I’m a little ashamed to admit that I found myself susceptible to one of those Facebook adds. “Oh, those pants are cute and they look super comfortable!” I put the pants into my cart. Low and behold, a request to enter my email popped up to receive 20% off! I entered my email and found the discount. I went back to my cart and started to check-out. At the top of my screen appeared: “With every purchase, you save a child.” WTF?!? I felt simultaneously furious and ashamed. I quickly hit the red X at the corner of my browser. Gone.
This is racist, ageist, capitalism at play! Hey you, elite privileged (read: white) adult: with your purchase, you just saved some imagined (read: Black or Brown) poor suffering child from a far-away land. Poof: all personal responsibility for harming children or enabling children to be harmed is gone. You are free. You saved a child. So many of us in this racist ageist capitalist circus will feel ease and comfort believing, “With my cute pants, I’m saving the world.” The mirage continues. The circus continues. Children keep dying.
The children are not responsible for our collective future! The children show us a mirror to the present, past, and future in their vulnerability to the harms that we adults continue to inflict on them and on us. Adults: you can deny accountability over and over again, but we are in charge. We make the rules. We cannot tell children that it is up to them to make the world right. How unjust! We feed them poison and then ask them to make everything better. They do not have access to the kind of power needed to make things better. We have access to that power.
Let me be clear: I believe that adults learn our greatest lessons from children, from paying attention and relearning what it truly means to live with conviction and to experiment. Children play. They are not innocent. They play. That is what we crave and desire. Children watch the world very closely and they are constantly learning from us—our violence and our care. Children also resist. They take to the streets to force us to face our hypocrisy and with courage, they demand justice for one another and for all of us. Children have always been at the forefront of protest.
As childhood scholars, we look for children’s voices and I love children’s stories. These stories bring life and joy and pain and beauty. I will continue to listen and learn. But we must be real. These stories will never free them or us without adults dismantling the violent institutions that continue to mistrust, misbelieve, and mischaracterize children.
Children may not have all the ugly words yet for the harm we create, but they are not innocent. This so-called innocence that we say we are trying to protect in our children is what we imagine, desire, and crave. Because without knowledge, we can pretend that we are not responsible. But friends, we have always experienced harm. Children experience more harm than adults with higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, and susceptibility to environmental degradation. Do not delude yourself in thinking that there is some sort of innocence out there that will free you or your children. Innocence is a scapegoat that lets us ignore—lets us refuse accountability—for the many harms we continue to perpetuate in our world.
The future is all of us. Children show us a mirror to the parts of the world we do not want to see. We make them innocent so we don’t have to look at the harm we inflict on them and on all of us. Together with children, let’s reimagine and build new and sustainable webs of care.