“I think there is still a strong sense that people own their children,” parent educator and author Eloise Rickman tells me. “For a long time, it was legal to sell your children. And in many societies, it’s still a parent’s choice who their child marries and what profession they go into. It’s only quite recently that we’ve started to think of children as their own people. It’s really important to think about because as soon as you start seeing your child as yours, you can take all sorts of liberties with them that you wouldn’t take with other people. Central to my understanding of children’s liberation is the idea that children do not belong to their parents any more than a wife belongs to her husband.”
Rickman is a woman on a mission: to make more people aware of “adultism” in a bid to create a better world for children and young people. In her new book It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children, she defines adultism as the systematic oppression of children by adults.
“That’s not saying that all children have dreadful lives or that all adults are awful, but that there are structural problems within our society whereby children have much less power than the adults around them and that society is geared up to suit adult needs and desires,” she tells me.
If this is a new concept to you, you’re far from alone. Prior to reading this book, I confess to being guilty of adultism. I was often the person eye-rolling at kids running wild in the pub and huffing at the volume of Clemence and Rupert on public transport, in a supermarket or restaurant. Child-free by choice, I’ve often felt frustrated with a culture that views having a child as the ultimate realisation of humankind – the pinnacle of self-actualisation.
“Adultism can also be seen in many things we consider normal behaviour,” she writes. “Adults feeling free to say ‘I don’t like children’ when they would never dream of saying this about another marginalised group; children being barred from social occasions such as weddings despite the rest of their families being invited; the rise in airlines offering ‘adult only’ flights; the normalisation and legalisation of smacking; sending children to educational institutions where they are publicly shamed and heavily controlled; the inaccessibility of public spaces such as art galleries, where children can find themselves reprimanded for making any noise; and harsh maternity leave policies that separate babies from their parents at a few weeks old.”
Now? I’ve been radicalised. I tore through Rickman’s book in just over 24 hours. I’ve done a complete U-turn that has seen me reflecting on my own experiences as a child, pledging my allegiance to the child liberation movement and identifying adultism almost everywhere I turn. The blinkers are well and truly off – and it’s been humbling and illuminating.
Rickman makes a convincing argument that we need to radically rethink our treatment of children and their place in society. She positions child liberation as a political and social justice issue that has been ignored for too long. And with a staggering 25 per cent of the British population consisting of children, it becomes increasingly hard to countenance an alternative.
It’s Not Fair isn’t a parenting book and Rickman doesn’t assume you are a parent. But children are part of society. To dismiss their pain or deny the many injustices they face seems unconscionable. And of these inequities, there are many.
“Collectively, children are the most discriminated against group in our society,” she writes. “Because of adultism, children are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to experience and witness violence, and are much more likely to have their lives significantly controlled by other people, from what and when they are allowed to eat, to how they spend their time.
“They suffer from a lack of property rights, barriers to facing legal representation, and a need to go through caregivers to access certain types of services or healthcare. They earn less money for doing the same job as adults, and under many jurisdictions, children are the only people who can be legally hit … they routinely have their bodily autonomy violated, for example, by being forced to wear clothes they don’t want to wear… how we treat children isn’t fair.”
Rickman goes on to unpack the legal rights children are entitled to, positions parenting as a radical act, critiques the formal education system, and looks at child poverty and inequality.
While it may sound sobering – the knowledge that gun violence is the number one cause of death for children in the US made my jaw drop – it’s more hopeful than it sounds. Rickman believes we’re ripe for a rethink on how we treat children and that there’s a sea change afoot.
With a general election just days away, Rickman is also keen for children as young as six to have the vote. In an ideal world, adults would have children’s best interests at heart, but this isn’t the case when the level of childhood poverty, food insecurity and inequality is at an all-time high in many countries, she argues.
She compares their exclusion to the arguments made against women’s suffrage – “that they had smaller brains and wouldn’t be able to understand the complex issues at stake or the political processes, that it would be handing an extra vote to their husbands as they would vote as they were told, that their interests could be represented fairly through their husband’s votes, and that they wouldn’t be interested in political life as they have other concerns”. She cites older people who may have the beginnings of dementia and people with intellectual disabilities as having the vote: “Are people saying that we should have an IQ test?”, she counters.
The suggestion that children shouldn’t have to think about politics at a young age ignores the fact that many children and young people are already suffering the impact of political decisions in very real ways, from climate change to CAMHS waiting lists. How to resolve conflict and share resources in a way that feels equitable are all issues that arise in the playground, she says: “Children are already political, whether they can vote or not.”
While changing the voting age so radically may seem like “pie-in-the-sky thinking”, she notes that “democracy has always been a living, shifting thing, and that who gets to vote – and who is left out – has been a site of contestation since democracy began.”
She writes that “every marginalised group who has been given the vote that things have massively improved for them in terms of social standing, their protection and all their qualities of life, really.
We have a whole range of academic research which states that children are absolutely capable of this, but politicians absolutely don’t want to because children would shake things up. And I think that’s deeply unsettling. Especially with the climate crisis – this is children’s lives on the line. We’re already seeing it all over the world – kids are dying because of the climate crisis. It’s unconscionable to me that they don’t get a say in their futures.”
In England and Northern Ireland, it remains legal for a parent or carer to “discipline” their child physically if it is a “reasonable” punishment. A 2023 YouGov poll found that almost two thirds of people surveyed (67 per cent) thought that physically disciplining a child was unacceptable.
But for many children “punishment (or the threat of it) is a core part of daily life”, writes Rickman. “With people that you respect, you tend to treat them like they’re on an equal footing with you,” she tells me. “If I saw a man dragging a woman screaming out of a shop, I’d be on the phone to Women’s Aid asking for help.
Yet, it’s very common to see parents dragging children out of playgrounds by their wrists saying, ‘You just wait ‘til you get home’ – and this is still something we tend to see as normal because that power imbalance is so normalised within our society.”
Like many people, I was hit several times as a child. For a long time, I parroted the knee-jerk response of “well, it didn’t do me any harm”, a response I suspect is closer to a coping mechanism intended to normalise a painful experience.
Putting aside the actual impact of this, do we really want to live in a world where we think physical violence is a reasonable resolution to conflict? Resorting to violence demonstrates a lack of emotional intelligence, a quality which is learned, rather than innate. But just because we’re not born with this skill, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to more for ourselves. Surely, we all deserve better.
Reflecting on my own experiences led me to suspect that just because we have individually endured or experienced something negative, there’s often a sense that other people should also have to suffer.
“We talk a lot about not wanting a punishment-based society but this is exactly what we do to children all the time: ‘If you don’t do what I say, I can punish you’, which is essentially causing pain, whether it’s physical or emotional distress,” writes Rickman.
“And then we wonder why adults do it to one another… the roots of much of the violence we see in society can be traced back to the domination, humiliation and powerlessness so many of us experience as children,” she says.
The concept of “discipline” inevitably brings up the subject of education. Rickman homeschools her own daughter, but isn’t evangelical about it: “Not everyone can or wants to home-educate and frankly families shouldn’t be forced to”, she says.
She is angry about what she sees as a largely sub-standard educational system which is more focused on exam results than education, however. Opposed to homework for primary school kids, describing it as “symptomatic of a culture of education where exams are king, and wellbeing comes last on the list, Rickman believes that “education shouldn’t be something to be endured”. She’s critical of the controversial and ultra-strict Michaela School founded and headed by Katharine Birbalsingh. While she admits that the school “gets excellent exam results”, she argues that this is at the cost of humiliating, shaming and almost military-esque enforcement and that “we would not tolerate this treatment in any other aspect of our lives – why should we force it onto children?”
When it comes to children’s legal protections, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted by the UN in 1989 and came into force a year later. Of the 54 articles that set out their rights, one includes a child’s “right to an education that supports children to develop to their full potential”.
For Rickman, however, this has generally been interpreted as “increasing children’s future earning potential”, or “giving children the skills they need to enter the workforce”, a position which she states neatly aligns with Conservative values. She argues that societally, we need a broader conversation about what education can and should be.
I was shocked when my wife, a secondary-school teacher, told me that her school has a policy of not letting children use the toilet during lessons, a ruling that seems to fly in the face of a young person’s bodily autonomy. In an average class of 30, one child requesting to leave the lesson to use the toilet often sparks a domino effect which disrupts learning, she said.
While Rickman agrees with me, she argues that we’re failing to see the real issue at hand, however. “There’s been so much discourse about school attendance, especially post-Covid,” she tells me. “All of these questions about kids not turning up claiming that parents are lazy or that kids don’t want to go – but it’s the same with toilets. The conversation we need to be having is: why are young people so desperate to not go to school? Why are young people so desperate to escape their classrooms that they’d rather hide in a stinking toilet? School toilets are not very nice!”
She continues: “We do this so often when we talk about children – we take a structural problem [a lack of support, problems at home, bullying] and we locate it in the child: ‘You are a problem to be solved, there’s something wrong with you.’ And I think it can be so isolating, but not just for children, but for parents who think ‘What have I done wrong? I’ve failed my child’. And it breaks my heart because it’s not a problem with the child – it’s a problem with the structures that we put in place.”
Our conversation rolls on, taking in CAMHS waiting lists and child poverty (“this failure to provide necessary services to children is a form of violence. Children are dying because of it”), to new draft guidance on relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) that aims to forbid the discussion of gender identity issues (“banning children from learning about what it means to be gay or transgender won’t stop children from being who they are, but it will stop them from feeling safe and included”) – but despite current circumstances for many children being severely unacceptable, Rickman remains hopeful.
“Sometimes our idealised view of what childhood should be like – a time for innocence, care-free play, schooling, and family – can obscure the experiences of children whose lives look very different to that rose-tinted vision: children who are in the care system or who have been abused by caregivers, children who work for a living, children who have caregiving responsibilities (including children who are parents themselves), child soldiers, children in the sex trade, profoundly disabled children and so on,” she writes. These may not be the children we see smiling back at us in Christmas adverts or Disney films, but surely their rights are also worth fighting for?
Struggling parents, carers and teachers are far from alone. “I think it’s really difficult to talk about this stuff without sounding judgemental,” Rickman tells me. “I’m a parent – I mess up all the time.” But a better world for children is within reach for us all, she says.
“Children’s liberation isn’t something ‘out there’, a utopia that lives only in the pages of radical theorists,” she writes. “It is present in the moments when we take time to listen to what children are telling us, when parents take a deep breath and apologise, when teachers challenge their school’s behaviour policies, when politicians allocate more money to low-income families, when grandmothers chain themselves to buildings to fight so that their grandchildren have a liveable planet to grow old on. It is a daily practice of resistance, hope, and love.
“When we start viewing children as people, a lot becomes possible.”
It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children by Eloise Rickman is published by Scribe UK and available to buy now