Shownotes
Parenting Beyond Power
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00:42 Introduction to today’s guest and topic 02:16 The definition of children and childhood 04:58 The historical shift from a protective view of childhood to a modern perspective emphasizing children's progression toward becoming adults and citizens 10:55 The developmental view of childhood is criticized for biases, as it deems non-Western governance as inferior. 16:23 Dr. Toby Rollo challenges the Western perspective on political agency, seeing children as political agents. 20:38 Dismantling racism and patriarchy requires challenging early patterns of oppression in adult-child relationships 30:50 Advocating for a change in society's focus to better empower children and families 37:12 Exploring the link between political ideologies and ideas about childhood 45:12 Dr. Rollo suggests conventional school success doesn't guarantee overall well-being and advocates for fostering children's internal motivation and self-awareness. 54:00 Wrapping up the discussionReferences
Araujo, E., Ferretti, F., Ince, A., Moason, K., Mullenite, J., Pickerill, J., Rollo, T., & White, R.J. (2017). Beyond electoralism: Reflections on anarchy, populism, and the crisis of electoral politics. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4), 607-642.Brito Vieira, M., Jung, T., Gray, S.W.D., & Rollo, T. (2019). The nature of silence and its democratic possibilities. Contemporary Political Theory 18, 424-447.
Rollo, T. (2016). Everyday deeds: Enactive protest, exit, and silence in deliberative systems. Political Theory 45(5), 587-609.
Rollo, T. (2016). Democracy, agency, and radical children’s geographies. In: R.J. White, S. Springer, and Lopes de Sousa, M.: The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt (Vol. 3) (p.235-255). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Rollo, T. (2018). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies 8(1), 60-79.
Rollo, T. (2018). The color of childhood: The role of the child/human binary in the production of anti-Black racism. Journal of Black Studies 49(4), 307-329.
Rollo, T. (2020). Women and Children First! Childhood, Feminisms, and the Co-emancipatory Model. Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities?: Gender and Politics Today and Tomorrow, 199.
Transcripts
Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 Reasons your child isn't listening to you (And what to do about each one), just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro.
Jen Lumanlan:
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today we're going to discuss something that's a little out of the ordinary for the show, and that is an epigraph. And more specifically the epigraph from my book Parenting Beyond Power, and the research and the ideas of the person who said it. So here is the quote from the mouth of the person who said it:
Dr. Toby Rollo:
What if I told you that your ideas about politics are actually just your ideas about childhood extrapolated?
Jen Lumanlan:
And so with us to unpack everything in that very short sentence is Dr. Toby Rollo. Dr. Rollo is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He received his bachelor's from the University of British Columbia, his Master's from the University of Victoria, and his PhD from the University of Toronto. So I think he might be a West coaster at heart. And his research centers on the democratic promises and failures of modern political institutions, specifically the exclusion of children. And we're going to talk about some big ideas here on today's show, but we're going to connect it back to practical ways that we can be with our children that are aligned with our values. Welcome, Dr. Rollo. It's so great to have you here.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Wonderful to be here.
Jen Lumanlan:
And so I wonder if we can start with a couple of linked questions that seem so simple, but actually may not be. and those are, what are children? And what is childhood? In your view?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yes, this excellent question, it's the one of the burning questions of my work is how we should think about children and childhood. And I think one of the more productive ways or disruptive ways of thinking about childhood is to understand it as a category of exclusion. So the reason we designate some human beings as children, or as being in a state of childhood is because we think we need to disqualify those people from participating in certain arenas of human life, usually political and economic. To be a child is by definition to be in a state of economic dependence, dependence on someone else for your life insecurity, usually a family member, and historically, to be in a state of economic dependence, rather than being independent and autonomous, self-sufficient, meant you couldn't participate in politics as a citizen. That's because political decision making historically was the concern of people who had something to lose right wealth and property. And since children had none, they were disqualified as citizens.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
The only role deemed suitable for children in the family and in society more generally, historically, was servitude. So to be a child in the ancient world was to be a servant. And this is why even today, the word for child in many languages, is just the word for servants. We see this reflected in French but godstone and but also derogatory uses of the term boy, and in other languages.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So, so far, this definition does not invoke the age of the person. And that's telling because one's age was of secondary importance to the designation of childhood historically, in ancient Greece and Rome, adults may even have been parents themselves. And were often legally designated as children insofar as they were dependent on the patriarch of the family. Some people live their entire adult lives as children, And therefore as servants, whatever wealth they created in their lives was usually the property of the patriarch of the family. So the historical conception of childhood as a state of economic dependence, political exclusion, and servitude lasted for about 2000 years. But there were a couple of developments in the 19th century that shifted us to what our modern conception of childhood is, and I'd be happy to discuss those developments.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah. And so I guess what I'm not hearing from you in this description of childhood is any sort of idea of protecting children. Right. I think that's what commonly comes to mind when we think about children is the idea that they should be protected and they're not hearing that from you. So what's the deal with the discrepancy?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But the actual history of how children came to be protected is a little more sinister. So there's two main developments in recent history that led to this sort of new view of childhood. One was the Industrial Revolution, which saw adults and children removed from the land and pushed into cities, where they competed with one another for jobs in factories in urban settings. Children were preferred in many cases, because they were often more adept at using machinery, but also because they could be paid less. Adults resented this, of course, because they had to accept less pay if they're going to compete with children, and children took up to so many jobs. Initially, most children handed their pay over to their parents. But over time, many children began keeping their pay for themselves and the heads of families really resented this loss of household income as well.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Right Excellent. So the shift to the modern conception of childhood, which you could call the protective view of childhood, the child is the innocent, the child as required protection is a relatively recent development. And it's the standard story is because in the 19th century and early 20th century, we realized that children deserved to be treated well. And so we decided to develop institutions that would protect them. And this is the Progressive Era of child saving, and later on conventions on children's rights.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
A new public discourse centered on protecting children and cultivating a childhood free of toil arose, but competition with children was one of the main reasons that workers fought to have children removed from the factories and placed in schools. Interestingly, these poor workers also had allies in the rich. Most children didn't have jobs. There was the lucky few had the jobs at factories, which meant that there are armies of unemployed children who lived on the street and made a living through begging or petty crime. Rise of crime in streets...the rise of crime and the masses of street children was viewed by many elites as a crisis as books, volumes or economic crisis of children in the streets, vagrants and ruffins. So conservatives joined workers and socialists and calling for children to be warehoused in schools, and often rounded them up with truancy officers to make sure that they were not on the streets or in the factories.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
The schools were vicious and violent, but no doubt better than the street or the factory. So what that led to is in the 20th century new view of childhood not as servitude, but as students and future workers. So the second development around the same time slavery was abolished, and White elites had to contend with this burgeoning possibility of solidarity between poor White people, and the newly freed slaves. One of the ways that White elites infamously tried to divide and conquer was to elevate or Whites above the newly freed slaves, granting them kind of symbolic syrup superiority, not paying them any more money or bringing them out of poverty, but granting them what has been called the wages of Whiteness, the benefits of feeling superior to black people's the symbolic benefits of white superiority, even if you were both in the same degraded economic conditions.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So it's at this point, that White children became the beneficiaries of the child safety movements of the Progressive Era, a host of institutions were created to rescue the masses of poor White children from poverty and abuse, because it was viewed that this would lead to crime and violence and social decay. And all of this would jeopardize the future of white dominance in society. These institutions were meant to save white children, by elevating them out of the state of mere childhood, which they shared with poor Black youth, newly-freed Black slaves, and into the status of a quasi adult who is capable of being a proper citizen and productive worker. The disparity between the experiences of Black and White youth today reflects this preoccupation with treating White youth as proto citizens, rather than mere children who are bound to a life of violence.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So the Industrial Revolution and the abolition of slavery. With these two developments, we see a shift, at least for White children away from the exclusion and servitude that characterized childhood for 2000 years, toward a modern view of childhood as progressing of the child as progressing as a potential as a potential adult, a potential citizen, that a potential productive contributor to society.
Jen Lumanlan:
That was a lot. And I'm so glad that you bring in the racial piece of it, the capitalist piece of it, the patriarchal piece of it. You see so many of the same connections that I see and it's so fascinating to hear your perspective on these issues I've been thinking about for a long time. And you've kind of finished up there by talking about development. And I have been starting to do some episodes where I look at, you know, really common ideas that we think about in child development, like the Gesell Institute that looked at the growth of children over time and expect everybody to be on the same track over time. I'm probably going to do one on Piaget at some point, maybe Kohlberg. And I'm drawn to a quote of yours where you said recently, scholars working in the fields of Child Studies, Sociology and geography, have acknowledged that the developmental model of childhood is a little more than a pernicious social construction. And so I guess I'm curious about this idea that I mean, you said that this is this is really a view of what White childhood is like, right? Where children are innocence, their job, "job" is to play. Is that misplaced? Do you think?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
The problem with the developmental view of childhood is that it's predicated on the idea that human beings move from a state of or progress from worst to best, right. So it holds, for instance, that the moral reasoning of a child is inferior to the moral reasoning of it adults, because adults are capable of abstract intellectual, conceptual thinking. The kind of thinking that's required in a mass democracy to participate in public deliberation is rational deliberations that adults exercise a superior form of moral reasoning. The premise of developmental psychology has been this premise has been used to argue that Black and indigenous peoples, for instance, who might subscribe to small scale, local and traditional forms of long government, not mass liberal democracy have not yet achieved or realized fully human capacities for thinking in terms of Western liberalism.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So in this sense, developmental psychology appears to harbor some like racist and colonial biases. It shouldn't surprise us when we consider that Piaget and Kohlberg were explicitly in the business of demonstrating the superiority of Western moral ideals right, from the get go. They weren't objective scientists who discovered that Western liberal ideals happened to be the ones that mature adults arrived at. They were explicitly setting out Piaget invokes liberal philosopher Immanuel Kant from the outset, Kohlberg is in direct conversation with liberal political theorists, John Rawls, and Kohlberg framework of moral development becomes the basis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, social political theorists. So developmental psychology has been a political project from the outset explicitly in the writings of developmental psychologists themselves.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, now I'm even more excited to do this episodes and dig into that, because I think I get a lot of criticism on the podcast for interpreting the science. Some people say, well, I don't want that sort of, you know, liberal feminist bias to be inserted. I want the science. I want the data. I want to know how things are. For those of you who are listening, Dr. Rollo is rolling his eyes a little bit there. So um, so yeah, so even the way that these theories are developed, there is bias inherent in it. And it's just that the having this sort of veneer of science over the top of it sort of makes it seem as though there isn't when actually it's there. It's just that it's much harder to see.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yeah, the most explicit bias because it's built in is the ableism that you find in developmental psychology. Yeah. Because it's predicated on the idea that if anything, was to interfere with the natural progress of the child into the adult, that represents a developmental disability, and which is morally regrettable condition. Whatever it merits, then that developmental psychology seems to harbor racist, colonial and ablest presuppositions that affect people of color and disabled peoples, but also the lives of children who are viewed as incomplete, and in need, of coercive discipline in order to be ushered into a mature state of being that is a fully human with being because childhood, and if you become arrested in childhood, by some developmental disability, is a morally regrettable fate, And a failure to become fully human.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, and when you say fully human, I'm kind of imagining someone who takes up their role as both a producer and a consumer in a capitalist society. Do you see it that way, too?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yeah, citizen and the producer. Yeah, definitely. Because both require an idea of mature rationality because the producer who engages in the labor contract is self-interested, understands their interests, and pursues those interests, which is rational process right, and so dangers in the labor contract, and the citizens supposed to be publicly deliberating in a rational way with other citizens. So the these are the two sort of ways and these are adult capacities completely right children are not included in this because they do not have an achieved full rationality yet.
Jen Lumanlan:
Right. Yeah. And I was reading recently, I can't remember why. But I was reading that the children are explicitly prohibited from signing contracts for that reason. And just to fully connect the dots that were alluding to here, Dr. Rollo introduced me to Dr. John Wall, who we may remember the episode where we looked at whether children should be allowed to vote. And I have to say, I went into that episode with a great deal of skepticism. You know, I picked up his book at the library, I was like, I don't know about this. And I come from a place that's deeply respectful of children. And, you know, it didn't take me too far into the book. And Dr. Wall told me afterwards, you know, I talked about this stuff with, you know, the non-believers for 15, 20 minutes or so. And they're like, oh, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense.
Jen Lumanlan:
And so his criteria, obviously, is, if you remember, the episode, for those of you who are listening, is the if the child is expressing a desire to vote, then they have the capacity that they need to be able to vote. And I want to link that back to your idea about children as political agents, and in particularly how that shows up in an indigenous context where you mentioned it. And I'm wondering, is there a time when a child is not perceived as a political agent? Like, I know, there's a lot of trouble with this, you know, when they get to a certain age, they are allowed to do a certain thing, but where does that come up for you?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Right, so I really appreciate John's work. It's excellent. We have minor disagreements, in-house disagreements, about what qualifies or constitutes political agency, or how it should be best achieved, but I tend to look at political agency, not in terms of rationality, or rationality is one form of political agency. You need a certain measure of reason to be able to participate in public deliberations over what we should do with the economy and what have you. But that's not the only way that we can affect the norms that govern our life. Politics is about making decisions, whether consciously or unconsciously, individually or collectively, about how to conduct ourselves in the world together. And you we can do that through a system of mass democracy and voting. That's one way of doing it. And that might require a certain measure of rationality.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But it's not the only way that we live in the world politically. It's not the only way that we affect norms. Some people live their lives in an exemplary way. And that serves as an example that changes the thoughts And behaviors of others, all without any kind of rational deliberation, or without any kind of even a conversation. And so there's different ways that we can affect the people around us. One is through arguments. One is through being an exemplar one is through just engaging in a particular practice that others might find desirable to practice themselves, but they didn't know it was possible, and so you're prefiguring, a new kind of politics. Children are precisely these kinds of beings, right? It's the kind of political agency I see them as, primarily engaging in is offering ways to live ways to engage in the world through curiosity and playfulness, and affecting those around them, and impressing upon those around them the need for care and attention to one another.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
This, to me is a form of political agency. And we see this respected in many not all but many indigenous, legal political cultures, where the changes that human beings go through from childhood to adulthood to old age aren't considered progress, but are just different ways of being, and that each way of being is a value to the community and has something to contribute to the community. Children can serve as teachers and responsibility and love. Adults can provide resources and work provide safety and security. Elders are the cultural memory of the people. And none of these groups is a burden on that must be sequestered away from the community. The community stays together, children, adults and elders are all present, and contributing in their own ways to political and economic life.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
In the West, however, because political agency is conceived of in terms of rational deliberation, and voting in order to pursue one's own interests, it's only the purview of adults and some elderly folks who are sort of considered honorary adults, even though their cognitive faculties might be failing. But children are legally excluded, precisely because they don't exercise what is considered the only form of political agency.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, and I just want to point out what a fundamental difference that is right in the way that Eurocentric cultures perceive children as you have to go through these developmental steps until you arrive as a fully formed adult, compared to a view of children where it's not our role to necessarily teach them or coach them through these developmental stages, but to maybe even learn from them. I mean, that's a really profound shift in how we perceive the role of children in society for most Eurocentric Soldiers?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Precisely, yes.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah. Okay. And I think that that also leads us into this idea that some of these really big social forces that we're thinking about, right and that I write about in my book that are white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. And I kind of set up the idea that these social forces are perpetuated in the intimate relationships between parent and child, and between child and teacher. And so when I was doing the background research for this episode, I stumbled on a sentence in one of your papers, and it says the bonds of Whiteness are not intellectual or ideological, but affective and relational. And so can you tell us what you mean by that?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yeah. So what I mean by that is that a lot of anti-racist work is aimed at changing people's beliefs about race. But a lot of critiques that come from people of color Black and indigenous communities, is that the racism that they experience is not always explicit, and emphatic. And it's not always folks who hold explicit racist views who end up behaving in oppressive ways. And so this alerts us to a problem in the problem is that you can't really argue somebody out of being a racist, or somebody who views oppression as natural and necessary. It's not open to argument. It's something that's sort of written into them. And there's a lot of, if you look at the sort of scholarship coming out of psychology of racism in the post war period, mostly, we find that the exactly what you said, the intimate arena of relations between children and adults is where we rehearse and reinscribe and reproduce the psychology of oppression in the family unit and the relations between adults and children.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So what I mean here is that the privileging for instance of size and strength and rationality, all the hallmarks of adulthood, over the privileging of it over smaller and weaker, irrational or more incapable of the hallmarks of childhood is something we're all born into. And we don't require concepts of adult or child to understand this to feel it. So virtually every child born into the world experiences themselves as being at the mercy as being at the mercy of bigger, stronger and more capable human beings, adults, right, we're all born into this. When we're infants, we can barely move, let alone flick a light switch or feed ourselves or drive a car. We experience ourselves as powerless of those around us as powerful. Long before we have any concepts of inferiority or superiority, rationality, childhood, adulthood, race, sex, gender race.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So there's a danger in the raising of children that we may normalize and naturalize adult capacities as morally superior, and that the child doesn't see themselves as merely different from adults. But as comes to regret themselves and to regret their size and their stature and their capabilities as being defective or deficient as inferior. And therefore the child strives to achieve that kind of adult mastery to become superior relative to the weak to the small and to the incapable. So admiring and seeking to exercise strength over the weak doesn't require a whole set of ideological precepts or ideas. If adults around children are careful, and they don't value the contributions of children, if they exercise, coercive, coercion, or even violence and power over them. It's the hierarchy of power and violence that the child may grow up feeling is not sure unnecessary. So and once this model of normal and natural power is written into us as children through our relations to adult. It serves as the framework for rationalizing and justifying racist, sexist transphobic and colonial hierarchies, right. So we get this, we see this in the work of Bell Hooks. Bell Hooks wrote that the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed ruler over those without power, and given the right to maintain that rule through practices of subjugation, subordination and submission.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
And again, Chester Pierce, who was a psychoanalyst in the 70s, the first one of the premier Blacks, psychoanalyst of his era, wrote in a similar vein that the oppression of children is the basic form the basic form of oppression in our society that underlies all alienation and violence, where it teaches everyone how to be an oppressor and makes them focus on the exercise of raw power rather than on volitional humaneness. The object yeah, so both Pierce and Hooks and others are trying to make us aware that targeting the beliefs of adults, we're already kind of too late. Right that we have to disrupt the patterns of domination and oppression that exists between children and adults, if we are going to have any hope of addressing the sort of permutations of that Dominator model in society in the forms of sexism and racism coloniality that they take.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, okay. And so, you know, we you mentioned the term violence a lot and obviously, there are interactions that we would look at and say, yes, that's violence, right there. There's physical abuse, there's mental emotional abuse. Yes, absolutely, there is violence, I think what I take out of Bell Hooks, his work is that there doesn't have to be a condition that we would point to unnecessarily And say, that is violence, for it to kind of effectively function as violence, right? It's the power dynamic itself inherently, that has this kind of violence embedded in it. So let me just pause there And get your feedback on that And make sure we're tracking Do you see it the same way? Yeah,
Dr. Toby Rollo:
I mean, a lot of these relationships can be characterized by love as well, right? That's the insidious part of this Yeah, is that you can have relations of domination, that appear quite loving, and have a lot of the sort of hallmarks of a caring and supportive relationship. But that doesn't change the fact that there is a power dynamic that one of the people in sort of a dyadic relationship might be, not have as much power and be dependent on and reliant on and view that and most importantly, come to view themselves as powerless. And most insidiously, come to seek the kind of power that's exercised over them, and exercise it over others. And all of this can take place in a loving family relationship if we're not careful. Right? Yeah.
Jen Lumanlan:
Okay, so, so then my question becomes, well, so what do I do about that? Right? How do I navigate situations where I want my to get my child to do certain things, or I, you know, which itself is a question that's embedded in a power dynamic. And so I wanted to pose something that a practice that I use on a regular basis, and this is something I learned from Mickey Cashton, who's a nonviolent communication practitioner, and she's written some excellent, excellent books, on childhood, her childhood and your childhood more broadly. And one of the practices that she recommends is that instead of having a child ask for permission, we each use similar language towards each other, right? Would it be okay, well, not actually, no, it's not... Would it be okay, it's, I'm going to... would that how is that for you? How does that work for you? And so a form that that might take would be my daughter might want to go out for a walk in the neighborhood. And so she'll say, I'm going out for a walk, and planning to be back in an hour, does that sound good to you? So that I can then get an opportunity to say, well, it's gonna be dinner time or anything else that's happening. But she's not asking my permission to go for a walk, right? Where we're functioning much more as equals in that interaction. And so I guess I'm looking to see sort of your perspective on those kinds of interactions and and how can I and listeners push this further, right? What other ways can we get out of this domineering dominated dynamic on a super practical level?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yes, those practices, I think, are wonderful, any sort of cultivation of mutual respect. The reciprocity is going to help erode the feelings of powerlessness and the feelings of hierarchy, and sort of destabilize any sort of natural hierarchies that often emerge in families. The real test, though, is not in the family dynamic so much, but in the social expectations of the family. So children, going to school, going to restaurants, behavior in restaurants, going to the doctor going to the dentist, this is really where the rubber hits the road. And this is where it's extremely this is where it matters, though. This is where it's extremely difficult to navigate the relationship and to try to mitigate the effects of power and coercion. I don't have any easy answers, but I think that it requires a lot of courage and fortitude, a little bit of luck and a little bit of luxury on the part of parents to be able to make the changes required to fully accept their children as so, agents in their own way. So if a child refuses to go to school, what do you do? Right? I'm school. Both my children are homeschooled. And they both have the option of going to school if they want. And they will probably last a couple days before they say this is a little bit too coarse.
Jen Lumanlan:
Come on, I love it.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But yeah, it's a very difficult and it takes resources that a lot of people don't have. It takes patience. And it takes most of all, I think courage, because you have to unlearn a lot of the things that you've come to internalize about education and about opportunities that about what is normal, and what is natural. And you have to undo a lot of the sort of narratives that you've been that you've internalized about what's appropriate and necessary.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, okay, so I'm with you on school, right? I think I'm with you on behavior and restaurants in what's considered acceptable and that maybe we choose not to go to a restaurant for a while, or maybe we kind of put up with other parents giving us the stink eye or you know, people, people who are not with children giving us the stink eye because our child's behavior doesn't necessarily conform. And then you started talking about doctors and dentists. And that's where my kind of leading edges, right, so as we are talking, there's going to be a new COVID vaccine or booster available, hopefully, in the next week or so. And I we're gonna be traveling soon, I just mentioned into our living room this morning, their new COVID vaccine, and my daughter's like, ah, so clearly, she does not want to have this vaccine. And so I do know that there are families who will take the child's lead on that, right, I remember listening to an episode of Akela Richards podcast where she was interviewing a parent who I think her child had a serious disease or illness, I forget what it was, it might have been malaria or something like that. And she allowed the parent allowed her child to make the decision about whether she wanted to take the drugs that would commonly be prescribed for treatment. And the child said, 'No,' and eventually, the child did get better. But I guess where I really struggle with this is I have been around in the world a long time, longer than longer than I'm starting to care to admit. And I am able to sort of put the frick of a vaccine in the context of what might happen if I you know, if we don't get that vaccine. And so, for me personally, that the discomfort of the day after the vaccine is worth not having the long term effects of the illness, a child is always I think, going to say 'no' to the you know, that real discomfort of a vaccine without being able to put the longer term ideas in context. So I guess I'm curious as to how you interpret that, where do you sit with that?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yeah, well, I don't have any prescriptions for anybody who's dealing with that sort of thing. It's, we deal with the same thing as we get older. And we have aging parents who are refusing treatments, that would be better for them as well. We have in our friends are friends and family members who are adults who are also their substance abuse, there's all sorts of harmful practices and things and practices and behaviors that our loved ones are engaged in, that we have difficulty dealing with, and would love to just like, hold them down and forced them to, you know, force dad to take his heart medication or what have you.
Jen Lumanlan:
And when you say that, suddenly their perspective is different, right? And I think it's the legal ramifications, right? If I have power of attorney over my parent, then I get to be the one who decides that. But if I don't have power of attorney, then they get to decide whether or not they want to take this treatment. I am legally responsible for my child. So I guess maybe there's two questions, right, like, what should I do anyway, given that I'm legally responsible, and should I be legally responsible is is the broader question I think.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
It's an intractable issue. There's nothing weird that institutionally, we're sort of bound in ways that don't allow us to make the decisions we probably like to make. And we're bound to ethical decisions that because of the way, the way our institutions and the way we're organized, so that sounds abstract. But I would like to see, for instance, during COVID, during the height of COVID, there was a tendency to rely on old institutions and push them to their breaking points, schools, hospitals, right. None of these institutions were equipped to deal with the level of, of illness and the demands that were being made on them. And we as a society didn't really well, governments didn't really seem to want to invest much in making them any any better and leading up even when there was warnings that something like this could really tax our systems, economic and healthcare systems. There was a reticence to make the investments that would have been necessary to meet it. gait, a lot of the harm and suffering that came along with our healthcare system being unable to, to deal with these sorts of issues.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So there could have been, and there always is a possibility of making our institutions capable of handling the choices that people want to make, we could have had institutions set up to protect the elderly, who were especially susceptible to the harms of COVID. But we didn't, right, we just kind of let things go. And we didn't have the courage, I guess, as a society to make the changes. We didn't see them as efficient enough, or what have you. I would like to think that there's a way that we could do home life and economic life and schooling in ways that allow us to accommodate the child who doesn't want to get the vaccine just now or something like this.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But we simply don't have the will to sort of make those institutional accommodations right, even though it is quite possible. Like when we wanted to go to the moon, we were we wanted to fight World War II, we rearranged the entire economy and manage to do it. We built the institutions from the ground up. Because we saw it as a priority. We simply just don't see the elderly or children as a priority. We see economic life and productivity as a priority and so we rescue the corporations, and we rescue the workplaces, but we don't rescue children or the aged, or people with who are immunocompromised. We don't seem to care about them. So the short version of that is, it shouldn't simply be that parents have to find a way to deal with a child who doesn't want to do X or wants to do why we should have institutions built up so that parents and families And children have the flexibility to exercise agency, rather than conform to the very limited scope of choices that weren't given, for instance, during a pandemic, which is either hiding your house, so there's possibilities.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah. Okay, so let us return to a certain epigraph. And I'm gonna read it this time, what if I told you that your ideas about politics are actually just your ideas about childhood extrapolated? And so what I'm seeing here is, and I'm linking this to a book that I read, actually, since I finished my book, and I wish I read it before George Lakoff, Moral Politics. And he concludes his acknowledgments section of the book. So before I even started reading the book, the conclusion of the acknowledgments talks about a conversation he had with a friend of his, I think, a therapist, Paul Bloom, and he was talking with his therapist about how do if there, is there one question, the answer to which reliably distinguishes between liberals and conservatives? And I guess, Bloom thought about this for a while. And the question that he came back with, is if your child cries in the night, do you pick him up? And of course, the kid is, it is in the quote, but, but we can, we can extrapolate from there. And so when I saw that I was just blown away.
Jen Lumanlan:
And the thing that I want to tease out here is, when we treat children with respect with care, when that is our primary ethic of dealing with children, then it's almost by extension that our primary ethic of dealing with everybody in the world is with care and respect. And we don't live in a world with that primary ethic, right, we in our systems-- capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, have been shaped by primarily what I perceive to be a conservative-oriented mindset. And that does not prioritize those values, it prioritizes other values. And so that's the connection that I'm seeing between the ideas about politics and the ideas about childhood. Would you draw any particular part of that or you know, add to it in any way?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yeah, I very much like Lakoff, Johnson and Lakoff's work on moral imagination, and language. And I do see value thinking about conservative or left and right politics in terms of how we view authority in a lot coughs notion that the conservatives are concerned with government as a father, dictatorial sort of father and liberals want this sort of nurturing mother government kind of thing. I wouldn't be so and I understand the thought behind conservative politics, but I guess what I wouldn't want to do is let the left off so easily, because it's definitely hidden. It's even though I've started in house disagreement, because I'm firmly firmly on the left.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But the problem for me is the sort of developmental logic that begins with our view of childhood. And this is what I mean by your views of politics being viewed as a childhood extrapolated. It's the developmental paradigm, which views the progress from a state of irrationality and dependence into a state of rationality and independence, that both conservative and liberal-minded, certainly in the American context, but even more broadly, view in terms of progress. That's not to say that there can't be a charity and compassion for those who don't develop normally and properly. We see that on both sides. But the, the problem really isn't the absence or the presence of a charitable attitude towards those who don't develop properly. The problem is the developmental paradigm itself. Once you have naturalized a hierarchy, within your understanding of humanity, the adult versus the child, the adult is a superior form of being human, that child has an inferior form of being human, it's not their fault. It's just natural. And they have to, if they're not to be a tragic failure, progress up to be an adult, once you have naturalized in sort of internalized that model, you have preserved a framework of hierarchy And oppression that all kinds of other things can get grafted on to, right.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
And so this is one of the problems with addressing racism as racism, right, rather than looking at the sort of framework that it's built on sexism as six transphobic views, rather than looking at what Pearson Bell Hooks are pointing to, which is like, where do we even get this framework where we think in terms of certain human beings being superior to other human beings, and those human beings being failures to not achieve the superior form of human being. And I think that's the real problem in political discourse. And it's one of the things that's hanging that's kind of hamstringing our device development of a really emancipatory liberatory. Political program is that whenever we get to a form of oppression that we want to challenge, we always seem to appeal to the standard of adulthood to try and rescue those people. Oh, don't treat women like children, treat them like adults. Right? Well built into that is the idea that children should be treated like children, and that the injustice here is not that we have segregated human beings into adults and children. The injustice is that the wrong people are being called children. Only those people get called children, women, should people of color the same, right? There's been a number of really good books written on how the strategy, the emancipatory strategy of appealing to adulthood in rationality was precisely what white supremacy wanted. Right? They wanted free blacks to endorse a view of rational adulthood as full humanity, because then that allowed White supremacy to preserve the notion that those who are not fully rational can be justifiably subjugated and justifiably excluded and used and exploited.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
And so they preserve that category of the subhuman And a lot of emancipatory projects unwittingly buy into the binary of adult and child. And that hamstrings us because we're, it's always going to be reiterated, right? Even if we have a small victory where we like managed to provide a formerly marginalized group with some sort of benefit, that progress will slowly be eroded, because the forces on the other side, still have this category of the subhuman that they can appeal to, oh, we've freed formally freed the slaves. But now the problem is we have some free black people who are going to university and becoming educated. But then we have these groups of people who are refusing who are thinking locally who are not participating in mass democracy. Those people are still a problem. They're still behaving like children. And so there's still a bit we have this built in rationale for subjugating those people because we didn't challenge the foundation of exploitation and that's in the child adult relationship binary. If that makes sense.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
It does. Yes. Thank you so much for adding that and I totally agree that that does cut across the political spectrum. So yes, I wouldn't let us liberals off the hook either.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
They can all agree that children should be excluded. Yeah. Yeah. There's never a debate.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah. So So I guess then what that leads me to think is okay, so I hear you, right. And I'm also thinking back to the conversation with with Dr. Wall. And, you know, I hear you children should be allowed to vote, you know, I hear you, we shouldn't have this binary. And yet, I am a parent, and maybe I'm a listener to this podcast. And so my child is in school, because I'm working all day and, and I want to make sure that they get get good grades, because they should get a good job at the end. And so that they can afford to buy the things they want to buy And to do the things they want to do. And I want to make sure my child is successful in that system. And it seems as though I can have one or the other, right, I can have this utopian vision of what society could be like without this binary. Or I can set myself my child up for success that I'm pretty sure it's going to come. So how do you navigate that? I mean, I know your homeschool. So that's a little bit different for you. But how do you advise? Or how would you advise parents who are in a school system And who see that sort of traditional path rolling out for their child to navigate that?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Okay, so very good. And I'll use anecdotal personal sort of examples here data. To illustrate, the first thing to say is that success in school and success and all those sorts of child institutions is not a guarantee of prosperity, and mental health and all the rest of it. It's plenty of really highly educated people who are barely functioning and barely holding on, because lots of emotional, so it's not guaranteed. And that's the worry of all parents, right that despite our best efforts, we still run into trouble with our children. But I hope to provide some hope. So I have, I have three degrees, university degrees, including a doctorate, and I'm a tenured professor. But other than those three degrees in my position as a tenured professor, by have a grade seven, or seventh grade education, because I had to drop out of school when I was in my teens. So I never finished high school, I was what's called Social past, most of the way up through school, the teachers even though I failed, all of my courses still felt like it was probably a better idea to keep me in my age cohort and to hold me back. And so I was social past all the way up through elementary school and finally just quit in high school. And I was told that if I didn't, wasn't successful in school, that I wouldn't amount to anything, that I'd be, you know, working in a factory or something like that. If I was lucky, I get to be a garbage man or something like that.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah. And in a capitalist system, that's about as low as it gets, right?
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Yes, even though I think being a garbage man would be really cool. But yeah, but I went to university as a mature students and found nothing. But success, because I was internally motivated to do it. I didn't have any external motivations. It was all my own desire to learn on my own desire to be successful and whatnot. And so one of the questions I get about my kids being homeschooled is, aren't you worried? Like, what if they want to become a scientist or a teacher? What if they want to go to university? What are you going to do? And so my answer is that I, I went to university just fine. Most universities have intake streams for children who don't have conventional education's. And the big obstacles now are financial obstacles. Right? So I had to take out student loans, of course, but that's everybody. That's even if you're really successful in school, you might get some scholarships, but it's only the very rare elite few get full scholarships for university and, and come out with a master's or doctorate without any debt at all.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
But the formal, educated or scholastic obstacles no longer really apply. So it's, there's really not too much to worry about. The thing I worry about for a lot of children is that whatever their internal motivations might be, they get sort of relegated or stamped out through the schooling process. That's one of the things that I worry about. So that when the time comes when they want to decide what they want to do with their lives, they don't have a sense of who they are, what they want to do. One of the things you can do if you're lucky enough to be able to homeschool is cultivate that kind of focus on what the children are really interested in. They're interested in something and run to the library and grab the books and you just have a day about dinosaurs or a week about Asia or what have you sort of thing. So I mean, I hope that a story like mine, And I know others like meat, do a story like mine can give some peace to those who are worried that if their children aren't successful in school, they might not be able to be successful later on.
Jen Lumanlan:
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I also am thinking of a story I read in New York Times this morning, and I just had a quick look to see if I could find the name of the person. And it's disappeared off the homepage. And obviously, I can't dig for it right now. But the President's name was Carlos something, and he was a prisoner. I forget what crime he committed, I think some sort of he was on probation for some sort of drug offense, and discovered during COVID, making art and making these models. And we obviously don't understand his full story and how he got into drugs and crime and that kind of thing. But we can hypothesize there was some sort of school, you know, quote, unquote, school failure there. And, and now he's doing this amazing miniature sort of model Art Forum that is being really celebrated. And as I was reading that, and then listening to you, I'm thinking, and what if we could have seen his talent? earlier? Right? What if that could have been recognized for what it was when he was young, and he could have found a sense of belonging and a sense of worth, instead of looking for that in things that are difficult in our society? And so I think, to me that that's another aspect of it right? Is that, yes, it you could potentially still pick up the traditional path. And I would say that I'm the same, right, I took five years off between my A levels in England and University and did a variety of jobs. And, And so so yes, it's absolutely possible to get back into it anytime, once you're sufficiently motivated.
Jen Lumanlan:
And also, maybe we could actually look at the strengths that our young people have, and see them as strengths even if they don't look like strengths within the school system. I'm guessing you're really good at things that were not valued in the school system. And maybe if somebody had expressed that value to you. If you'd been able to see that value, maybe you wouldn't even be a professor today, maybe you'd be doing something else that totally lights you up.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Well, it's funny, because my skill set is actually was really well suited to school, which is why I was so successful in academics, writing and making arguments and writing papers and studying and I love all that stuff. It was all but what I couldn't stand was the schooling structure. And the way that external motivators are used to try to compel me to do the things that I already loved, doing, completely destroyed my love of doing those things. And it wasn't until I had quit school and worked for a while that I was able to be internally motivated to it. And University is good for that, you know, the professors not monitoring you, or calling your parents or anything like that, you're, you're there today, I hear they do. You're there because you want to be there and you want to learn and you want the sort of benefits that come with the accreditation that universities provide, and that kind of thing.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
So it's ironic, right? I was very good at school, but school was not good for me. And so, and I see a lot of students that come to me, that are like that, that find success in University and did terrible in their elementary and high school days, because of the coercive, competitive environment that they were placed in. And because they were, one of the problems is there, you're sequestered with your age group. And you have, there's a real lack of diversity. There's no elders there. There's no really young children there. It's just you, and your one age group, maybe one or two years separated. And you're placed in competition with one another, and all sorts of ways. And so it's really not a environment that's conducive to people figuring out who they are, what they love to do, all while you have a teacher who's trying to manage a classroom and compel you to do assignments using the threat of bad grades, if not suspension And expulsion, if you've refused to do that sort of thing. Yeah.
Jen Lumanlan:
I think we could probably talk for at least another hour on top of this stuff. It's been such a privilege to learn about your work, I'm so glad that they got to use your quote as the epigraph for a book. I love the way it sets up the idea of the connection between the personal And the political. So thank you for for lending that to me And for being here to talk us through it today.
Dr. Toby Rollo:
Thank you for having me.
Jen Lumanlan:
And so all of the references to Dr. Rollo's work that I have read for this episode can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/ChildhoodExtrapolated.
Emma:
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