Rev Left Radio - Solidarity With Children: Love, Autonomy, Parenting, and Innocence

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

In this episode, Breht is joined by revolutionary feminist and author Madeline Lane-McKinley to discuss her recent book "Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy", in which she argues for a politics that centers young humans as essential comrades in the struggle for a better world! In the process they examine the concept of childhood as historically structured, which children are granted innocence and which are robbed of it, how to parent through a lens that respects children as unique and autonomous human beings instead of the property of their parents, and much more! You can follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ (on twitter and IG) ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Introduction A World Against Children by Madeline Lane McKinley A few weeks after I began writing this book, Israel declared war on Gaza, following a series of attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023. Quote, we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly, pronounced Israel's then-minister of defense, Yoav Galant, ordering a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. At the time, half of the 2.2 million people living in the open-air prison of Gaza were under the age of 15. So many of these children, all born under siege, have since been massacred by the Israeli military, along with so many of their elders. That October, much of what we witnessed in this genocide came as images of suffering children. A constant stream of photographs of children screaming, crying, fleeing, fleeing, bloodied, injured. dead. One of the most enduring images of the first weeks was captured by photographer

Muhammad Salam in a hospital in the southern Gaza Strip where Inis Abu Mamar embraced the corpse of her five-year-old niece, Sally, wrapped in a shroud and balanced on her knee. Days later, another image taken by photographer Mahmoud Hamz, incited controversy. It depicted six small children lying in a row covered in dried blood beneath a white sheet in the morgue of Al-Azka. hospital in the Gaza Strip. Yet the image was deemed too graphic to be circulated by mainstream media outlets. The New York Times decided not to publish the photograph in full, instead using a cropped version to accompany a column.

Of this decision, Times' opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury explained, quote, As editors, we ask a series of questions before publishing sensitive photos, such as, Does the image respect the dignity of the victims? Is it exploitative or gratuitous? Does the image help describe the news event in a way that has more impact than reporting alone can do? That same day, the Times published a column by former Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Pullgreen, who argued against this editorial decision, stating that it is an, quote, image that demands to be seen. To this we might add, what does it mean to see this? image. And what does it mean to crop it? In the version featured in the times, the children's

faces are left out of view. Quote, if you don't look too closely, Polgreen writes, you might think the photograph is a dimly lit snapshot from a slumber party or a family camping trip. You would not know, for instance, that the child's second from the left appears to be missing a chunk of their school. That fall, disputes erupted everywhere over photographs and videos. One of the key points of contention was whether these images were of Israeli children or of Palestinian children. And there were copious rumors and conspiracies, such as the notion that the children depicted were not real, but in fact plastic dolls. Soon a story began to disseminate about 40 Israeli children, believed to have been beheaded by Hamas in the Bieri kibbutz, which political leaders across the world quickly corroborated. In a statement that made headlines across the U.S.

media, President Joe Biden claimed, quote, I never really thought that I would see have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children, end quote. But soon the White House walked back this statement. When journalists attempted to substantiate the story, which was reported by Israeli soldiers, the Israel Defense Forces refused. Meanwhile, the notion of these 40 decapitated Israeli children, precisely as figures of innocence, was used relentlessly to justify the massacre of Palestinian. including children. Quote, We will not allow a reality in which Israeli children are murdered,

Yoav Galant told the press, just as the death toll in Gaza surpassed a thousand. Nearly everywhere in this horror are traces of a political question, which children get to be innocent, and which children are merely human animals. Appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable, as poet and scholar Jackie Wang writes, quote,

even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence. In the unbearable context of Gaza, we see variations on the figure of the child put into conflict with each other. Children's innocence at a rhetorical level legitimates genocide by the Israeli state and, conversely, stands in for the innocence of all Palestinians living under apartheid, whether they are children or adults, and no matter what form their resistance to their oppression has taken.

At the heart of this innocence is a conception of children as something like human animals, as not quite humans and not quite historical subjects. As innocent, the child is likewise imagined as being without agency. In this sense, the story of decapitated children found by Israeli soldiers made into the mouthpieces of Israel's attack on nearly a million children in Gaza is even more devastating. I want to ask the question again, which children get to be innocent?

Said another way, which children get to be seen as children. Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, we have on Madeline Lane McKinley, the author of Solidarity with Children, an essay against Adult Supremacy to discuss this wonderful book,

the idea of being calm, with children, the false assumptions we have around childhood, the historical and class creation of childhood as such. We talk about the obvious genocide in Palestine, how to talk about that with your children, right-wing and left-wing, anti-children views and how they manifest in our politics and our discourse, and so much more. This is a beautiful conversation. Whether you have children or not, no matter what your situation is with regards to children in your life, I think this is an incredibly generative and important work that behooves us all to struggle with, even as it challenges perhaps some deep assumptions we have about ourselves and about

children. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio in exchange for bonus monthly episodes, our meditation group, our situation room and much more. For only $5 a month, you get access to all of that. But if you don't like the subscription model, you can shoot us a one-time donation and buy me a coffee.com forward slash revleft radio. It really goes to supporting me and producer Dave's families.

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All right, without further ado, here's my wonderful discussion with Madeline Lane McKinley on Solidarity with Children. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Madeline Lane McKinley and I'm an author and feminist based in Portland, Oregon. Well, welcome, Madeline. It's an honor to have you on. Today we are going to talk about your book, Solidarity with Children, an essay against adult supremacy. I love this. I think it's a super interesting argument. I think it puts pressure on like basic assumptions that a lot of people have without even ever thinking critically about them. Just the, just the de facto way in which we see children in some way as lesser than, as undeveloped. as needing to be kind of subordinated to the adult world, and you put really interesting pressure on those assumptions and make us think critically about these issues. So I love this book, and this interview is an attempt to try to wrestle with some of the main arguments, though. Of course, I always encourage my audience to go out and get the full book because an interview

can only kind of scratch the surface of what a book can fully cover. So let's go ahead and just get into it. And the first question I have for you is, can you kind of just explain what made you want to write a book on children, especially one that challenges core notions of childhood in the way that you did? Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on. This is a pleasure. I was inspired in a lot of ways by my experiences of being a parent in a few different left milieu. and I felt like there was a kind of lack of thinking and critical awareness of children in the spaces I was observing where, you know, if there was any kind of like inclusion of children, it looked like, you know, a box of crayons in the corner or something like that.

And I think, you know, especially in spaces where we're thinking about liberation and, you know, political practices, revolutionary practices, that this should be a priority. And I also, you know, the question of like, do you like children still gets posed, right? I find that question really interesting. I don't often, you'll hear that question from folks

who would never ask that of any other kind of grouping of human beings, right? But children are still kind of imagined in that. way. And just spending a lot of time with children as a parent and also as a caretaker, I was during my kid's early life in a place where, living in a place in Santa Cruz, California, where the child care options were totally unaffordable. And it wasn't really a matter of choice. It just, I had to develop some kind of child care collective to make my life work and to help my My friends, comrades, peers make their lives work. And just spending all that time with children, you notice, like, it's hard not to notice.

Some children are kind, some are annoying, some are mean, you know, some are funny, some are serious. They're just like all human beings. They're everything. And I think the question of do you like children is a question. posed by someone who just doesn't know any children, right? And I don't mean that to be overly critical, but it's a kind of gap in experience that I think is common. And it's partly because children are thought to be the responsibilities of exclusively, you know, parents and guardians or those who are recognized through their job, right, such as teachers or social workers to have some kind of

appropriate relationship with with children right and and now perhaps more than in a very long time having any other kind of relationship with children is dangerous right we see for instance the the targeting of anyone involved in these like readings in public libraries as groomers right and there's a suspicion towards anyone who would want to have any other kind of relationship with a child. And so I think it's urgent to build solidarity, not just with children, but with each other to make those kinds of possibilities of care more possible, right? I also felt like as a parent, I'd relied a lot on, I'd learned a lot from radical parenting books. But, that so many of these radical parenting books that I'd read, not surprisingly, were just for

parents or guardians and caretakers, right? And so in many ways, they kind of further siloed off these questions of solidarity with kids. So I wanted to write a book that was for everyone, and I also didn't want to write it as an expert, but as somebody who's committed to doing this in my everyday life. And that's often really confusing and troubling. And so a lot of the book is just about, you know, rather than coming from a place of expertise, it's about finding ways of thinking through those problems, you know, much more than providing clear answers to them. And I know that that's a little bit frustrating, actually, I've heard. But I've also heard that it's a productive frustration, right? Like there isn't a program I'm offering. It

It really does have to do with developing practices that exist in the minute to minute day to day, which anyone who spends time with children knows is, you know, that's vital. That's where the good stuff happens. Yeah, I love that. I think it is incredibly generative. And there is no one-size-fits-all approach. There is no, you know, structure or thing that can be imposed on how to deal with children or how to parent that could fit every single child. as you said earlier alluded to, children are as diverse as the human species itself.

And as a father to multiple children, as an uncle to multiple nieces and nephews, one thing I have noticed is, and I always say this, but I'll say it again, is that children, like, we often kind of flatter ourselves to think that, you know, how we act as a parent kind of dictates the personality and worldview of our children. But I've been humbled time and time again by the fact that children come out with a personality and with a temperament already. They literally are already their own human being. And it's not so much you're there to shape them and turn them into something, but you're there just try to cultivate who they already are. And kind of, and every time, you know, I have three children. So every different child I had, it's a radically

different experience, a radically different approach. And that's sort of humbling in its own right. So I think that the only way you could honestly go about wrestling with questions like this is the way that you did. You know, everybody wants an answer that they can apply in their own life or like a copy and paste thing. But that's just not the, that's not the nature of reality, especially when it comes to children. Absolutely. And even the most well-intentioned of those kinds of, you know, how-to guides or something like that can't avoid authoritarianism, right? that's just kind of built into the genre of that kind of parenting advice, right? Absolutely. But it does make sense that, you know, we're always looking for, we're always looking for that solution with parenting just like anything else, right?

What's the kind of like quick fix? There isn't a quick fix. It involves patience. Yeah, absolutely. And it's simultaneously like the most important and the most challenging thing that many of us ever do in our lives. I know for myself, all the life experiences I've been through raising children is just, it's like the number one priority I have, my responsibility to my children and also the most challenging thing I've ever done. Yeah. And so that really raises the stakes on it.

You mentioned authoritarianism. I don't want to talk too much right now because I still want to get into some of the core themes of the book itself. but I do want to come back around to that because I think it's an interesting and a really important point. And I've already jotted down a bunch of notes, but I'll get to them as we go through the conversation. So let's go to the next question, which is,

and your book begins with the introduction, a world against children, and it immediately goes in to the genocide in Palestine. And that's something that anybody listening to a show like this or anybody with open eyes and an open heart have been devastating. stated by what's happened over the past two plus years now in Palestine and continues to happen. And the role of children in this tragedy is really the inflection point.

Gaza was a site of two million people, half of which were under the age of 18. So when you are basically carpet bombing the entire area and turning everything into rubble, you are, by definition, engaged in a genocide against children. And we've all had access to that visually and emotionally in ways that in every previous historical epoch people didn't have. You might have got newspaper headlines once in a while. But you didn't get that intense moment to moment visual engagement with mass slaughter like we have with a modern technology. So I just wanted to just say the introduction to the book itself, I think, focused on the. on a seriously important thing and was deeply emotionally moving because of it. But your book begins

by arguing that we live in what you call a world against children, a world whose political and economic structures actively endanger them. For listeners new to this idea and assuming, you know, many people haven't read the book yet, can you explain what you mean by that phrase and what helped you see childhood in this more systemic, less sentimental way? Hmm. Yeah, thank you for for that reading too. I mean, I think in Gaza, what we are watching in real time is

the question of who gets to be a child, right? Who gets to be a child or, you know, in the language of the IDF, human animals, right? I think that that's been profoundly disturbing for

all of us to witness, but we really need to take responsibility for, for processing this, right? I think one of the things you're bringing up is just the overwhelm we're feeling of these images of our exposure to this from afar and sense of powerlessness, right?

But that has been one of the features of this genocide for anyone who is not directly there, on the ground, right? What do we do? How do we feel any political agency at all, right? And so I think reflecting on the ways in which those images impact us is crucial. One way it impacts us is to make us feel powerless, which is a lot of what it means to be a child, right? To be restricted of rights or an ability to make choices about your life or the world at large. So I was thinking a lot about this much earlier on, not that the horrors in Gaza were anything new in in 2023, but I was inspired by some conversations I was having with my kiddo about family separation at the

border in the U.S. And around that time, they were quite young when this became a big issue with images like the ones that you're talking about, all of these horrific images we were seeing children in cages, right? And I wondered how to talk about. to them about this. And, you know, the decision many of the parents around me were making was to not. And that felt wrong to me. I'm not saying that I have judgment to anyone, but I felt that the conversation needed to happen. And so one of the things that came up in talking with my kid was over this idea of innocence, which children get to be innocent and which don't. And my kid, was at the time very blonde and blue-eyed

and was reckoning with the fact of their perceived innocence as being different from other children who they were witnessing being harmed in this way. So how to make sense of that. And even for the most idealized children in the world, these kinds of figures of white supremacy, these white, blonde children, The idea or the notion of their innocence is used against them as well, right?

All children are harmed by the idea of children is one of my fundamental arguments. And it's precisely as children also stripped of rights that child laborers are among, you know, the most exploited workers in the world and doing the most dangerous kinds of work. So so much that is done in the name of children is not for the sake of children at all. And the innocent child is a rhetorical device that, you know, for the right, has been long deployed on behalf of the fetus, which is merely the idea of a child, right? And through policies that enact, like, direct material harm on the actual lives of most children in this country who are living in poverty and without access to many social resources, such as, you know, basic health care, food, shelter. So these are the kinds of strings I was pulling out from this idea of the kind of white, innocent child, right? Is how that is for no one a source of protection.

And it's merely a kind of fetish object in some ways. So, yeah, I hope that makes sense. It goes in so many directions, this idea of, of children, but whether you're included in it or excluded by it, right? It's a, it's a weapon. Absolutely. And, yeah, in the introduction of your book, you, after talking about Gauze a little bit, you go into the case of Timir Rice, right?

The, I think, 13-year-old boy in Cleveland, doing what so many young boys do, young people in general, right, playing with a fake gun. I used to do this around my neighborhood all the time. We would play war, me and my friends, you know, just stupid little fake plastic guns, you know, pretending to shoot at each other, just a very child, innocent child-like activity. And we, most of us will even remember the video footage from that day of a police officer pulling up and before the cruiser even stops the guy is jumping out and shooting innocent little Tamir Rice. And I think that speaks obviously and directly to your point, or at least half of your point, about. you know innocence of children who is and isn't included and how it's really not even protecting of the people it claims to be in protected of but certainly in the case of

young black boys in America from Emmett Till to Tamir Rice everything in between before and after that that notion of childhood and the notions of innocence that go along with it are really denied to the to entire groups of people in that way I even think about the Philando Castile shooting where his kid or his kid or stepchild, I can't remember exactly the situation, was in the back seat of the vehicle. And Philando Castile worked at the local school and was loved by the children there. And, you know, just to be that child in the back seat watching the police basically murder your father figure right in front of you. You know, the media, everybody just moves on.

And it's like that child is going to have to live with that the rest of their life. And it's like that doesn't even matters. It doesn't even come up in the conversation, even on ostensibly liberal. sides of the media or whatever. So I think that does speak to some of what you're saying there. Yeah. No, absolutely. So many of, so many children who don't get to be innocent children are marked by birth. And, and can't seek any protection from their status as, as child, right? But it's, it, I, I don't think we have enough conversations about that. And when we do, it is often to then transpose some of this rhetoric of the white fetishized innocent child onto these children who are

who are seen as excluded from it right so I think the the question of innocence is is important because what we see in innocence is someone who's not not complicit in some way right not a part of this world not yet and that's often how we think of adulthood, right? As it's as a loss of that innocence. So I think part of it is getting rid of the innocence. Yeah, right? For everyone.

And, you know, when I talk about parents who didn't want to tell their children about X, Y, or Z, and, you know, with Gaza, we see this too. Don't talk to kids about this. It's too upsetting, right? Well, which kids get to even have the choice? preserving that innocence is something we're also participating in, which isn't to say, oh, like, traumatize kids, go out and traumatize kids, right? It's just to take actual responsibility as fellow humans for the real life situation

that many, many children are facing. And a lot of that doesn't look very innocent, right? A lot of that looks very dangerous and sad and tragic, right? but how do we just really look at that? That's, yeah, that resonates so deeply with me because I have wrestled with the exact question of how much and to what degree I let my children in on what's happening in Palestine. And I decided early on for many of the reasons you're implying that, you know, of course I'm not going to show them the horrific, you know, images and the graphic images and instill that in their mind. But had multiple deep conversations about it. In fact, on the way here today, I brought my 10-year-old because my audio engineer has a kid and they play together why I record.

But I was bringing my 10-year-old son over here. And, you know, I often listen to like political media in the car. And then it'll start stirring him up and then I'll push pause and most of the car will be us talking. And me and him have talked deeply about what's going on in Palestine for the two years since it's been happening. He was already immensely curious, right? he would see something like, you know, me just start, you know, listening to something about it, and I just start crying. He looks over and notices that his dad is crying, and he can't help, but be absolutely enamored with what's going on. And so, you know, brick by brick, we kind of built

up a conversation around it. And it's really, I see it as I am like kind of ushering him into social and political consciousness. And it doesn't serve him to prevent him from that knowledge, try to shelter him from the reality of the world. I want to be the person that helps him begin to understand in a responsible way, of course, but in a way that cultivates his already existing sense of complete injustice at the situation and putting himself in the shoes of a Palestinian child. And so many times, I've said, like, you know, those children love their dads just as much as you love me. You know, they're loved. They're looking forward to the next holiday like you are. You know, they go to school. They care. Like, they are you. You are them. And just as it

would be completely unacceptable for some entity, no matter who, to drop a bomb on our house right now, it is exactly as unacceptable for that to be happening over there. And we have a responsibility as human beings to care about that and to love the Palestinian people and to fight alongside them and to advocate for them, even though we are thousands and thousands of miles away. And no matter how much it's frustrating, we can't personally go and stop it, although we wish that we could. So I think there's something good about that. And I think there's something bad about oversheltering a child. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you. And if you've had similar conversations, I know your child's a little bit older. But if you've had similar conversations with them around specifically the genocide.

Oh, yeah, from day one. And yeah, I appreciate everything that you're saying, especially the brick by brick part. Right. And this is what I was talking about earlier, right? Like, this is an ongoing practice. This isn't just like a very special episode where you talk to your kid about, about, you know, some horrific world historic moment and then move on, right? We have to be doing this ongoing day to day in conversations. And in keeping those conversations going is a wonderful and challenging part. of having an adolescent, I would say especially. But, you know, yeah, I would have conversations about challenging things starting, you know, around four or five with my kid. And it's just a matter of, you know, how do you talk about it? How do you frame it? What are the words that you use, right? But not a matter of whether or not to have those conversations, right? But I think, I think this is a very different topic, but I wanted, because it's December, I think about this every year.

I chose not to, I face tremendous pressure from some members of my biological family to have Santa Claus a part of my kids' childhood. And I was really opposed to doing this. And the argument for Santa, from many who believe that we should be doing this, is, you know, it's about the magic of childhood and, like, having something magical and playful and beautiful like that is, you know, so important to childhood. And I don't disagree with that, right? but I also don't think that Santa is the only way that that happens, right? And a lot of what I think the Santa myth does, I guess, like, yeah, spoiler for any really young kids listening to this. Santa is not real. But traumatic experience to find out, oh my gosh, my parents, my family members, my all these adults around me,

even like the children a little bit older than me, they've all been lying. to me, right? I think it creates a kind of suspicion towards the adult world, which, you know, is productive, in fact. It's probably pretty good to be, to be suspicious when you're a kid. But what it's doing is telling you, you know, this thing that's magic is actually like what, the labor of people in your household and also the labor of people, likely children in sweatshops, elsewhere, right? Being masked is like this magical Santa thing. And also, yeah, I don't know. I just don't think that there's some version of this. It's like that, you know, the necessary lie, you know, or something like this and like a broader governmental sense, right? Like, why do we need to,

why do you need to do this with children? Why do we have a sense that, that to have magic and in a sense, it needs to be constructed as a lie, right? I don't see that as like necessarily a useful experience to be shared among children. And I find myself still feeling very controversial in saying that, right? But I'm not saying anyone, you know, who really wants to do this, you shouldn't do it. And I also think there's lots of ways of doing it that are kind of winking or something like with kids and being a kind of play or or having a playfulness about this idea of Santa, right? There's lots of ways of going about it, but I do think it's worth worth really like

actively considering like what, what are we taking away from this weird tradition, right? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I think it will like sort of get an automatic response from some people, a sort of defensiveness out of the gate, but I would encourage people to kind of really think about what's going on there. And I'm very sympathetic to your argument here, even if I don't fully do it. My approach has been allowed the process to play out. And the moment my children start showing natural skepticism to kind of encourage that and to get them to start

thinking like, you know, my daughter, when she came across this, she would just start offering logical arguments. Like, well, hold on, you know, how could, how could this be physically possible, time? It doesn't make sense that he could go to every single, you know, whatever it is. And then I would just, instead of shutting that down or like poo-pooing it away or reinforcing the myth, I would begin to ask questions that deepened, that sort of path of inquiry for her. But my question to you kind of an interesting way to have to deal with this is I understand not imposing the myth in the first place, but the social pressure, right? The child, by living in society, will come across the myth at school and TV and movies.

And so, you know, it's one thing not to impose the myth on them yourself, but don't they kind of ambiently get indoctrinated with the myth? And how do you handle that, especially at a very young age? Well, I think that's the other, that's the other side of it, which is you're kind of, you're implicated no matter what in this thing. And so if you decide to tell your kid, you know, some people are talking about Santa. And Santa isn't real, but, you know, you're not supposed to tell them that. That's also deeply troubling. So I don't, again, I don't think that there's like a right way forward in a kind of programmatic sense. I think it's really about having those conversations that you're talking about, having with your daughter, right, and being able to nurture them. But I do think we really need to consider what are the takeaways that children are getting from this, right? That's the really important part. if the thing is that they had fun, you know, great.

But I remember thinking to myself, well, how come some families get more gifts than others, right? And the ways in which it naturalized these class disparities among families and made, you know, made that a part of the myth was, I think, really troubling to me as I reflected back on it and decided with my partner, we weren't. going to participate in the Santa thing. But I think that can also be incorporated into the, you know, the healthy skepticism that I hear you saying, like, this can also cultivate, right? But yeah, no matter what, Santa's there. So you have to have to figure out a way to respond to this thing. But I think just asking the questions, figuring out how to do that in a way that that feels respectful towards children and not about deceiving them or belittling them, right, is really important. And those are often the takeaways.

So. Yeah, it's so funny. I remember being broke as fuck for many, many, many, many years. And in some days with the cost of living, I still am. But Christmas is a very stressful time when you're broke and you're just barely surviving already. And so like it wasn't like a high-minded, you know, thing like you're arguing, but I would I would downplay the Santa thing just for the simple fact that whatever gifts they did get, I didn't want him getting credit for it. It's like, no, dude, I worked hard as shit for those

gifts. And those are for me. They're not from Santa. And so I kind of actually disconnected the gift-giving thing from Santa. Like Santa was like a background entity, but it kind of, he came into the house and ate cookies and left and maybe put some stuff in the stockings, but he didn't leave presence because it's like we you know i can't be given credit saying all the credit but i do remember as a like a nine-year-old um learning about it my my parents finally breaking the news to me and it was a deeply disturbing situation like i remember like um you know sitting staring out the window just like weeping um you know trying to heal the wound of not just the fact that santa didn't exist but like yeah like implicitly even if i didn't consciously really think about it or dwell on it

like they lied to me all these years i was just the the bud of the this joke and it was kind of disturbing. I don't think it left necessarily a lasting scar, but who knows, everybody's different and they can be very subtle. But I certainly take your point that, yeah, at the end of the day, it's like this huge conceit or huge deceit that your kid does eventually find out you are participating in and there's a sense of just inherent disrespect that kind of comes with that even if a kid can't articulate it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's risk. Yeah, exactly. One thing I always tell my kids, though, kind of what you were saying earlier is from a very young age, I tell them, like, do not just

take what adults say for granted. Like, adults don't know shit. Just because an adult says something does not mean it's true, does not mean that you automatically need to respect it or adhere to it, that you are always, you're always given permission to think critically, to disagree, even with me. Like, if I, if you are in trouble for something or I chastise you for something and you think that I am being unfair or unjust, please give you. give me your argument and and I will abide by it if it is a good argument and kind of always giving them that leeway to have that skepticism and to cultivate their own sense of critical thought. Yeah, that's really important. Yeah. So let's go on to the next question here.

And this is really, I think, very interesting. For me personally, I was very interested in this. And I would love for you to articulate this. You kind of question whether childhood, as most people imagine it has actually ever really existed for the majority of the world's population. And I could even add a historical dimension to this, that childhood as we experience it is actually kind of an invention of modernity. That for a long time, childhood and all the ideas and qualities we think it has sort of eternally, they're socially constructed. And in many times and places, childhood wasn't a thing. Even in industrial capitalism in Great Britain, you have child labor.

In the U.S., you have child labor, children losing fingers in looms and cleaning chimneys at age seven. Childhood was not allowed. The social conditions for childhood to exist were not allowed to be present. So can you kind of just walk us through what it means to you to think of childhood as a historical and class construction rather than this universal and eternal experience? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you got at a lot of it, right, that, you know, it is not, it's not a natural thing. Of course, we develop, and we continue to develop, well, into adulthood, onto our death, right? But this idea of childhood is itself not natural. It had to be constructed. And it emerges historically alongside the development of private property and, the family form, right? And so some of these questions we were talking about earlier, like, who gets to be in a family, or who, excuse me, who gets to be a child or who doesn't,

extends from that history of childhood being a kind of fiction of the white bourgeois family. And that has been the instrument by which, you know, children, you know, these child laborers throughout history that you're bringing up slaves, indigenous children, migrant children, disabled children have been historically, you know, shut out from. So I think the big question of the book, really, which we've already kind of scratched at a few times, though, is if we take seriously this matter, that childhood comes from historically the moment of private property and the family, then how do we think of children not through this kind of logic of ownership, right? And that's not just a matter for parents to think

about, but is really important in education too, right? So that's also the period from which, you know, the Enlightenment, the philosophies of education are really prolific. And in so many, you know, these theories of the mind as through like John Locke's theory of the mind, the mind begins as a tabula rosa, right? And as a kind of as a blank slate that we need to put things onto, right? And so even the best teachers I know, and I am a teacher myself, will find themselves feeling that they're, you know, molding, y'allel. minds or something like this, right? These kinds of pedagogical fantasies are all bound up in this too, right? Students, just like children, as you were speaking of earlier, they come to the class and

they're already, you know, autonomous beings to the extent that anyone can be, right? And thinking for themselves and bringing their own perspectives and experiences and we can help them like look at certain problems or think through certain ideas, but we're not molding them, right? That's a kind of, again, authoritarian fantasy structure that is just built into the language of how we talk about these things, right? So again, it's not to like make anyone feel bad for things like that, but to pause when we hear, when we hear things that smack of this logic of ownership. So for instance, my kid will often be asked, you know, my partner is good at math, but I'm not. So, oh, they must have gotten their math skills from their dad and not me, right? They're good at writing, so they'll hear, oh, you must have gotten up from your mom.

Well, no, I write every day, right? So, you know, if you spend every day writing and reading, then actually you're where your writing skills come from, not like from your biology somehow, right? So I don't know. I think these are kinds of tropes that we'll encounter all the time and it's just a matter of kind of taking a beat and reflecting on them. Where do these things come from? And in doing that, we can see the way in which not just, you know, childhood was socially constructed, but that we're continuing to construct it, right, in our day-to-day lives in these ways. is. Yeah, yeah. That point about, you know, you have the traits from one of your parents, this

sort of deterministic view of children that they are just these outgrowths of a combination of traits of their parents as opposed to their own autonomous, ever-evolving human being, you know, themselves, I think is really interesting. And one way I try to combat that is, we'll often hear this and we'll often say it to ourselves, these narratives of like, so, you know, math is an easy, is an easy one. For many of us, just math is hard. It's, it's a tough thing. subject to get really, really good at. And many of us struggled with it in childhood. We certainly weren't interested in it. So that played a role in us not really putting forth the effort to try to understand it. But my kids will sometimes regurgitate that narrative. Like, I'm just not good at

math. It's just, you know, it's just, I'm just not the sort of person that is good at it. And I just always try to tell them it's like, there's no such thing as being the sort of person that is naturally good or not at something. I mean, sure, you might have a natural proclivity towards something. You might have a little bit more of a natural interest in or talent at something. And thing, but for the most part, it's what is cultivated. You know, like you were just saying, if you want to be good at math, there's actually a fascinating aspect of math. Math can be cool. It can be fun. It's very satisfying when you work through a very complicated math problem and come out with the right answers, and you did that yourself, and your brain kind of lights up

the reward systems. And that urges you to continue getting better at it. So I always tell my kids, do not give this narrative to yourself that you are naturally bad at something. If you want to be good at it, you absolutely can. And anybody that's really good at anything, they don't just come out, you know, ready to be a genius at that thing. They dedicate hours and hours and hours and hours of their life to practicing that thing and getting good at it. So I think there's something important there for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And when I think about, for instance, the difference between my partner and my abilities and math, which is not to say he is very good at math, right? but he was also encouraged to be good at math as a cis man. Absolutely. And I fully accepted as a young femme person when somebody told me that I wasn't good at math. Okay. Well, I just won't try, right? So, yeah, these are, I see in us, these are not things that we can hand down as genetic traits either, that they are conditioned within us.

And it's painful when you really think about those things that, yeah, the lesson of actively cultivating is so crucial with kids. And that I appreciate that my kid is thinking, likes doing math, likes doing science and likes reading and writing and doesn't see these things as like counterposed either, which is such a weird

thing that we teach children. So like you have either have this kind of brain or that kind of brain, right? How early they hear that. It's really damaging. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I want to kind of

steer or steer off the outline for second and kind of touch on something that we've kind of been alluding to throughout, but I think would would, is a subject of interest to me, which is, and I wonder what you make of it, this, you know, broadly conceived reactionary right, right wing obsession with children that is hypocritical to the core. There's, there's so many examples of this. I was just watching an interview Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh. And Matt Walsh goes in this diatribe about how, you know, this pro life, quote unquote diatribe about how we you know we abort so many children and this is a mass murder and we don't even care and we just throw them in the medical bin and it's like we'd have no respect for life and then

the very next conversation they have is about the the genocide in gaza and then matt walsh starts making all of these you know attempts at neutrality and trying to understand Israel has to go and and take out humas and you know in wars people die and it's like immediately in like a five minute chunk of this two-hour conversation, you get up on your soapbox and opine dramatically about how much you care about the life of children in one instance. And then the political lens shifts. And now you are justifying, actively justifying the mass murder of tens of thousands of children by retreating to this abstraction about morals and war and what has to happen. It's just obviously grotesque. There's so many examples. The right wing spent years.

I think it was during the Biden administration, calling everybody groomers, right? Going after drag shows and, you know, like you were mentioning earlier, going to libraries and and people reading books to them and, you know, going against trans people and gay people, just by the very nature of being trans or gay, you were indicted as a groomer. And this was all in service of this MAGA movement that promoted Epstein's best friend and number one client to the presidency. And during a genocide of children, where Republican after Republican and these church pastors and these Republican politicians are caught with child pornography or in some way, shape,

or form harming children. And it's like, it's this sick, weird, twisted, distorted projection of something onto society, onto their political enemies, even as the, I mean, and, you know, separating children at the border, you know, dismantling free lunch programs at schools. It's like it is such this glaring gap of what they present themselves as being these brave, courageous fighters for children and then being the defenders of a political project that seemingly everywhere, harms, murders, separates and otherwise, you know, inflicts violence upon children. And it's like, what is this psychology? You know, I don't know. What do you, what do you make of,

of that. It's what's it's it's kind of an easy point to say the right or hypocrites but it's specifically around the question of children it seems pathological. Yeah well and then the children that they're speaking of are though you know exclusively that the white cis innocent children right so called innocent children right and that is exclusively what they are talking about when they when they speak of children. Um I guess I mean Children aren't real to them, right? They're just not real. They're an idea.

They're a fetish object. They have no responsibility to real children, right? And the example of abortion rights issues, right? Children, pregnant children are the most harmed by the post-Roe world, right? And in addition to the children who are born forcibly, it's devastating, right? And it's all in the name of children, the idea of children, right, rather than the reality of them. And I think, you know, I think it's fairly clear what the problem is there. But then when I think about it in terms of more kind of,

well-intentioned leftists. So often we talk about, you know, one of the questions I hear is like, well, is it responsible for me to bring in a child, bring a child into the world? I think that's a really good question. But it's also a question that distracts us from the fact that there are already children in the world. These like preennial pro and anti-natalist debates that that we see. I don't want to, I don't, I just don't want to pay attention to them because all of them are, um, are actively, uh, precluding our, our ability from thinking about the real children in the world, right? That there are real children already here who we have a responsibility toward, um, as human beings.

It's not, not simply as parents or, um, or guardians, right? And when we, when we talk about children as a decision that adults make, right? It all, it implicitly puts all of the onus on those, quote, creators of children, right? And again, distracts us from thinking about our, just our co-responsibility to the world in these other kinds of ways. So, yeah, I mean, I can't watch Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh. I know that it's important. important work for some people to do. So it's nauseating. But I do think, you know, overwhelmingly that's the issue, right?

Is that the children are a rhetorical device, there are fantasy structure, they're a fetish object, but in no cases are they real human beings. And it's all often in the name of like what family values, right? But the reality, when we look at that, is that the family is where, you're, you know, the most child abuse takes place in the world, right? It's immeasurable because the private family household, you know, invisibilizes that and makes it impossible, you know, like the possibility of reporting such abuse is much, much worse, you know,

worse than any other spaces where children exist, such as schools, right? But we know that. that the, and we know that because of stories that we survived if we're so lucky, or that we know others may not have survived. That it's all, you know, for the right, it's all in the name of preserving that, that right to abuse your children if you, if you're the owner of them as well. So all, from all corners, it's, it's adult. authoritarianism, it's abusive towards real life children. But I think there's a tendency

among leftists to think, well, we're not doing that. And that's the thing I'm like, no, but we're also, we're also thinking of children as just ideas. So how do we reflect on the thing we're seeing happening, you know, over there at that comfortable distance, however horrific? and disturbing and think about how we're also doing that in our own ways, right? I think that's, I think, the more difficult part of your question, which maybe I'm drawing out a bit. No, yeah, no. Let's think about our complicity in this. And I think that's something that the Epstein discourse is really bringing up for me a lot,

is watching so many people who, again, have good intentions, just enjoying all of the details and lavishing for them. And, yeah, I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. I don't, none of this is fun for me to listen to or there's no like gotcha that's going to feel that good going over these details or anything like that. And all of these children who are a part of a part of that story are real and some of them aren't here anymore, right? And so I think we need, again, to be thinking about how we're reproducing this idea of children that keeps them from being real.

I mean, so perfectly said, I can't add anything of substance to that. I agree with every syllable. And I would only say the famous James Baldwin quote as an exclamation point to your argument there, which is, you know, James Baldwin famously said, the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe. And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. and I like that quote hits incredibly hard and I think speaks to an aspect of what you're saying there. So very, very well said.

Let's go to this next question here. Your book distinguishes between mothering as a practice of care and motherhood as a social institution tied to gender, property, and the nuclear family. For listeners who may not have encountered that distinction before, how do you kind of define these terms and why is it important to separate them and to think through them? Yeah, that's a really good question. So motherhood, just like childhood, had to be invented. It's a social construction and it's an institution. So it has a history and motherhood has been constructed as a set of rights that are only granted to white bourgeois women in its history. So in this country, indigenous women, black slave women, for instance, were deprived. of the right to motherhood could not be mothers, could not be legally defined as mothers and are thus shut out from this institution, shut out from motherhood. But I think through that deprivation, we see that the revolutionary practices of mothering and caretaking are always kind of happening alongside this invention of motherhood.

And that's where I want to look to in terms of my definition of what it means to mother, is these kinds of practices that happen outside of the logic of ownership, whether or not by force or legality, right? And so I'm also interested in thinking about that in terms of gestation, right? So as a way of like unbinding the relationship between mothering and gestation. So, you know, the gestator is cast as is not just the laborer, but like the owner, the maker, the creator of the fetus. And that extends into the child's life.

and at least in our kind of fantasy thinking about it, right? That there's a lifelong responsibility that the gestator has towards the child they birth. Obviously, we know that there's many cases where that's not possible, and I think there's some narratives of adoption that are so coded in, you know, white bourgeois, you know, savior politics, right, that we're able to see that. But, but those are kind of the only cases, and by we, I mean, society at large has some willingness to accept, you know, that someone else can be someone's mother who did not gestate them, right? But I'm really interested in the possibility that we can all be really participating in this thing we call

mothering, right, in that it's not something, that it's actually very harmful for the so-called mother as well as the so-called child, right? That this remains a kind of distinct title that only one person can be in your life that puts so much pressure on the mother figure to be the interlocutor between the child and the world, that so often, as we know, you know, there's so much hatred towards mothers for not being able to fix the world, to not be able to usher one into a world that has no problems, but that is incredibly dangerous and unsafe in lots of ways. So that's an impossibility that is put on mother's shoulders that I think, You know, one way to to move beyond that is to find ways to help mother.

And maybe we don't call it that. I don't really think it matters what we call it, right? But to be participating in this thing mothering. And something I think a lot about is the sleep deprivation that I felt after having a baby. And that was indistinguishable for me from like the idea of postpartum depression. I felt depressed because I wasn't able to sleep and, you know, I had one person helping me sleep. And so that puts you against your partner very easily. And I kept thinking about like, what if my friend just came over and like helped me for a night once a week or something like that, you know. And

sometimes I would get some kind of help, but, um, but really that we, we don't see many practices of that in the U.S., you know, um, this is a cultural thing where, you know, in the Western world especially this, the mother is, is meant to, to feel like this is all on them. Um, But I think that's really distinct from gestation. It's hard to imagine gestating in more than one womb, right? But once a child is born, there's all sorts of ways that we can share in that labor. We just don't have cultural practices to support that vision. So I think, you know, what I observed is that once my kids started talking,

more of my friends and comrades around me felt like they could help. But that first year before language felt really deeply isolating. And I don't really know how to tell that apart again from this thing called postpartum depression. I don't know how one is not to feel depressed under those circumstances. And that's not to take away from the fact that, yeah, I had a partner that there are partners who help.

But in this world where we're working within the confines of a nuclear family, and this is really at most two adults' responsibility, it's kind of doomed to failure. What a hard thing to start a life at, you know? That's one example of how I think about this. question of like what would mothering look like in other ways but it seems like a good social experiment that I encourage people to do like go and help your friend who's sleep deprived one one night it would probably make a huge difference and also just know what that's like I don't think one

should have to go through childbirth or commit to becoming a parent to know what it's like to to go through those months. There's no reason why it has to be that way. But I feel like people's eyes would really open up about caring for children if they had more experiences like that, if we could find ways to share it. Yeah, I mean, I think that will anybody that's had children, any mothers out there in particular will immediately resonate deeply with what you're saying. having seen it many times myself. I mean, I genuinely consider myself a good partner. I try my

hardest. I think about these questions. But it is without a shadow of a doubt the hardest thing in the world to be a mom, straight up. And the burden on your shoulders, the expectations on your shoulders that just aren't there often socially for fathers in the same way that they are for mothers is unbearable. The exhaustion, the, just impossible demands put on mothers in particular in such an isolated society where we're struggling to survive, struggling to live paycheck to paycheck. We're hyper alienated within our nuclear families. There is no expectation of social parenting in any way. Even with family members who we often lean on, Like you said, like handing off your infant, it feels like you're doing something fucked up.

It feels like you're putting too much on somebody else. And there's almost an internal block on your asking for that sort of help. So, like, you know, having a friend not even ask you, hey, do you need some help? But just coming over and helping is probably even better because if you ask, you know, a mother, like, you know, some will say yes, of course. But some people struggle with saying yes to the help because they feel like it's not there. It's my thing. It's it should my burden, even though I'm clearly cracking under the weight of it, I feel almost bad about putting it on somebody else, right? That's sort of internalized form of what you're talking about.

That indebtedness. Yeah. And I think, you know, to speak to the thing that happens between, you know, heteropartners around this, but also between, you know, gestator and non-gestator around this in this country, right? like I think back on the disproportion between my partner and I and how much we slept during that year. And it was directly because, you know, he had a job where he didn't have any parental leave, right? And I did, I also had a job where I had no parental leave, but I took a leave of absence from it, right? But just the pressure of work, right, and having to keep showing up for work is so much of this, too. Right. It felt to me like a privilege to be able to stay home, sleep deprived, right?

Like get up and have to go to work. I felt, I felt bad for him for doing that, right? But either way, it was just so the scarcity of care that characterizes that that first year for so many people is devastating. So it's, I think back on, I had a friend who brought me a lasagna. a week after. And I still remember just, you know, crying so much when they brought this lasagna, like how much this lasagna meant to me because I didn't have to really think about what I was going to feed myself for, you know, a couple of days. And it just, I told my friend about this, I don't know, it was like five or six years ago. And she didn't even remember that she made it. You remembered coming and visiting, but like, yeah, I think that's a good reminder, right? You know, just a simple gesture that isn't a big deal to you can mean so much. Absolutely.

Yeah, and I think ultimately our vision for parenting in particular is a top-down and a bottom-up vision, a pre-figureative bottom-up shift in our culture away from alienation, away from hyper-individualism toward community and social notions of well-being and interdependence, as well as a top-down, in my opinion, you can disagree with this, a top-down socialist program that compensates parents, that sees parenthood as a genuine contribution to society and gives institutional support in the form of certainly paternity and maternity leave, you know, influxes of compensation in the form of literal checks that we send to to young parents, you know, free universal child care, universal health care. These are ways in which we can structure society around human flourishing,

human well-being, as opposed to productivity and profit accumulation for a few, which necessitates the mother or the father, sometimes both having to be violently torn back into the workplace, separated from your child. Oftentimes you hand up. over to underpaid care workers at daycare centers for an exorbitant price that doesn't go to the people actually watching your children but goes to the business being run around profit accumulation around watching children. And the whole structure of society seems hostile literally to life itself, right? Yeah.

I'm wondering really quick before we move on, this idea of mothering as a practice, like, extending that to the furthest logical reaches that we can extend it. like as a you know a white cis man i'm a father i'm a human being um going out in the world how would that manifest in like would it manifest in just a sense of like every or maybe a way to start thinking about it is every child you come across as seeing them and in interacting with them as a full human being and sensing immediately just by proximity to them a responsibility for them and their well-being like how would you think about mothering as a practice being extended socially in a radical way?

I just think it depends on who you are and for some people interacting with children in public is really dangerous, right, with fascist targeting and these type of things. So perhaps for some of us it's about, yeah, finding a mother, a parent, a caretaker, that you can support, that you can help support. so that they can they can do their caretaking most effectively. It may be that solidarity with children may be an indirect practice if you don't have children, you know, at the forefront of your life. I think it's something that anyone can do then, though.

It's just a matter of how. But I think in many ways it's to, de-isolate any of these caretaking practices. So I think, you know, the child care worker who is tasked with looking after, you know, a dozen or more kids without break, right, needs support in various ways. And the teacher, right, of K-12 class, right, needs support in various ways. So those may be ways of showing up for kids. I think taking seriously issues like climate crisis and anything that we see youth movements really powerfully, you know, articulating, those are another way of showing up for them is by putting your political weight towards

issues that matter that kids are speaking out about. So I think a lot of, about shifting the language. You know, I think there's a lot of really well-intentioned people who speak of, like, protecting kids on the left, especially protecting trans kids, which is, it's coming from a good place. And obviously, I have solidarity with trans kids. But to call it protecting, I think it presumes, again, a top-down relationship that showing up may disrupt in some way, like finding ways to, yeah, to show up and be present because there are already kids out there working on these issues and you can be there for them. I'm thinking about my friend who made, you know, as an ethical decision not to have children themselves, has been

mentoring my kid in like basics of videography, right, which my kid is really interested in, right? This is an example of revolutionary mothering in my mind because it's a way of like showing up for me, like caring for my kid, doing something that like I can't do for my kid, providing that for them, being a friend, being a trustworthy, adult that they can turn to. Being somebody who can pick up my kid if I'm sick and they're at school or something like that, like there's all sorts of ways to plug in, right? It really just has to do with like who you are and what you're interested in, you know, there's, there's so many ways that we can be doing this. But it really starts with like a curiosity about what that would look like

in your life. And I think that's the thing to be, to be really cultivating. And to not think of it as something that someone else is doing, right? Or that's for them. And I, you know, this book, inevitably, it's, it's being read by some as a kind of like women and children only book or something like this. So I appreciate having conversations about, like, you're bringing it fathers and like, what do fathers?

what is their responsibility in this? Well, that's just one of many roles that are beyond the mother, child, or women and children kind of framing of what solidarity with children means. So that's also a really good starting point is to just to be thinking about how to articulate this is something that we all have responsibility toward. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to be respectful of your time here. I kind of wanted to ask this question as a way to kind of wrap up this conversation. Again, there's so many questions we didn't even get to on the outline, let alone what you could dive into in the book itself. So I encourage people to check it out.

We'll link to it in the show notes. But you end the book by inviting readers to imagine a world organized around collective care rather than ownership, a vision captured in the idea of everyone for everyone, which I love. And I also think it's important to not just have a critique but to offer a positive vision, right? That's essential for our politics broadly is to not only have a critique of the present but to have a vision for the future. So for listeners encountering the phrase, everyone for everyone for the first time, what would it mean to build solidarity with children in practical terms and what kinds of social transformation would be required to move in that direction? I think much of it, which I at least, haven't spoken about today is to think about also how this means part of solidarity with children is, you know, deconstructing this thing we call adulthood and looking for the ways in which

many, many adults among us are also rendered children. I think this is very palpable when we think about elders, many who grow to an old age if they're so lucky. will describe a feeling of being made and going back into a kind of child status or something like that, where decisions are being made on their behalf. They have a very limited agency over their lives. But there are many adults who, through their adulthood, are never fully recognized as adults. whether because of their disabilities, their migrant status, their gender, their class status.

I know this is something like when we talk about, you know, the avocado toast discourse or something like that, right? that young people aren't able to afford houses because of these extravagant mocas that they're ordering or something, these childish decisions that they're making about their finances. So we see this logic really actually applying to everyone in some way. And I think that's maybe like theoretically, philosophically, a place to start. And I think that helps us to see that issues about children are not just about children, right? And that this is an issue about everyone. This is all of our world that's at stake in this project.

So I think a lot of the book I discuss as a kind of thought experiment, it's really about kind of bumping up against what we find unthinkable, what our kind of political imaginations have deemed impossible in some way and troubling that, sabotaging that even, so that we can actually have access to these kinds of solidities and these practices that are at our disposal that we could be doing, but we don't do. So I think that's, you know, to the extent that I have a big kind of vision or program in the book, that's what it is, right? Is to look for those kinds of practices and engage in them.

And to also kind of try to explode this binary of child, adult, that like I said, we already kind of know isn't really real, right? That many, many are kept out of, just as I was talking about with mothers, right, that like adulthood is this kind of institution that many are, many are excluded from for a variety of reasons. So, yeah, finding a way from the bottom up to, to unwork those systems of power and to really be thinking about how else we might relate to each other. I think one thing that happens a lot when we talk about child liberation is that we encounter this kind of purely dystopian like kind of hobbsian war against all all against all kind of imaginary that many have

you know you'll hear child liberation will the kids will just be like eating candy all day or it will be you know lord of the flies or this kind of thing um and i think it that's funny right There probably would be, you know, big problems if adults just like let children run rampant and do whatever they want, right? But that's not really what I mean by child liberation. I think it's not just that there's that or pure authoritarianism, right? Children are dependent on adults, especially in this world structured around private property. They're dependent on adults to have access to food and shelter and medicine, clothing, the things that they need to survive. But they're also dependent on us to help them make decisions and think about things and learn consequences.

If I touch a hot stove, I'll get hurt, these kinds of things. these are all part of our development. But it's also, when we start to think about the ways that children depend on adults, I think it's important to see that that actually helps us understand how we depend on each other. That when we become adults, we don't suddenly become, you know, autonomous and austere beings, right? we still depend on each other. The ways in which we depend on each other may change over the course of our life, but that dependence that children have on us is a kernel of truth about our existence.

That I think that that's also a really important vital part of the project, of everyone for everyone will conceptualizing that possibility. So I hope that makes sense. In terms of, I'm often asked questions about, like, autonomy, and I really prefer to think about this issue of dependence that we're all interdependent. And that's the way we live. That's the way we struggle. Yeah.

Profoundly said, and I totally agree, that interdependence, the web of interdependence, the, you breaking down the wall between, like, childhood and adults, adulthood, thinking that because you're an adult now, that you're somehow an island unto yourself, that you don't also deeply depend on everybody, you're just as embedded in the web of interdependence as an adult as you are as an elderly person or as a child. We would be nothing without each other. So the idea of everyone for everyone is beautiful. And in between the two extremes of complete hands-off, laissez-faire, just let children run wild and strict authoritarianism is what you're saying, which is comradeship of seeing children as human beings that we are in interdependence with

and that we have a responsibility towards and to see them as humans in their own right, not subservient or somehow lesser than us. And I think all those points are beautiful and well stated. So the book is Solidarity with Children, an Essay Against Adult Supremacy. I loved it. I highly recommend it. Madeline, before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they They can find you online as well as your work? Yeah, sure.

I'm on X and all of these things. My handle is La Louvre Rouge. It has some space, La, space, Louvre, space rouge. It's a reference to my favorite anarchist feminist, Luis Michel. That's where I am on all the platforms. and you can find me sometimes there or sometimes avoiding it. But I hope you get the book and if you like it, contact me however you can. I'm happy to talk more about these ideas if they move you.

And one of the things I've really been excited about has been that there's been reading groups developing about the book among parents and caretakers and adolescents. And I'm really, I'm just really thrilled that adults and youth are talking together about the book. So especially if you're doing something like that, reach out however you can. Absolutely. I'll link to the book as well as your socials for people to reach out with ease. And again, I encourage the idea of book clubs, if you're in an organization of any sort, wrestling with these issues with your comrades and fellow organizers is a very productive and generative. thing to do. So thank you so much for the book and for being generous with your time. I wish you

the best of luck and any other work you do in the future. I'd love to have you back on. Thanks so much. It was a real pleasure talking to you.