A few years back, someone linked me to this essay by Barbara Kingsolver, from 1992: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Baby.” It’s a beautiful reflection on the nature of children in society, and what it means when we treat them the way we do.
My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread.
Kingsolver
My working theory, here, is that in America, we see children as Not Belonging in public life paradoxically because so many of us have been pressured into having them. I know that I am lucky: I wanted children, and I have an amazing child. But other people are childfree by choice, and while some are benevolent towards the mere existence of children, others cannot stand to have them around.
I think the optimal solution, like most optimal solutions, lies somewhere in the middle: We stop pressuring people to have kids when they don’t want them; and we stop acting like kids are this horrible Other Species, barely even human (see the man who called a child “it” in the essay).
It’s absolutely appropriate to say that children should not be in some places; not every location, every entertainment, is intended to be enjoyed by every human. But bans like that need to be considered thoughtfully and reasonably. Take weddings, for example, the source of so much internecine drama. It’s absolutely fine for the people getting married to say “We would like to have a party that is just adults” – it sets a certain tone, it allows for fragile objects to be placed on tables, etc etc etc. But the spirit of that request does not mean banning the 17yo twin when her 18yo twin had the good fortune to be born at 11:47 pm, rather than 12:01 AM. It does not mean banning a nursing infant who is not even ambulatory yet (a ban which functionally also bans the other half of the Nursing Dyad). Acknowledging that children are part of our world means making places for children – not just banning them from things. Allowing the 17yo twin or the nursing infant does not require you to also allow the shrieking, running 5yo. (Though if you want the 5yo’s parents to attend, the best chance of that happening is to provide on-site childcare, since the logistics of babysitting in a strange city are dicey at best, and all the normal family caregivers are likely at the wedding already.)
And all this comes back to the question raised in the subject line here: are children an Individual responsibility, or a Collective one? My feeling is Collective.
(And I will ask another friend if I can get a copy of her essay “Parenthood, and the Irrational Concept of ‘Choice’,” to also post up here, because it handles the question of Individual vs. Collective so well.)
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/
This TikTok expresses a similar idea through an explicitly leftist lens: that if you build a community that is inhospitable to children, you functionally make it inhospitable to women, and all you will do is reconstruct the existing patriarchy.
Emilybook 