Every once in a while a blog post about ‘childism’ makes the rounds on social media, which is described as being a “prejudice against young people” that’s on par with sexism, racism, and homophobia. But the Director of the Childism Institute, Dr. John Wall, argues that that definition implies children are simply victims of whatever adults throw at them - when actually they are active agents who create meaning for themselves. Dr. Wall’s most recent book is called Give Children The Vote - when I picked it up, I have to admit that I rolled my eyes. I was prepared to remain skeptical…and was surprised to find that by the end of the book, the idea of children’s suffrage actually made a whole lot of sense. Changing our minds…changing the world A big part of what happened to me as I researched this episode was that I changed my ideas about two things I’d long assumed to be true: that we need to protect children from adults who look down at them, and that children shouldn’t be able to vote. As you’ll hear in the episode, my daughter was actually part of this process on the voting topic - we talked about whether she thought she should be able to vote, and she demonstrated the major capabilities that Dr. Wall said children need to be able to vote responsibly. So often we get stuck in a rut of imagining that the way we see the world is The Right Way, and if our child doesn’t see it that way then it’s because they aren’t yet mature enough to know how the world really works. But what if we could see that the ways children view the world - in fact, the ways we used to view the world before we were taught that rational arguments supersede all other kinds of knowledge - as something that actually has value? Not only does it have value, but it might create insights into the challenges we face - from the small ones in our daily lives to the really big ones like what we’ll do about climate change and how we’ll address really big social problems. Our children need us to see and value their creativity, because there are so many other places in the world that don’t value it - and that will squash it out of them pretty quickly.

 

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Dr. John Wall's Book

Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy (Affiliate link).

  Jump to highlights 01:28 Introduction of episode 04:04 Introducing the guest 10:12 Background of childism 14:10 Difference between 3^rd way and 2^nd way feminism 19:26 What does childism do to society 21:03 Another children’s right 23:01 Idea of human right 34:20 Set of ideas that we could engage to children’s right 35:54 3 main points of Dr. John Wall’s book Give Children The Vote 43:35 The idea of the children’s right to vote 45:02 Why children are actively prevented from voting [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so Jenny 00:10 do you get tired of hearing the same old interest to podcast episodes? I don't really But Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development but puts it in context for you as well. So you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordedtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours Jen Lumanlan 01:28 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I found my guest and their topic today via a bit of a circuitous path. I was listening to a presentation that was part of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education conference and heard a fabulous quote from Dr. Toby Rollo that I immediately thought would make a great epigraph for my book. And the quote was, "What if I told you that your ideas about politics are actually just your ideas about childhood extrapolated?" I got in touch with Dr. Rollo. And in our conversation, he mentioned he's writing a chapter for an upcoming book on childism and that there's a childism institute, which I had no idea existed. So I went and dug into the research on the institute's page, and I knew that we needed to talk with its director. So he's here with us today. Before we start the conversation, I'd like to note that we spend a lot of time talking about ideas that are deeply grounded in respect for children in the show Whether or not you agree that children should be allowed to vote, perhaps you'll see from our conversation that to even consider the idea of childism as Dr. Wall defines it means that we hold children in high regard; it means we want to hear their ideas about themselves, our families, our lives together, and the wider world. When our children are sharing their ideas with us, they're learning and we're learning too. They're learning to observe, to create new ideas, to connect ideas, and to explain them to others. And we might learn that the way we've always thought about something, the idea we assumed was true, might not be true after all; there might be a different way to see it that allows us to understand the idea more deeply and even consider their perspectives of those whom we normally see as opposed to us. If this idea of learning with and even from your children sounds enticing, I would love to see you in the free You You’re Child's Best Teacher workshop that I'll host in just a couple of weeks between August 29 and September 9. We'll spend two weeks at a really relaxed pace learning how to see children's learning where we would never have imagined it's happening and explain that it's happening to folks who might doubt that it's happening and be and really believe that you can be the one who supports your child intrinsic love of learning, which they already have and they're already doing if we can just learn how to see it. The workshop is totally free and you can sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher. The workshop gives you a bit of an introduction to my learning membership, which gives you so much more support in making this transition over the next year and beyond. Enrollment technically opens in September, although it's actually available in presale mode right now. So if you already know you want to join, you can go to YourParentingMojo.com/learningmembership and sign up, and we won't charge you until September 25. So to head into our conversation today Dr. John Wall is professor of philosophy, religion, and childhood studies as well as the director of the childism Institute at Rutgers University Camden. He is a theoretical ethicist who works in political philosophy, post-structuralism, and children's rights. His latest book is Give Children the Vote on Democratizing Democracy, which argues that denying children the vote in democratic societies is both unjust and counterproductive. We're going to talk about some of the major objections made to the idea of children's suffrage and why Dr. Wall believes it could lead to not just better outcomes for children, but also stronger democracies. Welcome, Dr. Wall It's so great to have you here. Dr. Wall 04:38 Thank you for having me. Jen Lumanlan 04:39 My first question is really related to my curiosity over what has been a really long-running interest for you in the topic of childism, which we're going to define in a minute, but I'm wondering what your childhood was like and what experience has shaped your work today. Dr. Wall 04:51 I grew up in the UK in England and moved here as a 13-year-old, and that's partly what shaped my interest in children because I realized my childhood is very different in the two different places. There's a sort of culture shock, but it was more a shock around how our children felt to be, how they are understood and what are their places so that was part of it. And also, that created in me a kind of existential angst that larger perspective on things, you know, things aren't the way they seem necessarily. So that put me in that perspective. As a young adult, I did some social work with children before going to grad school. So that also raised a lot of questions around the ways in which policies handle childhood in this country and what children are in relation to adults. And then in graduate school, I was involved in a long project on religion and family. And I had not at that point thought at all about studying children or childhoods, and this project was about there were 21 books that came out of the project, and not a single one, believe it or not, was focused on children. They were pretty much all about marriage that we were into the same-sex marriage debate at the time. I was in favor of same-sex marriage but other kinds of debates like that. And I thought that's really strange that there's nothing really about children as subjects. You know, this will be good for children, but not what the children thing. And then I just had the good luck to come to Rutgers University, where there happened to be a center for children and childhood studies. My first book had nothing to do with children. I never thought about them as an academic subject at all. My dissertation doesn't really children It was in political philosophy. And I met Myra Bluebond Langner, who's one of the founding childhood studies scholars in the US, and through that other people. And then I gradually started to get involved in religion and childhood studies issues as well. There was an emerging group I helped to found the project to the American Academy of Religion on Children, and I just became fascinated with the subject, and it doesn't let me go. And I've written three more books since then, and they've all been about children. I got beyond my own childhood, I realized, but I do think it's rooted in a sense of childhood as having great creativity and playfulness. And my first book was actually called Moral Creativity, and it was about creativity in ethical life. And then I realized, yes, children are really creative in many ways, and their own creativity is not part of how adults think about even creativity, let alone everything else. Jen Lumanlan 07:05 Okay, but now you have to take us back to the beginning and tell us what was so different about living in the UK and living in the US as a child. Dr. Wall 07:13 Absolutely. Well, I mean, it's hard to generalize, but the difference I experienced had to do with, well, it was really policy things. I was very interested in politics as a child, and why wasn't there universal health care for children? Why would I tell them about health care in the US? I just couldn't understand. It didn't make any sense to me. Schools, I came here and moved to a supposedly great school district and all that kind of stuff from ordinary public school in England, and it was just a very different experience. I didn't feel like I was being taught to think critically, which of course, I'm not saying everything is wonderful in the English school district. But I was lucky, I think to grow up in England during the 60s and 70s, when there was a great investment in schools and I had some really wonderful teachers, it just seemed quite routine, it seemed pair seemed very flat. I took my first standardized test on my first day in school. I was like, "What the heck is this?" Fill in the blank or whatever. And I've now realized that this is a capitalistic, neoliberal kind of model of schooling. I didn't realize that at the time, of course, there was also cultural things. There's all these nerds and jocks and stereotypes of children that you had to somehow fit into, and I have not really experienced those kinds of stereotypes in the same way as a child in it. So I just felt like there was less respect for childhood in general, not to say that everything was wonderful growing up in England either. Jen Lumanlan 08:33 Right. Yeah, I don't remember being that way anyone. I came here a few years later. Okay, so I want to move into talking about childism, because this is sort of the crux of your work, and I first learned about this concept on a blog that was very popular in the respectful parenting world called Happiness is Here. And it defines childism as a prejudice and or discrimination against the young and a systemic condition that promotes stereotypes of the young, and the author goes on to say in a blog post, "We recognize sexism, we recognize racism, we recognize homophobia, but we don't recognize childism." But you see childism a bit differently there, right? Can you tell us how you see it differently compared to what I just described? Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Wall 09:11 What you described is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s definition, and I want to just give a little historical background actually first on that because she used the word childism to mean the same thing as what has more traditionally been meant by the word adultism, and there's been this concept of adultism since Patterson DuBois, in 1903, coined the term adultism to mean discrimination against children and the adult in position of power over children. In the ‘70s, Jack Flasher developed this idea in a very influential way. As well, John Bell, Barry Checkoway, and others in the '90s developed a concept of adultism to mean different things like prejudice or discrimination, or disrespect for children, or marginalization of children. There’s many different nuances to this concept of adultism. When I developed the concept of childism, this was prior to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s idea I was vaguely aware of the concept that had been developed prior to mine, which was in the 1990s by Peter Hunt, and he had developed this concept of childism in contrast with adultism. He was a literary theorist who was attempting to say, "Well, yes, there's adultism in how you think about literature," but what would be childism in contrast to that? Well, it would be reading like a child or trying to understand how children read, and so these ideas are not really used anymore, because they were critiques of it. And I agree with those critiques that it can be a centralizing, you know, there's not one way that children read literature, just like there's not one way that women or men or racial minorities or any other group read the literature or does anything. So the concept of childism I was trying to develop came out of my early research in political theory were grounded in third-wave feminism. Womanism was the immediate inspiration, which is African Americans, third-wave feminism, but also environmentalism, decolonialism, and things like that, you know, where I wanted to develop a term similar to those for age, but not old age. Ages have been used also around children, but it tends to have this other connotation, so I wanted to develop a term with childism, which I started using publishing about in 2006, and effort to positively think about how to transform societies in response to children. So this Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s concept of childism, I thought it was very unfortunate that she was coming out of psychoanalysis. Her career was in prejudice around sex, and religion, and disability, and homophobia, and so absolutely, you know, just as feminists need to uncover patriarchy, and toxic masculinity, and all those kinds of things that's absolutely important, but if feminism was only those things, it wouldn't have gotten as far as it has. So I think it's just unfortunate to use the name of children to refer to the negative prejudice against children I also think that it is very useful to use it in that way. I mean, I have nothing against deconstructing childism in that sense, but I would just prefer to call it adultism. And so the idea in which childism is, as I developed it, came out of childhood studies, which I don't think Elizabeth Young-Bruehl was aware of being in psychoanalysis, even though it had been around for 20 years by then. Childhood Studies as a field of study which has attempted to understand children as agents in their worlds and also socially constructed persons does not own childhood, and it was a bit of a reaction to developmental psychology at the time, which sort of tended, not always, but sort of tended to have a more rather universalistic sense of children, and also, the concept of development has a sort of inherently adult aesthetic dimension to it, because you're looking at what a children developing into, which is adult, so you then measure them by how far developed they are. You know, that's not true of all developmental psychology, but that was the idea at the time. So I was building out of that kind of field of study that children are agents. They're complex beings. They're very diverse beings in different parts of the world. Their worlds are constructed very differently, but they do act and have voices and participate in their work, and so my concept of childism, the way I define it, is an effort to empower children's experiences and lives by transforming the structural norms around them, just like third-wave feminism. One of the differences between third-wave and second-wave feminism is that third-wave feminism didn't want just equality to men, because of course, that could be defined entirely on men's grounds. How do you define equality? I wanted to do the similar thing with childism is not just define children in relation to adults and define children's agency in relation to adult agency or voice or whatever, but actually allow for concepts like agency and voice and rights and politics and democracy or whatever to be themselves transformed. I see it as deconstruction and reconstruction in the same step, you reveal adultism and the ways in which people and...