Childhood and Marxism

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, English edition of 1888

As the deadly toll of Israeli/U.S. genocide on Palestinian children became widely known, it served as yet another horrific example of just how expendable and vulnerable our children are to imperial imperatives and capitalist greed. In response to these atrocities, young people raised their voices in loud protest, including elementary school kids, and took up the struggle to stop the bombing, stop the money flowing to Israel, and to free Palestinian children and their families.

Children are far too often victims of a system that values only profit, not humanity. But children are also actors in their world, and at times are powerful voices of dissent in both individual and collective ways. There has been renewed interest on the left in the questions of the oppression of children within the context of the privatized family, the economy, and the state. How can the radical ideas of Marxism be used as a tool to help us understand and advance these discussions?

Contradictions and precarity of childhood today

The images and realities of childhood today are rife with contradictions.

On the one hand, we have the idealized image of childhood as a state of happy innocence and yet, the United States stands alone as a place where over 400 people remain imprisoned serving life sentences for crimes they allegedly committed as children. Seventy-six percent of them are African American.

Contrast this with the image of the child as one of living in a state of constant vulnerability and fragility demanding adult care and protection in the safe refuge of the family.

Of course, this image of vulnerable child and protecting family runs up against a tragic reality that the U.S. has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates in industrialized world of deaths from child abuse and neglect and that most deaths occur at the hands of parents and step parents. Not coincidentally, the U.S. provides the least amount of government support of families with children (parental leave, childcare, income support for poor families, mental health services, and healthcare).

A corollary to this family-as-safe-refuge-for-vulnerable-child narrative is the notion that outside the family exist adults who threaten children’s safety and wellbeing on a daily basis: from the greedy and lazy teachers who seek to deny them an education to sexual predators (often overlapping in the rightwing imagination with LGBTQA+ people) that lurk around every playground corner and in every daycare center. These fears predate the rise in rightwing conspiracy theories that have become such a big factor in U.S. politics or the very real conspiracy of Epstein and his rich, well-connected friends to traffic, rape, exploit, and abuse young women for their entertainment.

Of course, another very real threat to millions of children’s well being, high rates of child poverty and food insecurity, makes them more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. The U.S. is a leader in infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. This is routinely ignored or blamed upon the victims of that poverty themselves by our politicians, media, and churches.

This notion that children are simply victims-in-waiting has a two-pronged effect; first, of making parents and children fearful and mistrustful of others in their communities—particularly the workers whose jobs it is to care for and educate our children; and second, of pressuring families to assume more and more of the responsibility for their children’s care within the confines of the privatized family structure and to blame themselves when this responsibility becomes more than they can financially or emotionally bear.

This other dominant image of children runs counter to that of the innocent and vulnerable. In this image, the child is untamed, rude, impolite, nagging, whiney, bratty, spoiled, undisciplined, unpleasant, and at times, down-right dangerous. For these images we can thank both the inheritance of early U.S. settler-colonialists’ Puritan belief in children as sinners in need of having the devil beaten out of them, but even more directly, to the modern capitalist market’s exploitation and degradation of children.

All these images—from the “precocious brat” stock character of television sit-coms to the Fox News hysteria over the Black “teen takeovers” on Chicago’s Gold Coast—are highly charged with racial and class overtones. The annoying spoiled brat is usually a white upper-middle-class child with somehow well-meaning but over-indulgent parents, and the gangs are always low-income inner-city kids of color with neglectful parents. In the latter instance, the child is seen as displaying the worst of what commentators consider to be human nature or a biological predisposition to anti-social behaviors. In the former, spoiled children are products of human nurture gone terribly wrong (they’ve had their egos artificially raised by too much praise and love). In both instances, tougher, more punitive parenting and schooling, and in the case of the poor and Black kids, carceral solutions are required to overcome these defects.

It is also important to note that transgender children and youth are seen both as a threat to society and victims of permissive parenting simultaneously–think gender-neutral bathroom bans in elementary schools, the attacks on trans kid athletes, and the criminalizing of gender affirming care sought out by parents of transgender kids. As well, the arrest and detention of thousands of children by the Department of Homeland Security and its thugs should make all of us question which children deserve protection and from whom.

Underlying all of this is the assumption in contemporary capitalist society that the child exists as incomplete, a lump of clay in need of shaping, training, sanctifying, schooling, parenting, or jailing to mold the future adult, and worker, they will become.

Nowhere is the child as they exist in the present considered important or worthy of contemplation.There is an explanation for this “child-of-the-future-not-the-present” outlook, rooted in the economic structures of society and the corresponding political and social institutions the economic system gives rise to. Marxism gives us a tool to help us understand how these forces impact actually existing children and the people who care about them.

When confronted with these reactionary images of childhood, it would be wise to remember the words of the great Italian educator and left-wing educational philosopher Loris Malaguzzi, who wrote;

It is necessary that we believe that the child is very intelligent, that the child is strong and beautiful and has very ambitious desires and requests. This is the image of the child that we need to hold. Those who have the image of the child as fragile, incomplete, weak, made of glass, gain something from this belief only for themselves. We don’t need that image of children. Instead of always giving children protection, we need to give them recognition of their rights and strengths.1“Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins” Child Care Exchange 3/94, pg. 55 https://hub.exchangepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/5009652.pdf

With this framing in mind, let’s turn to the question of how ‘childhood’ has been culturally constructed and reconstructed throughout history.

Prehistory to class Society: The construction of childhood

Let’s define childhood for the purposes of this article. I will use the general term childhood to cover a big portion of the human lifespan, from birth to young adulthood, roughly 0-18, corresponding with the legal definition in the U.S.. Within that span, there is obviously a big difference, on the one hand, between infancy and toddlerhood (when there is complete dependence on caregivers) and, on the other hand, adolescence/post sexual maturation (when independence from caregivers is a biological, if not an economic, possibility).

There are both continuities and divergences across time and place in how human societies have defined childhood in relationship to adulthood. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the human lifespan was roughly 30-35 years, and most people eked out a living doing hard physical labor requiring no schooling. It would make no sense in such a society to consider a 17-year-old a child. But it is also true that no society anywhere ever has viewed a 4-year-old as an adult or a 21-year-old as a child. Every society has had a view of children as comprising a somehow distinct phase of life, although the contours of that distinction vary substantially depending on how families produced and reproduced their existence.

One of the key things that makes human development unique among mammals, even among our closest relatives, the primates, is the huge amount of time between birth and sexual maturity. This represents a big investment from an evolutionary standpoint where infants and children (as well as nursing mothers to some degree) need care and are not a fully productive part of the group.

Why is this beneficial? Humans have evolved with many physical limitations compared to our closest cousins but with one huge advantage: big brains that can think and learn, which in turn evolved to allow us to communicate through spoken language and symbols. These capacities are necessary to collaborate to transform our environment through socialized labor in order to survive. These big brains are designed to learn from their environment and social interaction rather than to operate primarily from instinct, and this process of acculturation—of learning what needs to be known in order to survive—takes a relatively long time to achieve.

Prior to settlements of human beings into agricultural communities (which, in its turn, ushered in the development of class-stratified society), human beings lived in foraging or hunting-gathering nomadic bands: 99 percent of human history has been spent in foraging societies or the smallest of settled agricultural communities. Through anthropological study among the tiny number of these societies which continued to exist until the present, we know a few very interesting and important things about how our ancestors viewed children and childhood. (We also know some falsehoods, as anthropology has messy, sometimes very chauvinist strains as well.)

Across varying social groups in varied terrain, we see these commonalities:

Care of children in these societies is communalized, not privatized. Although nursing infants are held almost continually and breastfeeding occurs on demand (necessarily in close proximity to the mother), they are held by many members of the band, and this sharing of care labor increased as the infant matured. Many anthropologists use the term “allomothering” or “alloparenting” to describe the common practice of shared infant and child care. It is theorized that this sort of practice, where even young infants are in close contact with multiple caregivers, has an important role in helping develop strong social bonds and social intelligence (the ability to discern intention in another through their facial expressions, etc.) among the young. This skill set is very valuable to a species dependent on cooperative labor to survive.

People in these societies live in mixed-age groupings of 20 to 40 people with no peer segregation. People work, have leisure, sleep, and eat in mixed-age groups. Older children are often involved in caretaking and playing with younger children.

Children (as well as adults) gain skills and knowledge without formal schooling or specialized instruction but through what can broadly be termed “play and exploration.” Children learn the skills required in their communities through play in which they imitate adult activities: playing at foraging, hunting, and toy making (tool making).

Children (weaned infants through puberty) spend most of their time in “play” in mixed aged groups with other children, but often within visual range of and interacting with adults.

Children, for the most part, are not expected to be productive (hunting/gathering of food to feed others) until adulthood, although in most of these societies, depending on resources available, children do provide some foodstuffs, provide care for younger children, and play important roles in groups in distributing food and other tasks.

Barry Hewlett and Michael Lamb write their edited book Hunter Gatherer Childhoods: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Cultural Perspectives,2See also: Meredith Smalls, Kids, How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children; Peter Gray, a developmental and evolutionary psychologist,and expert on play in American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009.

Interestingly, although human offspring are more dependent on adult(s)…than the young of other species, children in hunter-gatherer societies are clearly much more independent than are children in industrial societies like our own, and they contribute to the welfare and provisioning of the groups in which they live much more extensively than one might expect. Many of the contributors to this collection describe a gradual transition from being a dependent recipient of care and provisions to being a participant in the care and provisioning of others—a transition that facilitates the transfer of social and survival skills more seamlessly than the typical patterns of socialization in Western industrial cultures…Comparisons among these chapters underscore a permeability of boundaries between play and work, as well as the gradual nature of the transitions between childhood and adulthood. (p. 412)

This “permeability of boundaries” that characterized early human societies stands in direct contrast to the rigid divisions that capitalism imposes upon both the lifespan and the day-to-day: First, we have the isolation of children and childhood within the privatized family structure, separated from other members of their communities. On a fundamental level, the world of the child and the world of the adult are intensely separated from each other within the family as well.

Children are not just segregated from adults, but also from each other in a multiplicity of ways: same-age classrooms, segregated schools, ability groups (honors classes, special education classrooms, magnet schools, etc.) and in highly gender-specified activities. Today, even children’s book stores contain different boys and girls book sections and legos are colored so we can tell the difference between boys’ and girls’ bricks.

The rigid demarcation between leisure/school/work has been described by Marx and other radical writers as central to the process of how labor is alienated under capitalism. This is becoming more extreme for children today as anything resembling play is taken out of our schools to make more room for more “work” on narrower and narrower bands of subject matter.

Clearly, by looking back at human history we can see that the idea that the private family as the only way to organize childrearing as well as the role of children in society are human constructions that correspond to a definite historical epoch. Therefore, these relations can be reconstructed by humans given new historical, political, economic, and social circumstances.

One of the things that the evidence from foraging societies doesn’t offer us is a roadmap for better parenting or schooling today. While there is much to be gleaned about how children and adults learn and live from this record, it would be a mistake to think we can easily apply these insights within our current contexts. I believe that some of the most well-meaning, sometimes insightful, but also highly moralistic parenting advice and educational philosophy can fall into this trap. For example, many of the insights of “attachment parenting” are based upon the way prehistoric peoples held, slept with, nursed, and reared their young. For working mothers and fathers today who work outside the home, attachment parenting can be held up as an ideal that most families could not attain, thus reinforcing the sense of inadequacy and corresponding guilt that leads one away from the sort of collective solutions based in struggle for a different kind of society that makes parenting easier and more attuned to the needs of children. I think there is much within the left wing “unschooling” philosophy and practice which runs into this same kind of cul de sac.

Children and capitalism

From Marx and Frederick Engels’ historical vantage point, the industrial revolution appeared to be destroying the proletarian family as it pulled men, women, and children out of their previous roles as peasants into modern factory work. All members of families, including children as young as four years old, were forced off the land and into brutal 14-, 15-, and 16-hour shifts, around the clock, in mine and mill. Traditional familial relationships broke down under this system. But, as we will talk about in a moment, capital found that it could not do without the role of the family as a tool for the reproduction of labor; Marx may have overestimated the “breakdown” of the proletarian family in this regard.

The development of capitalism, as Marx writes, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The role of child labor—both within the so-called “free” labor market and within the plantation slave system at the dawn of the industrial revolution was certainly one of the essential pillars of capitalist accumulation of profit. British industries, Marx wrote, “live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too,” and, he went on, U.S. capital was financed by the “capitalized blood of children.”

Louis Hine, the anti-child labor campaigner and photographer whose iconic images of children’s exploitation helped popularize and expand the struggle against child labor in the U.S. in the early 20th century, described a 1911 scene, repeated tens of millions of times over, “Manuel is 5 years old but big for his age. When the whistle blows at 3 o’clock in the morning, he pulls on his clothes and hurries to the shrimp and oyster cannery where he spends the day peeling the shells off iced shrimp. He has been working as a shrimp picker since he was four.” 3Kids At Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor,  Russell Freedman, p. 1)

Marx identified the tendency of capital to transform any and all people and things—including children—into commodities. Child labor was considered desirable for dual reasons: In some industries and services, such as chimney cleaning, small physical stature was desirable. You have to be tiny to climb up small, dirty chimneys and scrub out the soot. But child labor was also desirable because children were considered more easily coerced, less assertive of their rights, and cheap.

Capital was right about the profitability of child labor but was wrong about children’s passivity in the face of their exploitation. Children have joined the labor movement to fight against their own and their fellow workers’ exploitation in every historic upsurge of labor, from the Chartist Movement in Britain to the Lawrence Strike of women textile workers in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, to farm workers struggles in the 1960s to the Indian, Chinese, African, and Latin American labor movements today. Where workers struggle, and where children work, children join—and in some instances lead—the struggle.

The 1899 Newsboy Strike is but one example, when New York City newspaper sellers—some as young as six years old—went on strike for two weeks against the most powerful media titans of their day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. They faced down vicious repression by police and hired thugs. The strike was sparked by a ten-cent increase charged to the newsboys for a bundle of papers, a fortune to them. A leader of the strike, Kid Blink, said, “Ain’t that ten cents worth as much to us as it is to Hearst and Pulitzer who are millionaires? Well, I guess it is. If they can’t spare it, how can we?” In a mass march across the Brooklyn Bridge, they shut down traffic and brought one of the world’s most populous cities to a stand still for two days. The strike was eventually victorious as the “newsies” forced concessions from the newspaper bosses.

In another example, a mass workers movement across Europe and the U.S. fought for and eventually won laws first limiting the conditions under which child labor was legally employed and eventually outlawing the use of child labor in most cases altogether. This corresponded with the demands by the workers’ movement for universal public education, a demand, which (after decades of struggle), by the end of World War I, was mostly won. Marx and other socialists of his day were at the forefront of these struggles. It might surprise some then to learn that Marx wrote in 1866,

We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production as a progressive, sound, legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from age of 9 years, ought to become a productive laborer in the same way that no abled bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz. to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain, but with the hands too.

While we can quibble over ages at which this kind of integration into productive labor is developmentally appropriate, Marx was essentially arguing that in a sane society, one not built on profit but upon meeting human need, it is wrong to exclude youth as they grow physically and cognitively from socially necessary labor alongside other members of their community. To do so would be to deny them both the rights and responsibilities of full members of that society.

He goes on later in this passage to make clear that all work–for children and adults alike—must include time for the broadest kind of progressive education and that work hours must be limited to make leisure a possibility for all. In a socialist society under worker’s direct democratic control of the economy, the corresponding transformation of work and school into places that actually fulfill, rather than destroy, human potential, the divisions between mental and manual labor, between schooling/working/playing/leisure/creative endeavor, would dramatically decrease. Alongside this there would be a corresponding decrease in the sharp way in which we demarcate child from adult. Why shouldn’t there be a lifelong process of labor and learning, side by side?

Today, under capitalism, children continue to be utilized for the worst kinds of exploited labor, as some of the most profitable corporations and most well known brand names on Earth knowingly utilize children in either direct production or as part of their “supply chain,” including Nike, Apple, McDonald’s and Hershey’s. Even in the U.S., despite laws on the books banning child labor, child labor continues to be a source of profits, especially in the agricultural industry. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which not coincidentally has the world’s lowest standard of living, 25 percent of children under the age of 14 work.

Children in the industrialized global north do not primarily generate profits through their labor for capital. But as a consumer group, children are considered an extremely important market. In the U.S. market, children aged eight to eighteen annually spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion dollars of their own money annually. Children under twelve directly influence household spending of an additional $196 billion each year, more than half of which goes to soft drinks and fast food. They indirectly influence the spending of over $400 billion annually, all this according to a report for the advertising industry entitled, “The Kids Market” (quoted in Susan Linn, Consuming Kids, 2004, p.1). Little wonder that children, on average, see 40,000 commercials on television alone in a given year. Think back to the image of a child as whiney, nagging, and spoiled that I mentioned at the beginning of this article and put the blame where it squarely belongs, not primarily on bad parenting but on corporate America’s insatiable greed.

Social Reproduction

I now want to turn to children as another source of profit for capitalists: future profits. Children are the exploited workforce of tomorrow, and both their current care and preparation for their future roles in society is a burden borne not by capitalists or their state but instead placed upon the backs of the working-class family, and in particular, women within the family. All of this is propped up by an overgrowth of ideology proclaiming this as the only possible, natural way to organize our lives and relationships.

In most U.S. families today, all of the adults work outside the home. Because most parents work outside the home, most children under five years old receive child care from someone other than a parent. Almost one-quarter of those children under the age of five are in some form of organized child care arrangement, which includes day care centers, nurseries, and preschools.

The average yearly cost of childcare for an infant in Cook County is more than $13,000. Because so few receive any form of government assistance to help pay for childcare, that cost falls on the families of young children themselves. Low-income families spend a much larger portion of income on child care than do others—more than half of their income in cases with parents of children under 5 years old. Half of all childcare workers who care for these children make so little they qualify for public assistance.

No wonder that most families in the U.S. today depend on what is termed a “patchwork” of childcare arrangements for their children, resulting in a constant shuffle between care centers and care givers, with such correspondingly complicated schedules that one caregiver’s illness or car problem can result in a cascade of missed work, missed school, missed appointments and an almost constant state of stress and anxiety for parents and children alike. Some of the most common patchwork solutions for lack of accessible and affordable childcare are reliance on other family members of young children’s care (including a small but significant percentage of under 5s who are cared for at least some portion of the day by older siblings) and alternating shift-work for parents (extremely damaging from social-psychological perspective).

The investment that the United States makes in early childhood care and education pales by comparison to the investments being made by other capitalist countries. One recent study found that the United States spends $600 per year per preschool-age child on early childhood care and education, whereas France spends five times that amount, and Sweden spends seven and one-half times that amount.

Little wonder that so many of the products marketed to children and their families revolve around two things: fast food so that you can simultaneously drive and feed your child, and passive entertainment–iPad and TV being the cheapest babysitters around.

It is absolutely fundamental to the socialist and working class movement more generally that we place socialized childcare—fully funded, accessible in all senses of the word, and of high quality—at the top of our demands for reforms we seek within the confines of capitalism as well as in our planning and vision of a future socialist society.

This overview of the sorry state of childcare in capitalist U.S. gives a description of the reality facing working class families. To understand why we live in a society which refuses to take responsibility for the care of its young, we need a deeper explanation. For this, we need to look at the structure of capitalism itself and within it, the special role of the family.

In the U.S., capitalist profits result from labor power, but capitalism does not produce that labor power. There is no mechanism to ensure labor’s daily and general renewal. The capitalist state therefore develops ideological, legal, and material “support” for unpaid labor in the home, performed for the most part (though not exclusively) by women.

Under capitalism workers are “free”: Our free time is ours–sort of. But the burden for reproduction resting on the shoulders of families necessitates that even this “free” time is in service to capitalism. Capitalism permits a limited range of options—daycare, divorce, and single parenting, for example. Twenty-eight percent of children now live in single parent, overwhelmingly single-mother households, and a majority of children will at some point reside in a single parent household. Yet, all of those forms are still driven and shaped by the capital/labor relationship. For example, public services like government-funded daycare are increasingly driven back into private families under neo-liberal austerity, women’s work is paid less, and therefore the single mother supports her children with fewer and fewer resources.

This doesn’t mean that the sphere of paid work or production is more important than, or superior to, the private sphere and social reproduction. Indeed, Marxist theory shows the reverse to be true: Production in the formal economy is made possible only because of reproductive labor. It is through care and nurturing (reproductive labor) received in the private sphere that capital receives a full functional being–the worker–ready to work at the point of production, while having to pay nothing for her/his/their work-readiness.

Children’s rights

In a very interesting book Seen and Heard, Children’s Rights in Early Childhood Education (2011), author and preschool teacher Ellen Lynn Hall recounts a study in her preschool classroom that sparked her interest in writing on this topic.

Shortly after the United States began its military campaign in Iraq (2003) a 4 year old boy who demonstrated with his parents against the war carried a protest sign into his class and declared, “1,2,3,4 We don’t want your muddy war.” The sign intrigued his classmates, one of whom asserted, “Soldiers don’t have the right to kill people.”

The teachers became interested in this question of “rights” and what the children thought about them. They initiated a conversation among the preschoolers, who had lots to say:

“A right is like you know in your heart it’s okay to do it…you can do it if you want and that’s it.”

“But you can do that only if it’s okay, like you won’t hurt somebody and it’s not safe.”

“People have the right not to be hurt too, right?”

This conversation sparked a week-long project where children in the school compiled a list of all their rights, 61 in all, including:

“Children have the right to have friends.”

“Children have the right to pretend everything and to pretend there’s a beach anywhere.”

“Children have the right to say ‘No!’ or ‘Stop it’ when someone tickles them without asking.”

“Children have the right to say ‘Yes’ when people tickle them too.”

“Children have the right to be listened to.”

“Children have the right to good stuff that makes them happy.”

Children are rarely asked to comment on their desires for their world in the way these thoughtful teachers did, but despite that we have ample evidence that children have very strong opinions on how they want to live. In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), Steven Mintz quotes this passage from Benjamin Franklin on the common phenomenon of English colonists who who ran away from home or were taken captive and decided to stay with Native Americans:

When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them…in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. (p. 8)

Quoted in the same book, a 19th century children’s rhyme speaks to the political thoughts and aspirations of slave children:

My old mistress promised me,

When she dies she would set me free

Now she’s dead and gone to hell

I hope the devil will burn her well. (p. 107)

Working children have been and continue to be participants in the labor movement. They have also been, and will continue to be, participants and leaders in the struggles for social justice across society. The Children’s Crusade during the 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign is a well known part of the civil rights movement in this country. Over 2000 children and youth were arrested that spring and summer as marchers attempted to shame the white supremacists by forcing them to arrest and attack kids. Of course, the racists had no shame, and so children also paid the highest price in that movement. The KKK firebombing that killed four little girls in a Birmingham church that September was a direct retaliation for the role that young people had played in pushing forward the movement against Jim Crow.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. For this we can thank the U.S. right wing, including so-called “parents’ rights” groups, which mobilize every year against ratification because, as it is argued, recognition of children’s rights drives a wedge between parent and child. This is a scary admission on the part of the right wing that all might not be right between parent and child to begin with if this would be the result of signing the treaty. In fact the UN Rights of the Child is a very un-radical document in many respects, placing the child’s “right to a family” at the top of the list of rights. While the UN’s rights of the child contain many progressive ideals, including the right to adequate nutrition, 25 years after its initial ratification by the vast majority of the world’s countries, five million children die every year from hunger in a world literally awash in food. Clearly, more than a document asserting children’s rights is needed–movements that fight for those rights are an urgent necessity.

A welcome discussion among radical thinkers and activists is developing on the question of children’s rights and liberation, the family and care, and how solidarity, mutual aid, and reciprocity could shape our thinking and practice alongside children in struggle. This article hopes to contribute in small part to those hopeful discussions.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: verkeorg; modified by Tempest.