It's okay if child liberation & family abolition make you uncomfortable.
Ask questions, acknowledge your feelings -- these are the growing pains of considering a radically new idea.
I remember that I first encountered the concept of family abolition on Tumblr when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and that it made me massively uncomfortable. To remove the system of protection and nurturance that guide a young child’s life seemed to me to create a horrifying vacuum of meaning, into which absolutely anything could climb and take advantage. Without the structure of the family, who would prevent a child from being abused by any and every random adult that ever had access to them, I wondered? And how could a child ever be expected to get ahead in life if they didn’t have multiple loving relatives devoted to their wellbeing, who spoke to them, read to them, taught them how to cook and to clean, how to balance a checkbook, drive a car, and distinguish good from bad?
I myself had been a survivor of multiple assaults, including some intense violations when I was a child, so I found the whole concept triggering. I knew that not every person could be trusted around children, and that young people were naive and largely powerless, and so they needed someone to defend them. That some people wanted to see a child’s only source of safe belonging taken away from them outraged and terrified me.
The irony was that my own early experiences of sexual violation had come from one of my parents. And for all that I had stressed about the need for family members to pass on important life lessons to their children, I had needed to train myself in so many skills — my eating-disordered, ARFID-afflicted relatives had no capacity to teach me how to meal-plan or to cook, let alone how to know much that I should eat, my father was verbally abusive during the two driving lessons that he tried to give me, and I only just figured out the basics of how to clean after watching this wonderful how-to video from an Autistic house-cleaner & Youtuber earlier this year.
Another irony about my fears of family abolition that only became clear to me in retrospect was that at the time, I had already known that most people’s fears of crime and predation do not track with statistical reality. Though decades of sensationalistic true-crime media have made the public fearful that a violent stranger is forever lurking in the bushes ready to ambush them, and they feel increasingly unsafe, in reality the violent crime rate has been on a decline in the United States since at least the early 1990s, and the majority of people who do victimize others are known to the victim, and relied upon by them — it is our parents, brothers, boyfriends, bosses, priests, wives, mothers, and the cops who are by far the most likely to harm us, not some passing stranger on the street.
Your Fear is Dangerous & Your Power Is Greater Than You Think
How cops and the news media convince us to fear the vulnerable and underestimate our own power.
It drove me mad that members of the public did not realize that it was the people who held power over them who had the greatest capacity to harm them, and instead voted to increase policing budgets, covered their properties in surveillance cameras, and called the authorities on random Black kids in their neighborhoods, all in the pursuit of feelings of “safety” that were completely detached from reality. I was a hard-core prison abolitionist already, working to get the solitary confinement prison in Tamms Illinois shut down and reading heart-rending letters from inmates every day, so it sickened me that people’s greatest insecurities were being used against them to create more and more powerful systems of state violence and coercive control.
And yet there I was, just as confused in my reactions, thinking that it was the family that protected children from predation, when my own experience had shown how often the opposite was the case.
When my dad was behaving in sexually inappropriate ways with me as a teen, I had trust-worthy relatives that I could have turned to, and adults that I knew at work and school who would have been happy to explain the practicalities of adult life to me and help me build my independence.
But doing something so extreme as breaking away from my family was never a thought in my mind. I wasn’t going to set out on some intimidating, dramatic legal emancipation process. I needed my family to help me get through high school, to give me a place to live, some food to eat, access to a car for my part-time job, a signatory so I could have a bank account.
The kids I knew who were emancipated couldn’t go to college, because they didn’t have parents to fill out a FAFSA. They didn’t get good educations or get to participate in any extra-curriculars. All of their lives turned out incredibly bleak — usually they got pregnant before turning eighteen, at the hands of some thirty-year-old drunk fanatical Christian with a manufacturing job who kept a roof over their heads until the Ford plant shut down, and then moved them halfway across the country where they were even more isolated.
To try and assert myself against my family in any way meant destroying the entire foundation for my identity and future, and dive into an unforgiving abyss. I wasn’t foolhardy enough to do that. I wasn’t abused enough, or by everyone, so I couldn’t justify such a dramatic rupture of my entire life — where I lived, who I knew, what my name was, how I prayed, the work that I did then as a landscaper, the accent I had, what money I had, the words I used, the beliefs I carried, my goals, all of it came from my family.
I couldn’t just leave all of that. And yet by the time I did turn eighteen I had resolved to stop speaking to my father forever, and cemented that decision by changing my last name on my birthday. I moved away from my hometown as quickly as I possibly could.
I had needed to slip loose of the confines of the family. But because there was nothing in the world to replace it, no systems of meaning or structure of support that could help me figure out who I was or how I might get by in life, doing so felt almost violently self-destructive.
The family that protects is also the one that imprisons. But that is too world-shaking and upsetting a realization for most people to make easily. It certainly was for me. And so I had to think on the family’s defects, despite having lived it, for many years.
I debated with anarchists and family abolitionists online, not really making salient points, just expressing that the idea of granting children full legal personhood was freaky and perverted-sounding to me. I asked a lot of questions about who would look after children in the family’s absence, and how society would ensure that everybody was adequately taught and looked after — and to my surprise, rather than getting frustrated, the anarchists that I spoke to said that these were very good questions, ones that we all needed to think about and build solutions for, because society was already failing at such important things. I wrote a lot of anguished, hand-wringing posts in which I said that something had to be there to look after children, as if I were praying to some god of reasonable authority to come down and set everything right.
But there was no such god. There never had been. If there had been, my dad wouldn’t have looked my nude teenaged body all up-and-down hungrily and declared himself proud that he hadn’t done anything further.
I also started learning a whole lot more about abuse. I read Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and recognized that no living person in my family knew how to handle big emotions, and had reacted with tension and distance any time that I seemed “too” joyful, angry, or sad until I became incapable of expressing such things. I read Albert Bernstein’s How to Deal with Emotionally Explosive People and saw my father’s emotional volatility thrown into sharp relief, and discovered just how much work I’d done as a kid to parent and therapize him. I read Kenneth Adams’ Silently Seduced, about child survivors of covert incest, and it slowly dawned on me just how much my mind had been warped by serving as a parent’s sole confidant, quasi-spouse, and best friend.
After that I found Lee Edelman’s more radical text, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which is all about the ways in which our society treats children not as complete people, but as future reproducers of the society itself. According to Edelman, it is through the rearing and indoctrination of children that a culture continues to pass along its existing values and structure, as if it were stamping messages of propaganda onto blank screens.
What the child wants or feels simply does not matter to society. They are but a breeding chamber for reproducing existing ideas, providing future labor, and eventually birthing the next generation of kids — who will also be indoctrinated to believe what their parents before them believed, to live as their parents lived. And so, we are all societally trained to be very conservative about children — exposing them to new and unfamiliar ideas or exploring new ways for them to live feels like a terrifying act of destruction toward society itself because, in a way, it is.
Anyone who does not treat children as if they are seed-pods for familiar ideas and well-worn cultural practices risks being seen as a perversion of the existing order, and a threat to all that we know and hold to be unquestionably true. What most people are missing, however, is that this can be a good thing.
The open existence of queer people makes it harder for society to teach children that heterosexuality is natural and right. Telling children that often the police kill innocent people and that racism is widespread makes it less likely they will grow into adults who support our existing police state. Admitting to young people that the adults do not actually know everything and that the laws of our land were not designed to be fair, but were mostly cobbled-together by a series of profit motives and prejudices means that we can no longer decide for the kid what is right, and that they might adopt completely different morals from the ones we do, and be better for it. The very structure of our society becomes very shaky beneath our feet, and we’re terrified that we might all just tumble into a complete nothing-world without any rules, or commonly-held values.
And so we get uncomfortable when a person is too honest about the harsh realities of the world to a child, and nervously ask how am I supposed to explain to a kid that queer people/genocide/white supremacy/injustice exist. Even if our actual politics are fairly radical and we do believe that our world needs to change, we have this intuitive gut feeling that we have to raise our children to feel that reality is just, that the structures around them are to be trusted, the rules to be followed, the people put in charge of them are safe.
Because what will we do if none of that’s true?
I am here to tell you that’s a very good question, and that all your reservations about the concepts of child liberation and family abolition are worth talking about. Don’t dismiss how freaked out or confused you might feel. If you think some of what I’m saying is absurd or utopian, go ahead and say that to me, or to somebody else. Just stay in the conversation. Follow your questions through to wherever they lead. Keep reading about these ideas and finding your own problems with them — I don’t expect you to land exactly where I have wound up over time (and certainly, my own mind is still wandering), I would just like you to grow. The whole basis behind these ideas is that there is no trustworthy authority who should rule us. We get to decide how we wish to live, what we believe in, and how we will solve problems, and we will make it our mission to allow as many people as possible to be equally free.
But I understand that it’s anxiety-provoking stuff. It’s existentially and emotionally threatening. And so, if you still have major reservations with child liberation and family abolition, I want to give you the following reassurances:
No one is trying to take your Mommy and Daddy away. Family abolition is about the eradication of the family as a system of owning people and transferring property— the legal, financial “family” reinforces wealth inequality that exists on the basis of race, forces women into caretaking roles and limits their economic and social freedom, isolates people from wider communities, indoctrinates children into conservative beliefs, and is a tool by which society maintains itself as it presently is.
If we were to abolish the legal construction of the family, you could still freely choose to love your memaw and grandpaw and spend all of your holidays with them, I promise. In fact, under such a reality, every person would be free to choose whom they love and trust. People would still have biological parents, and often relatives that they knew, but “family” would not be determined by blood or by someone’s name. If the people who raised you are lovely people with whom you share a close relationship, that is so great, you can keep them. You might also fold a close buddy or neighbor into your existing family structure if you like, too.
Family abolition isn’t coming anytime soon. I find that when I discuss any form of abolition, people get very anxious about what will replace the prison/family/educational system that we presently have, and shut down from the conversation quickly, visions of wild-running pedophiles and escaped convicts playing about in their heads.
In these cases I often want to comfort my conversation partner by reminding them that the ideas I’m talking about are still really niche and unpopular! Nobody is coming to take your family away! Thus, there is absolutely zero harm in having a casual philosophical chat about it. What we are discussing is an alternative vision of what the future could be — but if this world is going to dramatically improve, then people have to believe that the cost of keeping things the same is a whole lot larger than the cost of change. Right now, most people seem to think that there is no alternative to the way our world is structured at all, which makes it very difficult for us to address the actual problem of children being abused by their caretakers. I’d just like for us to be able to speak openly about this, and imagine that a better world is possible.
Family abolition does not mean a lack of protections and resources for children, but rather an abundance of them. One of the things that currently keeps so many children trapped within abusive families is the total absence of any other options — a restrictive society maintains itself by convincing its subjects that they need it, and that it is the very grounding in which their life exists.
But this is not true. Even if there were no laws forcing parents to feed and raise their children, most people would have a strong motivation to care for those around them, and to open up their lives to those in need. In fact, it is our property & financial laws — including the ones that say parents “own” their children — that make it so difficult for people to depend upon larger, more interdependent communities.
Just look to the people of Gaza, who have lost just about everything that most of us in the rest of the world rely upon for meaning and structure. They don’t have a functioning state or any kind of political representation. They don’t have any laws or anyone to enforce them. Their homes, universities, libraries, museums, shops, mosques, and churches have been destroyed. They’ve been stuck behind a total Israeli blockade for going on seven weeks, and running out of the last dregs of food — and still they choose to gather together in bombed-out buildings to feed one another, pray, take care of stray cats, and even put on clown costumes and entertain hundreds of other people’s orphaned children.
This is how the average person behaves when there is no legal or social structure in place that prevents them from being prosocial. Even when their life has gone the absolute worst that a person’s life can go, and they have every reason to be filled with hateful or anti-social sentiments, the average person feels drawn toward the community, to be of aid to others, and they care about the little lives around them who cannot look after themselves. See also: Rebecca Solnit’s faith-in-humanity-restoring book, A Paradise Built in Hell.
If children were not the property of their parents, and if helping another person’s kid was not seen as an illegal and predatory act, children would have numerous safe adults to whom they could turn. There will always be people who feel called by something fundamental inside of them to love, feed, comfort, educate, and inspire children. Playing around with children is an intrinsically motivating act — it’s fun and helps you melt years of cynicism off your own body!
Caring for other people in need is itself a core human calling. Why do you think so many childfree people still consider themselves “plant dads” or “boy moms” to their cats? It is because even with how much parenthood has become associated with financial and logistical burden in our world, most of us have a nurturing instinct that it feels really meaningful to satisfy.
There will be a family for all kids if we abolish the legal “family.” I promise.
Family abolition is part of a larger social project that includes the abolition of prison, forced institutional education, oppressive states, and capitalism. Family abolition isn’t just going to happen overnight. (All the more reason not to be scared of talking about it!) For it to be made possible, a lot about how the world is organized would have to change.
Take for example the structure of the suburbs, dotted with unwalkable shopping centers and distantly spread-apart single-family homes. These communities were built for the white, middle-class, nuclear family of the 1950s, and if you family doesn’t look like one of those, then the setup creates a lot of problems for you: your ailing grandmother can’t walk to church for bingo every Tuesday night, so she’s trapped at home; it’s three miles from your door to your kid’s school, and a mile and a half to their nearest friend, and so it’s almost impossible for them to get educated or socialize without you driving them around (which in turn makes life a lot harder for you).
But if we lived in more closely-knit and interdependent communities, how we live and build family could radically change. Imagine if more humans lived the way a great many Indigenous societies have, with a clutch of small homes gathered around a public community space, with separate public buildings for meal preparation, eating, education, and political gatherings that could all be reached on foot. It would be a whole lot easier for a kid to leave their parents’ house and go stay with a supportive auntie or friend’s parent if things got hairy in such a setup. And because so many community members would be around and making incidental contact with one another on foot, people would notice when abuse was happening and step in far more quickly.
The legal nuclear family is just one of the ways in which people are kept shackled and are heavily indoctrinated by our current society. It’s not enough to simply throw open the bars of this particular cage — we would need a world where every person could access the resources they needed, find support, and connect with other people readily. We talk about family abolition because we want to live to see that world, and to build it.
Abolish Age
Every person deserves both freedom and support -- no matter how long they’ve been alive.
Family abolition is rooted in the belief that human beings can create the solutions to our own problems in an active, ongoing way. Often people criticize child liberation & family abolition by calling them idealistic. I wonder why exactly that is a bad thing. Why is it a waste of time to talk about how the world might function better? There is no reason to discourage creative and imaginative problem-solving unless you think it is impossible for the world to change — or if you believe (read: have been conditioned to believe) that you can play no role in shaping your society.
Ours is a profoundly authoritarian world. We rely upon authority figures such as law-makers and church-leaders to tell us what is correct to do, and if we do not follow their instructions we can be attacked by the police and then locked up. We do not get to weigh in on the rules of our land very much at all — at most we get to choose between two political representatives who aren’t all that different from one another and will not listen to us. Our educators have control over us and decide what is important for us to learn. The people who raised us also owned us. In such a world, it is easy to see oneself as powerless, and to believe that all meaningful change must come from above with perfectly-designed intent.
Anarchic ideas like child liberation and family abolition challenge all of this. At their core, they presume that individual people are competent, and creative. We are the ones who make up society, after all, with our daily work, our habits, and the relationships we build. Society would be nothing without our collective buy-in — we make it every single day, and so we can unmake it. By collectively refusing to follow unjust laws, supporting one another until we are not dependent upon the state anymore, and making decisions every single day about how we want the world to be, we have the power to change things.
This is why anarchists generally do not discourage open conversations about what would replace the police if prisons were to shut down, schools if education were made less institutional, and the family if it were abolished. We want everyone to be thinking about such things and to never stop asking questions and finding ways society could be improved!
We anarchists might give a lot of answers that non-anarchists find frustrating at first — such as saying that there won’t be as much need to protect people against ‘crime’ in our future world, because people will have greater access to food and shelter, and the vulnerable won’t be controlled by powerful others in the ways that allow abuse to exist. But it’s also a feature of anarchism that we don’t have definitional “answers” at all. Anarchy challenges you, the reader, to be an active participant in the society in which you live — you are trusted to have valuable insight into where problems like child abuse and predation come from, to be able to do something in real-time to prevent them, and to address them when they occur.
It is idealistic, yes, but it’s also aspirational. Anarchism is, arguably, a kind of anti-politics: rather than giving over the power & responsibility to run society into the hands of a few elected elites, it gives it all right back to you. It is a process of constant reflection, decision-making, and re-evaluating, and it’s meant to be so fluid that if any one solution does not work, then the people are always empowered to try something new.
This complete freedom to direct one’s own destiny is scary if you are not used to it — just as talk of abolishing the family is. It’s uncomfortable to hold true responsibility for your actions. But it also means that your fate is yours again, and that you can always make the right choice. You can be the person to take in an orphaned child off the street. You can be the one who speaks up when you see a caretaker striking a young person. You can decide to speak to young queer kids about their history, or how to practice safer sex — and if you see someone repeatedly abusing their power over children, you and your community can step in and make it stop.
I understand if that sounds like too much to carry right now. That’s okay. Sometimes it also overwhelms me. But stay here in this conversation with me. Keep criticizing the ideas, keep speaking to your discomfort and hesitations. Don’t ever stop exploring. Don’t ever believe that this world cannot change.
If you’d like to read more about anarchism and family abolition, I recommend:
Toward the Abolition of the Family: Why We Demand It and Why It Matters by Lee Cicuta
The Debate Anarchism Subreddit
The Anarchist Library’s Writings on Child Liberation
And Lee Edelman’s No Future, free pdf here:
If you are interested in learning more about supported decision making, a model that allows for disabled individuals (and, potentially, children!) to advocate for themselves while still receiving guidance and being informed of their options, here are some journal articles you might enjoy:
I prefer the term Family Liberation. I think it has a more positive context. I also think what gets left out of the discussion is the idea of the village raising the child and parental supports. As a parent doing the hard work of unlearning my childhood trauma and verbal abuse, I need a lot more support to support my children.
Also Midwest Magic Cleaning is awesome. For your ADHD audience https://youtu.be/EU0EtL8VHSI?si=ET7dmIRcNSW7Ako2
I'm just back from a family vacation. The family in question is myself and my partner, their kid and their coparent, their coparent's two partners, their kid's best friend, and her two parents. My partner's kid decided a few years ago, aged 12, that he wanted to move in with his bestie. His parents and her parents agreed to support him to do that. We are all walking distance apart. We form a support network for each other and care for our disabled family members as well as the kids, who we refer to kids collectively as The People's Children. It absolutely is possible to imagine a different way of being in family and community. I've gone on a very similar journey from child-free kid-hater to hard-line child liberationist and it's been so enriching to realise how much I have to learn from people society deems minor who have such interesting and thoughtful perspectives on the world.