Denying Youth The Right To Public Space: A Growing Problem in American Society

   Recently a story has been making the rounds in the news media regarding an eight-year-old young woman whose mother had the police called on her and then had a Department of Children and Family Services investigation launched in reference to her, all at the behest of what sounds like a quite frankly imbalanced neighbor because the young person was walking her dog by herself on the streets of her suburban neighborhood. The mother ultimately had to hire an attorney to clear her name and the matter was put to rest in less than two weeks, but she was understandably outraged, disturbed, and somewhat traumatized by the incident. She explained to reporters that she rarely allowed her children to be unsupervised and that she felt "mom shamed" by this entire bizarre incident.

   First of all, one's heart does certainly go out to this mother who was doing nothing wrong and had to deal with an avalanche of legal harassment concerning her family. I find myself wishing that the person responsible for this family's nightmare was being publicly shamed in the same fashion as those individuals recently rightly publicly derided in the public sphere for calling the police on African-Americans simply going about their business while black. All of that being said, I find it somewhat problematic that the main focus of the media in reporting this story has been on the mother and not on the even greater problem which is ultimately linked to this mother's plight - the fact that increasingly in American society, young people are discouraged from occupying public space.

   The rationales given for attempting to keep youth from occupying public space tend to vary based upon the age of the youth and the nature of the space that an ageist is trying to deny a young person access to. For fairly young youth (such as Dorothy Widen, the eight-year-old young lady walking her gratuitously adorable white toy poodle in the aforementioned story) the rationales proffered by those who want to segregate youth from the rest of society and deny them all freedom of movement often come down to misdirected concerns about safety. Unsupervised children, we are told, will hurt themselves, hurt others, or be harmed by strange people with ill intentions. This is despite the fact that crime rates are actually far lower than they have been in years past when unsupervised children out and about were a more readily identifiable feature of urban, suburban, and rural life. Writing at the dawn of the second wave of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s (a much more laissez faire time in terms of youth being unsupervised compared to today), Shulamith Firestone, Richard Farson, and John Holt realized that calls for women to abandon themselves completely to mothering and supervise their children constantly were largely rooted in sexism dressed up as concern for children's welfare. Those who have subsequently written about the daycare ritual abuse and sexual molestation panics of the 1980s such as Richard Beck and Roger N. Lancaster have similarly noted that the mechanics of these modern day witch hunts were set in motion in large part due to increasing concerns within society about the fact that so many women were putting their children in the care of others while they worked outside of the home for the first time. Clearly, something other than an increase in actual dangers and risks to young people is driving these phenomena and a great deal of it has to do with the sexist notion that women belong in the home and should be watching and caring for their children at all times instead of occupying public space themselves.

   However, in the contemporary United States, while adult women do continue to suffer as a result of these problematic attitudes and the laws, policies, practices, and social norms that grow out of them, the greatest victims are in fact young people themselves. The fact that cultural anxieties about women's increasing independence from hearth and home present in the guise that they do speaks to the fact that very few people in America today are comfortable with openly stating that a woman's place is always and only in the home caring for her children and looking out for her husband. What we are comfortable with stating openly is that children need constant supervision. Young people should never be let out of an adult's sight. Curfews should be imposed to keep teenagers locked away after dark. Allowing a child the freedom to inhabit public space should be criminalized. Even supervised young people should be kept out of some public spaces just because some people don't want to see them. We as a society are increasingly comfortable with promulgating the notion that adults without children should see children out and about as little as possible and never on their own. While sexism may be fueling a great deal of this trend, anti-youth ageism is fanning the flames even further. And ultimately, young people are the biggest losers in this situation.

Remembering and Celebrating the Work of Richard Farson, Radical Youth Liberationist and Author of Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children

   June 13, 2018 marked the one year anniversary of the death of the psychologist and author Richard Farson, the radical youth liberationist writer behind the 1974 classic of youth rights theory, Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children. He was ninety years old when he died in La Jolla, California. I would urge every single person concerned with the rights and liberation of young people to read Birthrights if they have not already done so. It is the first book on youth liberation theory that I ever read and it is in no way an overstatement to say that doing so dramatically changed the course of my life. It is to this day the best book ever written about the oppression of young people and how our society might do better by them. There is no other single volume which provides a fuller articulation of youth liberationist grievances, principles, values, and hopes for the future. It is both extremely accessible in its language and format and yet highly theoretically substantive and sophisticated, a rare combination in theoretical work on almost any topic.

   I have been thinking a lot about Farson and Birthrights in particular these days as I have recently begun work on my own book on the topic of youth rights and liberation. Birthrights was published during an era in American social and cultural history in which fairly radical notions in reference to the rights of young people were taken far more seriously than they were today by intellectuals and activists and yet, the more I reflect upon the conditions of American society at this present moment, the more I feel that the time is ripe for a second wave of radical youth liberationist writing, theorizing, and activism. There is no better encapsulation of the first wave of youth liberationist theory than Birthrights and as such, it provides those of us charged with ushering in a second wave of youth liberationist activism and theorizing with a wonderful legacy upon which to build. We are trailblazers, yes, but we are also part of a transgenerational lineage of radical youth liberationist thinkers, writers, and doers. It is important not to forget that.

   A good deal of what makes Birthrights so powerful and convincing is that Farson saw youth oppression both in its specificity and in its totality. He was able to see how youth subordination within the family, compulsory education, legal age restrictions, the juvenile justice system, and oppressive, patronizing, and paternalistic attitudes towards young people, to name just a few major areas of concern in reference to youth subjugation about which he wrote in Birthrights, were both serious and unique problems in their own right and also how they worked together as part of an interlocking system of force and coercion designed to keep young people, in Farson's own words, "incapacitated, oppressed, and abused." Farson's eye for both specificity as well as the panoramic view of youth oppression (and what might be done to remedy the situation) has been highly influential for me in reference to my own writing on youth liberation and has guided me in terms of how I approach the structure of the book that I am currently at work on regarding youth rights issues.

   Another important element of Farson's analysis was his focus on intersectionality long before the critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw formally coined the term in the 1990s. Throughout Birthrights, Farson makes reference to the struggles of various groups within American society - women, men, prisoners, racial and ethnic minorities, disabled people, sexual minorities, poor people, elders. He sees how young people belonging to more than one marginalized group are impacted by multiple axes of oppression. He also sees how the struggles of groups other than young people may intersect with young peoples' own struggles.

   Finally, Richard Farson brilliantly understood that youth oppression is not just a product of laws and customs, although it is indeed a product of those forces. He also had a special sensitivity to and gift for describing the ways in which ageist attitudes impacted how adults saw young people and ultimately how young people came to conceptualize themselves. This is evident when Farson discusses the way that so-called "child prodigies" are in a certain important sense pathologized in contemporary American society, how youth sexuality is always only understood against the backdrop of deviance, how ageist attitudes towards young people infiltrate and impact the ostensibly scientific work done to study youth, and how adult preferences for children who are cute, obedient, quiet, docile, and apolitical reflect deep antipathy towards young people as individuals and their political interests as a class.

   As a second wave youth liberationist, I am so grateful for the gifts that Richard Farson provided to us via his work as a first wave youth liberationist. I pray that he rests in both peace and power and that his memory is forever for a blessing. Perhaps most importantly for those of us interested in continuing his youth liberationist work, I pray that we take his passing as a sign of a charge to keep in reference to continuing the work for youth rights and liberation that that first wave of youth liberationists began back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It's time for a second wave. I think we're up to it and I think that we're incredibly fortunate to have Richard Farson's brilliant work to guide us along the way.

Richard Farson: 1926-2017.

     

Youth Liberation As a Personal Commitment: Reflections and Resolutions

Youth liberationist friends are the best sort of friends. From left to right, there is me, Victoria Rodriguez, Katrina Moncure, and Alexander Cohen. We were eating at a Chinese restaurant in DC on this occasion. Victoria is another good friend that I met through the youth liberation movement who has since become an attorney at the LGBTQ Task Force and a nationally recognized figure in the burgeoning transgender rights movement. Victoria has also been active in reference to disability rights, queer rights, and other vitally important social justice causes.

   So recently I have been thinking a lot about what being a youth liberationist means to me as a personal commitment. It has been about seven years since I became a radical youth liberationist. I had previously been involved with activism for a variety of causes that were and remain important to me, but when I became a radical youth liberationist something inside of me changed. I was living in Washington DC at the time and schmoozing with a lot of folks in nonprofit jobs in my Master of Public Administration program, at internships, in job interviews, and in other settings. I was reading and talking to people about a lot of different social movements - queer and trans rights, women's reproductive rights, international human rights, disability rights, racial justice activism - and I was learning a lot. I found all of it worthwhile and valuable. I saw a role for myself in furthering all of these worthy causes. And yet after talking to some youth rights activists that were then affiliated with the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) (a problematic organization I have a somewhat fraught history with but which served as my introduction to the youth liberation movement) and reading Richard Farson's book Birthrights, a seismic shift occurred inside of me.
  

The canon. These are the books that ultimately made me a youth liberationist. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (which features an entire chapter entitled "Down With Childhood!"), John Holt's Escape From Childhood, Richard Farson's Birthrights, and Howard Cohen's Equal Rights For Children.

   I had always been secretly bothered by the way in which our society organizes relations between adults and younger persons. Something about it had always troubled me in a way that I struggled to put my finger on and that I lacked the vocabulary to name. I was bothered by the authoritarian control that sexist, racist, and heterosexist parents could exert over their children and the common attitude that someone's children were simply theirs to raise as they saw fit unless they were violently abusing or sexually assaulting them. The way that I and other students were treated in school by our teachers and school administrators never sat right with me, even when I was in kindergarten. The authoritarianism of the school system had always bothered me. It saddened me that my racist older cousin could prevent her children from having me as an influence in their lives and yet she was allowed to fill their heads with anti-miscegenation white supremacist garbage because she was their mother. I was haunted by stories of child abuse I heard from a woman that spoke to the students at my undergraduate institution about her career in child advocacy. A documentary on the local public access television station that I just happened to watch one day while I still lived in Tallahassee, Florida (fresh out of my undergraduate days at Florida State University) about the ways in which African-American male students are often labeled and pathologized within the school system made a particularly strong impression upon me. When my law class for public administration students studied DeShaney v. Winnebago, I began to formulate in my mind the notion that due to guardianship laws, the father who abused and nearly murdered his son was somehow an agent of the state and therefore the government did have an obligation to do more to prevent this from happening once they knew about the potential for abuse, in contradiction to the way that the Supreme Court had ruled on the case. I read a blog post while I was probably still an undergraduate on The Bilerico Project blog in which the blogger noted that societal expectations shape the rate at which young people mature - this was a revelation to me and suddenly it caused a lot of things to make a lot of sense to me that hadn't made sense before. On my Amazon Wish List, I added a few books about children's rights over the years starting from the time that I was a senior in high school. I found the topic intriguing. I didn't know what the answers were but it seemed to me important to figure out. All of this was before I was a youth liberationist or even aware that a youth rights movement existed. My sense of justice had always been fundamentally offended by the ways in which society at large structured relations between adults and younger people, but I lacked a theoretical framework with which to understand the problem and I did not see much in the way of immediate and obvious solutions.

Me at my American University graduation in 2012 when I obtained my Master of Public Administration degree. At this point, I knew that I wanted to enter a philosophy program next so that I could begin the work of theorizing youth liberation in the academic context. In my arms is Truffles, a plush lamb who is the unofficial mascot of the radical wing of the youth rights movement. He got to graduate too with a degree in Sheep Studies which my mother presented to him in our family's hotel room after my graduation ceremony was over.

   And then reading the psychologist Richard Farson's Birthrights caused everything to come together for me. Birthrights was an out of print book published back in the 1970s. The only reason that I even knew of the book's existence is because someone in NYRA that I was interviewing for a class project on local nonprofits recommended it when I asked him if he had any suggestions for further reading about youth rights for me. (This class project would ultimately serve as my primary entrance into the youth rights movement.) I either ordered a very cheap used copy of the book on Amazon or obtained the book through NYRA's lending library. And when I started reading it, all of a sudden, it all made sense. My sense that children were oppressed and that the adults in their lives exerted undue authority over them was a sign of ethical intelligence as opposed to maladjustment or an inability to accept the world as it must be. The way Farson discussed everything from the pathologization of child prodigies in an ageist society to the stifling and rigid character of the American K-12 public school system to his reflections on the politics of childhood resonated with me in a deeply satisfying and yet intellectually and ethically challenging way. I wasn't sure at the time quite what to make of Farson's views on abolishing the voting age and the age of consent, but the broader themes of the book - that children are oppressed as a class, that the pathways which child development takes are in part socially constructed, and that it was worth radically rethinking the institutions of the family, the school, the juvenile justice system, the law, and cultural attitudes as they pertain to youth - struck a chord inside of me that I had unknowingly longed to hear played for years. "This stuff is really out there and really radical, but I think I might agree with it," I thought to myself.

   Reading everything about youth rights that I could get my hands on and talking to more youth liberationists about both youth liberation theory and in many cases their own personal experiences of ageist oppression radicalized me even further. Getting to know young activists in middle and high school who were already sophisticated organizers and thinkers underscored for me just how arbitrary age-based notions of competence, character, and intellect can be. I also talked to people who had struggled unsuccessfully to gain emancipation from abusive and unhappy home situations as minors, people who had been abused or kicked out of their homes due to their sexuality while they were still in their teens, people who had been sent off to abusive "troubled teen" facilities against their wills, people who bore the physical and psychological scars of traumatic non-consensual elective medical procedures performed on them as minors. I was outraged both that these things were happening and that there was no large scale mass movement in existence seeking to address these injustices.

   When I came to Washington DC I had initially wanted a career for myself in politics. The plan was that I would get my Master of Public Administration degree at American University, work as a government bureaucrat or nonprofit administrator for a few years, and then run for elected office. However, when I found the youth rights movement that all changed in an instant and I didn't even mourn the fact that I was letting the dream that I had clung to for so long die. The day that I signed the ASFAR (Americans for a Society Free of Age Restrictions) Declaration of Principles, I surmised that I would probably never have a political career. I didn't care. Doing this work was more important than holding any elected office could ever be. The world was full of people trying to become legislators, governors, and the President of the United States of America. The world was not full of people  trying to ameliorate anti-youth ageism and the many evils it engendered. I needed this movement and it needed me.

   A lot has changed for me since I first became involved with the youth liberation movement back in 2010 and 2011 and yet my commitment to this cause remains steadfast. The way that I engage with people these days about youth liberation issues is probably a lot kinder and gentler than it was in my first few years as an angry activist, but my positions are still fundamentally the same. The passion is still there. My values have not changed. Both I and everyone close to me has come to know that being a radical youth liberationist will always be an important core part of who I am. This will not change even if one day I become a parent. It will not change as I age. And perhaps most rewarding of all for me has been seeing the transformations of some of the people around me as I have shared my message with them.

Alexander R. Cohen and I. Alexander has taught me so much about what it means to be an activist, an intellectual, a philosopher, an academic, and a radical youth liberationist. You can follow his Facebook page to learn all about his values and interests as a philosopher-journalist-activist and to read his opinion pieces on hot topics ranging from youth rights to immigration to guns to business rights.

   My mother has always been a highly ethical person and a person who deeply loves children. She was widely regarded during her teaching career as one of the best educators in her entire public PreK-12 school. (She has recently retired after devoting a lifetime to educating elementary school aged youth.) During the course of almost my entire lifetime she taught first grade at Baker School in Baker, Florida, the tiny rural Southern town in which I grew up. In fact, she was my first grade teacher. She combined a great deal of compassion and love for her students with an intense work ethic, boundless creativity, and a keen expertise in pedagogy. She understood how very young youth learn, how they think, and how they begin to mature developmentally. Introducing her to youth liberation theory and watching her become more sympathetic to these ideas and gain a greater understanding of the need for a radical youth rights movement has made me even prouder of my mother than I already was. I have also introduced some of my philosophy professors to youth liberation theory over the course of my studies. I do not know if I have converted all of these bright people into staunch child libbers, but I am proud that I have exposed them to new ways of thinking about the relationship between adults and young people and I hope that I have challenged them to perhaps be more ethical and less dismissive towards the capacities and need for autonomy of the youth in their lives.

Mama and me. She baptized me, she taught me how to read and write, and she has taught me a lot of life lessons over the years. Now I'm teaching her youth liberation theory and while she's not yet on board with all of the most radical stuff, she grows more radical by the day.

   Youth liberationism, like feminism, has to show in the way that one lives one's life. Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg lived feminism. I aspire to live youth liberation. Growing up in the church, I would hear folks say to one another "You are the only Bible that some people will ever read." As a youth liberationist, I have adapted this to "You are the only Birthrights that some people will ever read." In fact, I would imagine that for most of the people that I interact with, I am their sole point of contact with the youth liberation movement. This comes with a lot of responsibility and I take it very seriously. I can't associate with people that hit their children. If you post a meme on Facebook about how your child needs to meet a belt, I'm going to unfriend you and I'm also going to make sure that you know why I did it. When people post private information about their children on Facebook without their children's permission, I cannot condone that and I am willing to lose friends over it. When someone casually mentions that they like to snoop through their children's things or that they keep important and personally pertinent information from their children, I have an obligation to make it known that I do not condone this even if I am not in a position to directly change things. If I say nothing, it can be interpreted as tacit approval and someone will get the idea that even their radical youth liberationist friend thinks that what they are doing is okay. I've learned to say things in a way that hopefully does not come across as alienating or disrespectful, but I also keep to the truth that it is absolutely imperative for me to say something in most of these sorts of situations.

Me at the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) Annual Meeting held at the University of Maryland back in 2011 where I was elected to the Board of Directors of the organization. I served for a year. I had a lot of struggles with some of the other leadership of the organization who did not share my approach to activism, but my time in NYRA ultimately allowed me to meet a number of wonderful people that remain great friends, confidants, interlocutors, and co-conspirators to this day. In this photograph are Katrina Moncure and, on either side of me, Usiel Phoenix and Nigel Jones. Both Usi and Nigel became good friends and also taught me a great deal about youth liberation too. It was nice to have some fellow queers in the struggle with me and as was the case for me, their queerness informed their approach to youth rights activism and theory.

   When I applied to Ph.D programs this cycle, I could have chosen to write on any number of topics. Writing on a currently trendy topic in philosophy may have helped my chances of getting into a top program, but it would have come at the cost of my personal mission and sense of integrity. I went into academia because I care about helping to spread important ideas and no idea is more important to me than youth liberation. If a program does not want me as a radical youth liberationist doing work on this vital issue, then that is not the program for me. I see academia as my way of making a difference and contributing something of value to society. Some social movements probably have too much theory and too little concrete political action. Where youth liberation is concerned, we are still at the stage where theory is necessary to help people to understand a.) that something is wrong, b.) what it is that is wrong, c.) that it is possible to right the wrong, and d.) how we can begin to go about righting the wrong. One major problem that I saw during my time on the NYRA Board was how a lack of theoretical grounding made taking effective political action against ageism more difficult than it otherwise would have been. When you're theory-phobic, perhaps rallying around the cause of trying to get people under the age of eighteen admitted to a local junkyard seems like a good use of activist energy, but when one theorizes the ways that guardianship, minor status, legal age restrictions, compulsory education, and prejudicial cultural attitudes towards youth form an interlocking nexus of oppression that also intersects with sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, cissexism, monosexism, sizeism, ableism, colorism, lookism, predatory capitalism, medical paternalism, state oppression, and authoritarianism more generally, it should be clear that our finite activist energies are better spent elsewhere.

Me at the graduation ceremony where I received my Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from San Francisco State University in 2016. I entered philosophy and academia in no small part because I wanted to theorize youth liberation for a larger audience. While at SFSU, I wrote my MA thesis on youth liberation. My thesis committee chair told me that I had introduced him to a whole new world of theory and activism through my work. 

   The youth liberation movement has introduced me to so many wonderful people who have changed my life for the better. In particular, Alexander R. Cohen and Samantha Godwin taught me a great deal about what it means to be a youth liberationist, a philosopher, an activist, and an academic. Katrina Moncure has gifted me with her friendship and has been a wonderful co-conspirator to bounce ideas off of when I am thinking and writing about ageism and related issues. Shain Neumeier is a great friend who has also taught me a great deal about the intersection of ageism and ableism. Because of Shain, I am a much better philosopher than I would otherwise be when it comes to theorizing that particularly fertile and yet fraught ground. Gibson Katz and I have practically grown up together since we first became friends when he was a middle school student in his early teens and I was in my early twenties studying public administration at American University. Now he's a young adult off at college and I'm in my thirties looking at Ph.D programs. William Gillis has taught me so much about anarchism through a youth liberationist lens. Abel Magana has introduced my work to others and introduced me to opportunities to publish it that I otherwise would not have had. I am honored and humbled by Ayman Eckford's work translating my writing on youth rights topics into Russian and sharing it with the youth liberation movement of Russia. There are so many other amazing individuals, more than I can list here, that have made a difference in my life as a youth liberationist, but I want all of them to know that I see and appreciate all of their contributions.

Shain Neumeier and I. A wonderful friend and a great role model in so many ways. A fierce advocate for justice who has taught me so much about the intersection of ageism and ableism. Shain is an attorney who currently runs their own law firm which specializes in youth, elder, and disability rights legal issues such as supporting the rights of minors to make their own medical decisions even when their legal guardians object and helping disabled adults fight guardianship arrangements, institutionalization, and nursing home placements. I'm ridiculously proud of the work that Shain does every day to help oppressed individuals to resist paternalism, marginalization, dehumanization, and authoritarianism in their own lives. 

   So where does that leave us in terms of the overarching theme of this blog post - youth liberationism as a personal commitment? For me, it means that I am going to try to post more regularly on the blog here and I may bring back the Weekly Roundup as a good way to collect all of the important youth rights related stories that I come across in the course of a week in one place. I am additionally exploring other new avenues to spread youth liberationist ideas, although I am not in a position to publicly speak about details at this time. I also want to challenge all of you to make youth liberationism more of a core part of your identity and your way of life. For parents and teachers, it means in part holding oneself to the highest of ethical standards in dealing with the youth in one's care and working to foster their autonomy first and foremost. For all of us, it means making sure that others know our youth liberationist commitments, not laughing along at an ageist joke or cooperating in someone's attempts to belittle or oppress their children. Maybe it means saying or doing something even when it's uncomfortable or could risk rupturing adult relationships. Before he went completely off the deep end, Tim Wise spoke of his anti-racist activism as a white man on behalf of people of color in terms of "speaking treason fluently." Adult youth liberationists need to get comfortable with this stance. For us adults, youth liberationism also entails being a positive, affirming presence for the young people in our lives. In some cases, it may mean finding opportunities to support young people in our communities and to be of service to them. I have sometimes contemplated what a difference it would make if every serious, competent, committed youth liberationist I know volunteered to become a guardian ad litem. Being a youth liberationist means bringing youth liberationist values to every institution we encounter and to every role that we inhabit. We don't take these values off and on and we don't allow these roles and institutions to diminish our commitment to them.

Protesting the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), an abusive institution where Autistic and other neurodivergent youth and adults are subjected to electric shock and other forms of torture, outside of a government building with Shain as well as my best friend of over twelve years Patrick T. Ayers (who still doesn't really get this youth rights stuff despite my near constant efforts to educate him) and Shain's partner and fellow activist and youth liberationist Lydia Brown. Lydia is an attorney, writer, organizer, public speaker, and activist friend of mine who has taught me a lot by example about activism through their work on behalf of youth, disabled people, people of color, queer and trans people, women, non-binary people, poor people, and other often marginalized groups of folks. You can get a taste for Lydia's brand of activism by checking out their Autistic Hoya blog. The legal structure of guardianship allows injustices like those that are still happening daily at the Judge Rotenberg Center to take place. Without guardianship and the notion of minors and some disabled adults as the quasi-property of their parents that it inscribes into law, there would be no JRC. Without profound degrees of ageist and ableist thinking in our society, there would be no guardianship as it currently exists.

   As for the young people reading this blog post who are committed to youth liberation, I don't think that it is my place to lecture them as to what their youth liberation activism should look like. The only advice I would give to them is to find a way to make sure to remember the indignities and everyday oppressions of youth so that you can look back on them when you are older and to think critically about how these injustices continue to reverberate throughout both society as a whole and individual lives. All of the effects of youth oppression and growing up in a profoundly ageist society do not immediately end when one turns eighteen or twenty-one years of age even if some of the most unjust and degrading aspects of minority are no longer a fact of life. Some people believe that being concerned with ageism is a phase that children and adolescents go through and then grow out of. Insofar as this may be true in some cases, it is not due to a sudden rise in maturity on the part of the formerly oppressed young as they age. It is because the problems posed by being a young person in an ageist society cease to be as keenly felt as one comes to be afforded the rights and privileges associated with adulthood and as time goes on, other more seemingly immediate concerns may take the place of  one's initial concerns in reference to ageism. One may even find that one benefits from their newfound place of privilege within the ageist hierarchy, particularly if one is a parent or a teacher. However, that does not mean that the injustices which initially troubled one were not painful or wrong. And discounting the importance of youth liberation as an activist cause as one ages is ultimately short-sighted when one stops to take note of all of the ways in which youth oppression contributes to almost every other major problem in our society from sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and racism to an easy acceptance of authoritarian and paternalistic government policies to an entire cohort of American adults raised by American parents and educated in American schools who felt that electing an ill informed, authoritarian, bigoted, lying, cheating, treasonous, absurdly unqualified con man to the American presidency was obviously a great idea.

Katrina Moncure and I. It's not easy being a youth liberationist sometimes and I would go crazy without her. She served on the NYRA Board of Directors for many years prior to meeting me and then for a few years after the year that I had served on it too. For years she moderated NYRA's online forums among other roles. She currently blogs about youth rights issues on her own personal blog, Sure, Why Not? and runs the I Support Youth Rights Facebook page, a great resource for anyone interested in exploring youth liberation theory in more depth.

   Our movement is growing but it is still a small movement. For this reason, how we conduct ourselves as individuals in public and in private is important for the example that it sets. We have to hold ourselves and each other accountable. Nonetheless, I have found taking up this cause to be immeasurably rewarding. Perhaps I picked a hard row to hoe, as the old saying goes, in committing myself to youth liberationism and hitching my fortunes to those of this cause, but I cannot imagine deciding to do anything else. Youth liberationism is something to be proud of and I am grateful to God that I found this movement and have been able to dedicate myself to making the mission of youth liberation a core part of my life's work. I would invite everyone reading this blog post to find a way to make youth liberation a more personal commitment in their own lives in whatever form that may take for them.  

Listening and learning with a critical ear at the NYRA Annual Meeting in 2011. Katrina sits next to me. A youth liberationist's work is never done.

   Disclaimer: All opinions shared in this blog post are solely my own. I do not speak for anyone else who is named here or whose photograph appears here.

No One Has All the Answers But At Least We're Asking the Right Questions

   When one chooses to publicly identify with a cause that most people do not support or even have much understanding of, she will find that others frequently begin asking her where exactly the borders of her philosophy are and on what side she would come down concerning various complicated hypothetical situations. This is frustrating to youth rights supporters because none of us have ever claimed that we have all the answers about anything. To paraphrase Richard Farson, it is impossible to be a truly great parent in a society fundamentally organized against youth and parenting, like all other human relationships, is a dilemma to be lived as opposed to a problem to be solved. While youth rights supporters can propose many more concrete solutions in the realm of politics, economics, and the law than in the realm of intergenerational relations, there are still controversial issues which pose a challenge to youth rights theory and call into questions the limits of support for youth liberation. This is true of all ideologies and belief systems (think of the hand wringing within the feminist movement about how the movement should handle the issue of sex selective abortion). It in no way fundamentally discredits youth rights as a philosophy or a movement. So while none of us has all the answers, what I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt, what all of us know as youth rights supporters, is that almost no one outside of our movement is even asking the right questions about the ways our society has chosen to relate to young people.

   Every major framework that our society uses to understand young people is deeply flawed. These frameworks may have some redeeming features, but they are fundamentally beyond reform. This is because what all of these frames share in common is the idea that children and adolescents are passive entities who exist in any meaningful sense only in relation to the adults in their lives. Whether they are there for adults to "educate" or "protect" or "punish" or "control", they are not perceived as autonomous agents in their own lives and interpersonal relationships. They are always painted as profoundly other. Where almost all adults are concerned, things are done to and for youth, rarely done with youth, and never done by youth (unless they are teenagers and they are doing drugs or playing hooky from school or engaging in sexual activities that adults disapprove of, in which case they are a social problem to be pathologized and controlled and this goes double for female youth, poor youth, and youth of color).

   What does this have to do with the kind of questions that most adults are prone to asking about youth as opposed to the questions that youth rights supporters of all ages ask about youth issues? Well, the frame through which we analyze an issue greatly affects the type of questions we will ask regarding that issue. Thanks to the LGBT rights movement, the frame for dealing with LGBT people has gone from "How do we cure homosexuality, transsexualism, and bisexuality?" to "How do we support individuals with minority sexualities and gender identities?" There are plenty of similar parallels in other movement histories and you are probably thinking of some right now as you read this.

   One of the most striking examples of this dichotomy is within the realm of mainstream education policy discourse. The questions that experts in the field primarily ask treat students in the K-12 school system as the absent referent in a policy discussion which one would think would center their voices, concerns, and lived experiences. However, this is the exact opposite of how most discourses in education policy deal with young people. Very little critical analysis is paid to the effect of zero tolerance policies, the lack of due process, and other forms of oppression faced by almost all youth within American schools. (You can read more of my work on student rights here.) Very seldom do those in the education policy world ask themselves how teachers, administrators, and others can help students to learn the information that is most relevant to them in a setting that feels comfortable to them. Instead all of the questions asked are about how to raise test scores, how to handle "disciplinary problems," and how to get parents (never the students themselves) more involved in determining the direction of the student's education.

   Another example of this phenomenon at work is in the realm of the sensationalized treatment of the "school bullying" issue. Now, were the behavior many "bullies" direct at young people directed at adults it would be termed "assault" or "battery" or "harassment" and so the term itself is infantilizing. Additionally, the frames proposed by adults (and some youth) to deal with the problem of school harassment and violence overlook the structural features of the environment which create the problem in the first place. Youth on youth harassment and violence within the K-12 school system is systemic. It is not an outgrowth of normal child development or supposed adolescent immaturity. It is an attempt by members of a subject class to exert control within the context of a deeply oppressive environment. If you put most adults into a situation they did not choose to be in, with people they did not choose to be with, doing things they did not choose to do, with no due process rights, without a financial incentive in the foreseeable future, with authority figures they had to constantly grovel before in order to gain permission to eat, drink, use the restroom, or get up from their desks, I would be shocked if their behavior was much better than that of many youth within our school system. There is a simple solution to youth on youth harassment and violence within our schools. It is to make our schools less oppressive and restrictive and to allow students a choice in the matter of whether or not they go to school and where they go if they do choose to attend. It involves doing this in a way that is sensitive to the unique needs of poor, rural, inner city, disabled, LGBT, and other marginalized youth. It would be quite an undertaking, but it would solve the problem in time. Instead politicians, principals, parents, and even some youth propose hokey school assemblies on why it's wrong to make fun of people in wheelchairs or why reaching out to those who are left out of the popular clique is the right thing to do. While this is ineffective, it is rarely very harmful. However many people concerned with this issue actually make the situation worse by proposing zero tolerance policies against "bullying" that are so vague that they penalize youth acting in self defense, make the schools more oppressive and dangerous places to be, and strip students of even more due process rights. Confronting the problem of youth on youth harassment and violence requires a radical paradigm shift that most parents and teachers are uncomfortable with so they fall back on "solutions" which reinscribe the oppressive circumstances they were ostensibly set up to ameliorate. Hence adults ask how to force students to by nicer to one another as opposed to asking why adults are forcing students to be around people they don't want to be nice to in the first place.

   So as you can see, youth rights supporters don't have all the answers to problems affecting young people in our society (although we have come up with some fairly good ones). What we are doing is the difficult work of deconstructing ageist paradigms which lead us to make unwise assumptions about youth and to make harmful decisions on their behalf.

Youth Rights 101: What Is Youth Rights Anyway? How Is It Different From Other Philosophies About Youth?

   This post is intended to serve as part of a series on the basics of youth rights theory. When I joined the youth rights movement, I found very few resources available to offer basic insights into the central tenets of youth rights philosophy. This section of the blog is intended to serve as an introduction to the ideas and attitudes that permeate youth rights theory.

   "Youth rights" can be difficult to pin down. The term itself is vague (although no vaguer than most terms used to describe more established social movements and philosophies). Youth rights is difficult to pin down primarily because there are a number of philosophies similar in some respects to youth rights that ultimately differ in critical enough ways to distinguish themselves from youth rights. There is also a great deal of ideological diversity within the youth rights movement itself. Those differences may be highlighted in more depth elsewhere on this blog, but this post is intended to focus on the commonalities that make us youth rights supporters as opposed to something else. Youth rights is, like feminism, first and foremost a frame for viewing issues (in this case issues affecting young people). It emphasizes the prevalence of ageism as a key prejudice affecting the lives of young people. It problematizes institutions like the family and compulsory education which are central in the lives of youth. It calls into question assumptions that most thinkers about childhood, education, and the family take for granted about children's capacities. Most critically, youth rights thinkers tend to regard child abuse and child protectionism as two sides of the same coin.

   In the words of philosopher Howard Cohen, "Child protection has been concerned with the quality of care of the child, and therefore with the fitness of the caretaker. It has not been concerned with fundamental questions about the nature and limits of adult authority over children. It is the sense that the ways in which adults control children and make decisions for them are themselves a part of the mistreatment and oppression of children which is absent from the ideology, and is ignored by the government when it becomes involved." To paraphrase psychologist Richard Farson, we believe that we best protect youth by protecting their rights. That which undermines the right of young people to autonomy and self-determination (even under the misguided assumption that it is for their own welfare) demeans, oppresses, and endangers them. Child abuse and child protectionism are two sides of the same coin.

   Youth rights supporters believe that youth don't usually need protection from themselves - they need protection from the social, political, legal, economic, and cultural forces that make them a subject class. We recognize that, as has been the case with people with disabilities, when youth need protection it is usually from the institutions such as schools, the family, and social services agencies that were ironically enough set up for the purpose of protecting them. This is because it is impossible to truly protect someone within a framework that denies them liberty, autonomy, and self-determination and thereby deprives them of the ability to meet their own needs and desires and to protect themselves.

   This isn't to say that there aren't some worthwhile things being done from child protectionist perspectives and that sometimes youth rights advocates' goals may not overlap with those of other people concerned about the welfare of children. They often do. Many non-youth rights child advocates care deeply and sincerely about children's welfare much as we do and there are of course times we will be working together for some of the same things. But it is to say that unlike most people concerned with youth issues, we are working within a tradition which centers concerns of autonomy, liberty, and rights while calling into questions many fundamental assumptions about child development.

Attitudes and policies which silence and stifle young people (even under the assumption that it is for their own good) contribute to young peoples' oppression and abuse.

The Works That Made Me the Youth Rights Supporter I Am

   Before I knew there was such a thing as a youth rights movement I wanted to read books about it. As a high school senior I remember searching in vain for books on Amazon that proposed new ways of thinking about childhood and the rights of young people. I didn't know then that most of the best books on this topic are currently out of print and often hard to find. I also didn't know where to look for excellent youth rights resources outside of books.

   That's why I would like to take this opportunity to introduce my readers to the works of youth rights theory that have influenced me and allowed me to grow as a thinker and writer dealing with youth rights issues. I hope that all of you will seek them out and allow them to take you on a journey as well.

   The first book of youth rights theory I ever read was Richard Farson's Birthrights. A psychologist and father of five, Farson's 1970s era tome made him a radical's radical in the movement for children's liberation (as it was then often called). Since reading the book for the first time I have reread it on multiple occasions. With its clear, simple language, Birthrights is incredibly accessible to readers of all backgrounds and ages and also the most radical and comprehensive call for youth liberation that I am aware of which has been committed to paper. The first time I read Birthrights I found it both incredibly easy to get through and amazingly disconcerting. I was also impressed with the richness of the theory. Farson sees connections between the liberation of youth and the liberation of women, people of color, LGBT people, and people with disabilities which are as relevant today as they were in the 1970s. Every youth rights supporter owes it to themselves to read this amazing book.

   Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex is principally known as one of the seminal works of second wave feminism. It is also a seminal work of youth rights theory. In the chapter entitled "Down With Childhood," Firestone reveals the many connections between women's oppression and the oppression of children. In just thirty pages, Firestone offers a radical critique of the ideology of motherhood, compulsory education, age segregation, children's forced asexuality, children's economic dependence, and oppression affecting children within the family. Firestone's work should serve as a wake up call to any youth rights supporter who doesn't see the important ways in which feminism is linked with youth liberation and any feminist who doesn't see children as an oppressed class and who overlooks the ways in which contemporary ideologies about childhood work to oppress adult women. This chapter is why I refer to myself as a Shulamith Firestone youth rights feminist.

   John Holt's Escape from Childhood has been rightly critiqued by many within the movement for Holt's problematic belief that children who choose to live with and depend economically on their parents should have to abide by their rules while children who are economically self sufficient are entitled to greater autonomy. Read this book anyway. Holt is often viewed as a simple advocate of homeschooling while his more radical views about youth liberation are ignored by most people who profess an interest in his ideas. This is unfortunate, because one cannot truly appreciate any of Holt's ideas without understanding the deeply subversive ways he saw children and childhood. Like Birthrights, Escape from Childhood is highly accessible and yet full of incredibly rich theoretical insights.

   Howard Cohen's Equal Rights for Children is probably the least accessible book on this list, at least for those without a background in academic philosophy. Nonetheless it is well worth your time if you have a serious interest in youth rights theory. Cohen's views can be best summarized by this quote: "Child protection has been concerned with the quality of care of the child, and therefore with the fitness of the caretaker. It has not been concerned with fundamental questions about the nature and limits of adult authority over children. It is the sense that the ways in which adults control children and make decisions for them are themselves a part of the mistreatment and oppression of children which is absent from the ideology, and is ignored by the government when it becomes involved." Cohen's work on child agents is also essential to a theoretical understanding of how to make rights for the youngest youth work in practice.

   John Taylor Gatto's book of essays Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling is brilliant in some places (especially the first chapter) and incredibly off key in others (especially the last chapter). Gatto is a former award-winning public school teacher who chose to use his platform as New York State Teacher of the Year to offer a radical critique of the modern American school system.

   Most people who write parenting blogs, including those who think of themselves as avant garde advocates for children, tend towards the smug and self-righteous. That is unfortunate because parents even more than the rest of us need good role models when it comes to treating those younger than ourselves with respect. This is why I love the Demand Euphoria blog. The author is a mother to two preschool-aged children and writes about her experiences as a parent with honesty and insight.

   Cevin Soling's documentary The War on Kids is as brilliant a resource as any I am aware of dealing with the issue of youth oppression within the modern school system. It touched on every aspect of schooling I found oppressive in my own childhood and it is recommended for anyone that wants to know what K-12 education is really like today for most youth.

   Samantha Godwin's legal philosophy paper entitled "Children's Oppression, Rights, and Liberation" is one of the most important works of radical youth rights theory to come out recently. It is also the only radical youth liberation work I am aware of that examines youth rights through the lens of legal philosophy.

   I hope you find this list of works helpful in your quest to gain a deeper understanding of the youth rights movement. These works have collectively made me the youth rights supporter I am today and I hope that any of you who choose to explore them gain as much from encountering them as I did.