their will. They are frequently coerced, via shame, rewards, or punishment, into compliance with adults’ wishes, regardless of their own needs and desires.
They often have little or no say in where, how, or with whom they pass their time. Many are forced to spend the majority of their waking hours in institutions where they have almost no freedom of movement; must demand permission to eat, speak, or go to the bathroom; must dress and wear their hair a certain way; and must engage in countless menial tasks over which they have no control and which often have little relevance to their lives.
Rickman cites German sociologist Manfred Liebel, who in the 1980s defined four categories of discrimination faced by children worldwide:
1) punishment of “undesired attitudes” that are seen as normal in adults (such as refusing to do what one is told, or speaking one’s mind)
2) age limits that exclude children from “specific practices and areas of social life”
3) limited access to rights, goods, institutions, and services
4) the failure to consider the social group of children in political decision-making.
Rickman then asks her reader to consider all the privileges adults enjoy (with the caveat that of course, not every adult enjoys all of these privileges to the same extent):
no one can tell an adult what to do in their own home
adults can speak in public forums and be treated respectfully
adults, simply by virtue of being adults, can demand their children comply with their wishes, insist their children speak in certain ways or not speak at all, and forbid their children from questioning their decision-making
adults are presumed to be mentally fit and trusted to make decisions for themselves
no laws demand that adults remain in certain spaces under the supervision of authorities they must obey for the majority of their lives
adults’ access to food and shelter doesn’t rely on pleasing others
no one can restrict where adults go, who they talk to, how they spend their time or their access to the outside world
they can vote
they can do with their bodies as they see fit (within legal limits)
most media represents them and their experiences
afflicting physical pain on them is assault
Seen through this lens, childhood can seem not a timeless elysian reprieve from life’s harsh realities, but rather a quasi-carceral state, marked as much by a sense of powerlessness, frustration, and futility as by tenderness and wonder.
“Children are repressed at every waking minute. Childhood as hell,” Shulamith Firestone notoriously wrote.
But how are children supposed to make decisions for themselves, the skeptical reader demands? Of course children are dependent on adults: wouldn’t they be stuffing themselves with Doritos until three in the morning, running wild in the streets without oversight, without school?
“We have this assumption that children can’t make sensible decisions,” Rickman told me. “Won’t they just spend it all on ice cream and pool parties?”
This assumption is born out an innate distrust of children, an idea that they are naturally lazy, sinful, indulgent, defiant – although many of those traits in children end up being reactions to a society in which they are constantly coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, for reasons that are not their own. Young children, as the writer and homeschooling advocate John Holt has pointed out, are incredibly motivated to learn, work, and connect with the adults around them – many only begin to lose that desire once they are in school.
Rickman cites one of the biggest surveys of children about what they wanted in a school, which eventually became a book by Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor entitled The School I’d Like. The responses were heartbreakingly intuitive and human. A fifteen-year-old named Angela described how depressing it was to spend her days in a “giant Magnolia prison,” and declared, “I want to be filled with inspiration by a place that I can call my home away from home.”
Children wanted gardens with flowers, ponds with animals in them, playgrounds, comfortable chairs, “just like home.” They wanted better food and enough time to eat it. They wanted to do more art, they wanted to be in nature, they wanted “children and teachers…to think of each other as equals.” One fifteen-year-old named Miriam wrote that in her ideal school, “We will no longer be treated as herds of an identical animal waiting to be civilized before we are let loose on the world…it is our world too.”
One of Rickman’s most compelling arguments is that we envision children more as human becomings than human beings. We describe them as blank slates, works in progress, forged by the diligent, constant tending of scrupulous adults.
And yet anyone who has a child can likely recognize the way in which that child has been fully themself from the day they were born. My daughter has the same wacky sense of humor at ten as she did at one; the same physical intensity; the same fierce desire to socialize with anyone and everyone; the same love for animals that once led her to get punched in the face at school for rescuing a pill bug from a group of boys set on smashing it.
For that matter, as far back as I can remember, I have been myself: passionate, verbal, sarcastic, skeptical, a lover of the outdoors and books and dogs. I was no more “becoming” in fifth grade than I was at twenty-two or now, at forty-two. I was changing all the time, yes, and also fully myself.
But children are seen as unfinished products, an idea that both gives adults great leeway in trying to shape their lives – you will play violin! You will love football! You will be brilliant at math! – and that tends to erase their unique needs and desires. It also creates such an intense future-oriented lens that it can be all too easy to ignore children’s need for happiness, joy, love, and stability right now.
And in fact, ignore is exactly what many societies do. At a recent lecture I attended by Matthew Desmond about his book Poverty, By America, Desmond declared that we could eliminate poverty in the U.S. with a wealth tax on the top 1% of earners. We could simply eliminate it, right now. It would cost billionaires a teensy tiny fraction of their bloated fortunes. This would dramatically impact the lives of children, for whom poverty is the single greatest factor in health, educational and financial outcomes, and overall well-being. But there is no political will to do so.
The political scapegoating of children – manifested in many ways in the U.S., such as denying children school lunch because their parents haven’t paid the cafeteria bill – demonstrates the assumption that children are less than full humans, and are the private property of their families, just as women were once considered the private property of their husbands.
It is easy for liberals to point the finger at conservative policies for causing harm to children, especially in the U.S., where the same outspoken politicians demanding abortion bans refuse to impose any restrictions on the #1 cause of death for American children: guns. And yet the left, too, can fall into rhetoric and policy that is antithetical to children’s rights, particularly when it comes to the issue of school.
One white parent in our liberal urban school district in Pittsburgh told me she was sending her kids to public school so they could experience “the real world.” I asked what she meant by this, and she explained that in life we will inevitably deal with challenging people, and be bored, and have to do things we don’t feel like doing. But, I argued, would any adult insist they should be miserable and bored and surrounded by difficult people now so the they could learn this was what life offered?
Another white parent told me she passionately believed in public school and thus sent her kid there, even though she knew the experience wasn’t great. I empathize with this argument, and with its shadow argument that fleeing public school means privileged, detached complicity with the relentless privatization and brutal inequality of our society. I too believe that school should be free and community-based and of excellent quality for all students.
But too often this conversation, like so many of our conversations about our institutions today, turns only around abstractions: how adults should or shouldn’t behave in accordance with a particular ideology (this = good, that = evil). It ignores complex, on-the-ground realities.
First of all, the public school experience in most urban centers in the U.S. is incredibly racialized. The curriculum and reception a child receives in these schools will be based on the color of their skin. In our local public school, the vast majority of the teachers are white and live in the suburbs. More than half the school is composed of students of color.
I have heard the white children of acquaintances who send their kids to this school say things like, “they always do this,” or “they don’t get to go on the bus to the field trip.” Once I asked: “Who are they?”
“The black kids,” was the answer.
Jorge put his foot down: there was no way we were sending our kid into this system. “How do you think she’ll be seen?” he asked me. He meant, she will not read as white. And the way she would be read would determine everything.
This ended up being true when we sent her to what we thought was a slightly better option: a public charter school that advertised its commitment to diversity and equity. In her first three weeks there (after doing preschool and preK at a private school near us, where she’d had a teacher of color and never had any disciplinary or behavior issues), we received three stern emails home from her (white, suburban) teacher about “behavior infractions” like “tickling another student.”
It only went downhill from there: over the next two years we were told over and over she couldn’t have access to “enrichment” in math because she “wasn’t ready”; she couldn’t join her (entirely white) group of friends in the advanced reading group because she “wasn’t ready.” I pointed out that at home she could read Harry Potter in Spanish. No matter.
“Her reading level is an ‘L,’” the teacher told me confidently. I looked this up and realized it meant that she should be reading picture books with a single line of text like, “Chicken went to the store.”
Beyond this, she was miserable at this school. It was a dysfunctional environment for many children, with kids frequently exploding into violence, teachers who refused children lunch or recess when they misbehaved, and hours of mindless “work” on screens.
I wrote the administration about the violence, again and again. I met with Elena’s teacher multiple times to explain what I saw at home and what she was capable of. I met with the “gifted program” administration. I emailed again. I organized other parents to email collectively. Nothing ever changed. This is a story I hear again and again from parents trying so hard to alter the culture at their local school: nothing happens.
So the question becomes: how is it helpful, or just, to force a child to endure a dysfunctional and miserable system? Even if that child’s endurance did ultimately change that system into a beautiful, thriving one (which, at least in the case of Pittsburgh, it has not done in the past thirty years – adults who went to our local elementary school in the 1980s recall racial divides and teacher behavior identical to what I hear about today), is it fair to ask children to sacrifice their well-being for years for such a principle?
Progressive adults passionately disagree with grotesque wealth inequality and low wages and inhumane working conditions – but most of these adults opt to work day-to-day in jobs and places they enjoy. They prioritize their own well-being and from there, agitate for change.
Often, Rickman told me, parents will pat themselves on the back, saying, “I’ve done my good deed, I’ve done something good and socially just” when they send their child to a public school – but “[they’re] not paying the consequences of that.”
I’ve seen friends and acquaintances on social media declare in one breath how essential it is to leave toxic work environments and burnout situations and have healthy boundaries and self-care, and then in the next insist on sending children to public schools no matter what. There is no contradiction here only if we fail to recognize children as full humans who also deserve to be happy, comfortable, and heard – not in the future, but right now.
I recognize the tension here – I recognize that many children do not have the choice to attend public school or not. I recognize that simply abandoning these children and reinforcing the vastly unequal system we have is unjust and terrible. And yet at the same time – and this is the kind of complexity that we as a society seem increasingly unwilling to countenance – forcing children into situations that cause them stress and harm in the name of a belief system or a future transformation (that has not manifested in most places) is also unjust.
Nowhere is this tension between the modern education system and children’s rights more pronounced than in the impact of COVID-19 on schools. I am not here to argue for or against school closures, though the evidence is overwhelming that extended closures had devastating effects on children’s learning and well-being. What is most salient about those decisions is that children were completely excluded from them.
No effort was made on the part of governmental, health, or policy-making organizations to speak to children about what they needed and wanted and to work with them on how to achieve it. Children’s needs were in fact almost entirely ignored: it was left, as usual, to parents – and let’s be honest, mostly to mothers – to figure out how to navigate nearly impossible situations on their own.
The solutions many came up with – learning pods, micro-schools, outdoor school, learning hubs – could have been applied on a much broader level, to many more children, but the political will and collective imagination was not there. There was more effort put into figuring out outdoor dining than outdoor schooling.
In the U.S., many children’s entire lives were shut down and transferred to Zoom, ignoring not only their distinct physical and mental needs – and the safety of those children at risk for abuse and neglect – but also the realities of working mothers. Millions of mothers were forced out of the labor force as we entered into the collective delusion that “remote learning” was actually a real thing, and not our society’s abnegation of care for children.
Is there any other social group, Rickman asks about children, whose voices are so collectively ignored in decisions directly related to their everyday lives and well-being?
Our experience of homeschooling radically altered my understanding of my daughter’s rights. Why did she have only fifteen minutes for lunch at school? Why was it okay for school administrators to force children to eat in silence? Why did only the “gifted” students get to do projects like put on Shakespeare plays, while everyone else slogged through worksheets? Why was my child coming home saying other students had threatened to poison the teacher, other students had gotten into a fistfight, other students had told her to spread her legs, and yet when I pulled her out of school, I was warned over and over that school was where kids “develop social skills”? Why did I feel I had to establish a strict curriculum for her – why didn’t I trust her to tell me what she loved?
Together, we read James Herriot’s books and she adored them. We did the enrichment curriculum in math on our own. She fell in love with French on Duolingo. She spent Fridays at a local farm feeding pigs and taking care of toddlers at an in-home preschool. Of course, this had a financial and personal cost: I had to squeeze my work into early mornings, swim practices, late evenings. I put my career aside.
Yet what I learned was that so many of us – me included – go along on autopilot with school situations that are not only less than optimal, but actually antithetical to our children’s joy and thriving. We see the same problems persist in stubborn, dysfunctional bureaucracies, with resources frequently being squandered and little to no imagination or appetite for change.
In an interview with Rickman, I asked her about these tensions between children’s liberation and our current education systems. Rickman home educates her child and has supported many families transitioning to home education, and she told me she has seen so much trauma; a word, she said, that she doesn’t use lightly. The children she encounters are often neurodivergent and have been scarred by bullying, mistreatment from teachers, and racial aggressions. Still, Rickman is very community and social justice-minded and wants to support public schools.
“What we need is a brilliant state-funded education sector which really takes children’s needs and views into account,” she told me.
But children, and especially poor children of color most likely to be harmed by school, are rarely asked what they want, care about, and need, and the lack of interest and trust in them manifests itself in many aspects of their schooling.
The conversation about children’s rights can become even more contentious in the context of feminism, where assertions of children’s needs can seem to directly confront women’s freedom to work outside the home.
“Women have fought for lots of different things over the past few decades,” Rickman told me, “and one thing we have not been very good at is bringing children’s struggle for liberation alongside women’s struggle for liberation.”
And yet the two are so deeply, inherently connected. I have seen from my writing about birth and motherhood how often women are treated like children: silly, innocent, naïve, incapable of complex decision-making, not to be trusted. I have seen how birth and motherhood are rendered childlike with pastels and the iconography of babyhood and gentle demeaning language that presumes incompetence, when in fact these processes can be incredibly powerful, gritty, fierce, intense, and wild.
Children’s liberation activists often draw parallels with women’s liberation: many of the arguments against giving children the vote, for example – they are emotional and not rational; they will simply do what their parents tell them; they can’t handle the responsibility – echo earlier arguments against giving women the vote.
Many of the defenses of “parental rights” sound eerily like rhetoric about why husbands should have the right to treat their wives as they wish. Until recently, marital rape was legal in many places. Many people still see domestic violence as a largely private affair.
And yet in a capitalist society haunted by a zero-sum, scarcity paradigm, children’s needs can seem like a threat to mothers. When the government provides no support for caretaking, and care work is constantly disparaged, undervalued and underpaid, it is all too tempting to dismiss these intensive needs.
A friend of mine, a Vietnamese mother of two who moved to the U.S. in her late twenties, told me a story about posting in a local online forum for new mothers that she didn’t think it was good for babies to “cry it out” at night.
“Oh no,” I said. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, oh yes. She had no idea what she was in for. She was swamped by hateful responses and then, after intense advocacy from a few people, permanently barred from the forum.
I understand there is nuance to the “sleep training” conversation, and am not here to declare whether or not parents should use this method. Many families could not function without it. But the fact that such painful hostility exploded from even bringing up the possibility that this practice might harm children signals something off: a society in which there is a powerful urge to dismiss talk of what is best for children because it is simply too uncomfortable or impossible to accommodate, too threatening to women’s freedom, which still feels incredibly fragile.
Similarly, there is a strong pattern in the U.S. and the U.K. of depicting the care of children as mindless, tedious, and undesirable, so much less valuable than white collar work for pay. Why would one ever “give up” a socially lauded, high-achieving career for something as brainless as caring for a child?
Rickman writes, “I often come across language used to describe mothers who choose to look after their children themselves as though this is a tragedy: ‘lost skills,’ ‘economically inactive,’ ‘wasted education.’”
In her recent book Liars, Sarah Manguso writes, “The trouble with spending the day with a small child is that at the end of it you’re physically exhausted, mentally emptied, and you have nothing to show for it but a filthy house, filthy clothes, raw and peeling hands, and the inability to see beyond babyhood.” Nothing to show for it – the child’s happiness, the relationship between mother and child, is not mentioned here at all.
This is not to suggest that women should stay home with their children, or that children’s happiness depends on constant access to their mothers. But it is undeniable that young children need an incredibly high level of care, and diminishing care work does no favors to either mothers or children. So many mothers know the stress of seeking high-quality care, not finding or not being able to afford it, and not being able to provide it themselves.
It is not enough to have “universal PreK” or “affordable daycare”: a significant and high-quality longitudinal study recently demonstrated that Pre-K actually led to a notable decrease in children’s well-being, behavior, and academic outcomes later in life. The data is by no means conclusive on whether PreK is actually beneficial for children or not – at least the way we have currently structured many PreK programs, as heavily regimented environments in which children begin early training on “academics” and follow rigid behavioral rules. Similarly, “affordable daycare” does not mean quality daycare.
Children’s needs must be the center of these policy discussions, not adult convenience and affordability. Children need love. They need close attention and deep relationship. They need play and the outdoors. This is not utopic or radical. It is reality. It is fundamental.
“[Children’s] lives,” Rickman argues, “are profoundly political.” I found this idea confronting, and asked Rickman about it. “Any relationship where there is an inequality of power is a political relationship,” she told me.
In some areas of the adult-child relationship, this is subtle. In others, it is incredibly overt. It is illegal to categorically bar most groups of people from spaces and events; one cannot, for example, deny Latino people or disabled people entry into a restaurant. But it’s perfectly acceptable, and increasingly common, to ban children. I have been invited to three “child-free” weddings in the past five years.
I have seen cultural figures who are otherwise outspoken about injustice proclaiming on Twitter how much they dislike children or don’t want to see children in their favorite coffee shops or bars. I have gone to cafes in my city and overheard the baristas discussing whether or not they found kids tolerable. It’s considered socially acceptable to “debate” whether babies should be allowed on planes.
Where it’s taken as a given in progressive communities that our society should support the thriving of all marginalized groups, that sometimes doesn’t seem to include children.
Trusting my daughter, I have found, is incredibly difficult. It is a humbling process. The more I trust her, the more I have to realize how little I trust myself: how much my worth has been tied to what I achieve, to how others see me, to whether or not I am liked and earning approval.
When I trust her, I trust the process of becoming: hers, and mine. I trust that I can’t control life, and that actually, trying to control it leads to fear and perpetual disappointment.
I asked Rickman about the joy she found in this work, which can seem so hard for parents. She told me, “I actually think that once you start treating the children in your life as people who are worthy of respect, I’m not going to say it removes all obstacles – it doesn’t, we’re humans, we live messy lives – there is something really beautiful about being in that relationship with your child. It’s quite exhausting to be the one who always holds the power and makes the decisions and organizes everything.”
“Parents are already overly victimized and need liberation in their own right,” writes Richard Evans Farson, one of the early children’s liberationists. “[They] need to be freed from the burden of guilt that comes from believing that they are solely responsible for what their children become.”
Holding all the power is exhausting, brittle, and unnatural. It makes us rigid. It inhibits real change.
What would it feel like if we gave it up, even just a little of it? Handed it over to those small hands, to those high little voices, and listened? What would they say?
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This is such an important conversation! I’m a former public school teacher who decided, way back in 1996, to homeschool with my three now-grown kids. I learned so much from my kids about how to give them independence and agency, and how to trust them. And for me, it was a very intellectually satisfying life, though our culture loudly insists it would be otherwise!
What concerns me now is that not only do we not respect children in our society, we have—in the last thirty years or so—stolen away their autonomy. I’m writing a book about this and it’s alarming how this has come about for a whole slew of reasons: the rise of parenting “experts,” the No Child Left Behind Act, changes in the college application process, fears for children’s safety, the rise of intensive parenting…I could go on.
But all the media seems to talk about is how kids are being ruined by phones.😩
There is so much more we need to be looking at when it comes to children. I’m really worried about what we’re doing to childhood. I’m grateful that you’re taking time to shine a light on this, Sarah. It matters.
Wow your observation about spending more effort to figure out outdoor dining than outdoor schooling is brutal, yet so true. Thanks for this powerful post.