Abstract
This chapter uses examples of the use of child poverty for racist, colonial, and sexist violence to highlight the dangers of our efforts to address child poverty. Using international appeals for aid, transnational adoption, and the seizure of Black children in the US and Aboriginal children in Canada, it becomes evident that understandings of child poverty assume conceptions of normative childhoods and parenting. These conceptions are grounded in modern Western understandings of children as innocent and in need of special protection, and of childhood as merely a preparatory stage for adulthood. Many efforts to address child poverty fail to see these conceptions as historically and culturally specific, and instead treat them as timeless and universal. This justifies the imposition of this framework on the poor, including through the violent disruption of families and communities through the dispossession of their children. Finally, this chapter offers brief comments on what an approach to child poverty that does not universalize the Western, Global North’s normative models of childhood and parenting would look like.
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- 1.
There are no uncontroversial terms for either the wealthier parts of the world, or for those areas more strongly influenced by the culture and institutions of western Europe, but Western and Global North are, at the moment, among the more common. Because the Global North can include wealthy nations outside the West, such as Japan, I will mostly reserve use of “Western” for discussions when the intellectual and cultural history is especially important, while “Global North” and “Northern” will be used primarily in the context of the contemporary makeup of institutions and the flow of resources and power.
- 2.
I am using “Western societies” and “Global North countries” as shorthand for elites within those societies. There are, of course, diverse conceptions of childhood and childrearing practices within these societies that often fall along class and race lines (see, for example, Lareau 2011). And, as we shall see, those who differ from neontocratic norms and standards within these societies, or who are unable to meet the demands of neontocratic childrearing, are subject to negative consequences.
- 3.
There is widespread disagreement about how to refer to the first peoples of the Americas; I have opted for “Aboriginal” here, following the use of the TRCC (2015). When referring specifically to Aboriginal Canadians, I will use “First Nations.”
- 4.
The residential school system existed prior to Canadian federation in 1867, and lasted throughout most of the country’s history; “the government’s partnership with the churches remained in place until 1969, and, although most of the schools had closed by the 1980s, the last federally supported residential schools remained in operation until the late 1990s.” In terms of size, “the [Canadian] federal government has estimated that at least 150,000 First Nation, Métis, and Inuit students passed through the system.” (TRCC, p. 3).
- 5.
The Sixties Scoop was the seizure by the Canadian governments of approximately 20,000 First Nations children for fostering or adoption by white families, (despite the name) lasting from the 1950s to the 1980s. Most children taken never returned to their communities. (Manitoba 1985; Sinclair 2007; TRCC 2015).
- 6.
As Weisner (2014) notes: “Co-sleeping or growing up in ‘crowded’ spaces by some Western standards may not lead to dependency or stress and can be associated with interdependence, and symbiotic relationships as a goal for well-being.” (p. 99).
- 7.
Briggs (2012) points out that there was no change in the availability of babies and children for adoption, as “every generation in the twentieth century faced a ‘baby famine’” (p. 6); instead, the racial and national composition of adoptees changed.
- 8.
Near the end of his essay, Friedrich addresses the counter-claim that there are few adoptable children by claiming that “it is easy to see there must be a huge gap between adoptable children and children in need of adoption” (p. 11), and that this gap is accounted for by a failure of cultures and institutions. Many countries that he claims have children in need of adoption lack “a cultural environment in which adoption is seen as an option, and sufficiently resourced institutions that identify and look after children in need of adoption” (p. 10), which it is the Global North’s job to remedy “whether we should relax the consent conditions in the Hague Convention, whether we should invest more resources into the bureaucracies tasked to handle adoption cases, whether we should promote the possibility of adoption in communities that do not usually consider it an option.” (p. 15).
- 9.
- 10.
Satz points out that removing children from the labor market could also drive up adults’ wages by shrinking the labor pool overall. This, however, is primarily applicable to societies in which wages, rather than say family farming, is the predominant source of income for families; moreover, there is no guarantee that such an increase would be enough to offset either the lost unpaid labor that children, often girls, provide through domestic work.
- 11.
One related problem is evident in Satz’s distinction between children and adults, in which she attributes too much agency to to the latter. The result is a confusing conclusion, such as morally condemning certain forms of labor when children perform them, but not when adults do. Satz argues that particularly harmful and exploitative work, such as sex work, dangerous industrial work, compulsory military service, or bonded labor, are unacceptable for children to engage in. But it remains unclear why, especially among the most dangerous and coercive jobs, it is morally acceptable to participate in systems in which adults perform this labor, either. Especially, as Satz also recognizes, those children who do perform such labor often fail to develop the very capacities for agency that she nevertheless attributes to adulthood (2010, pp. 158–9).
- 12.
While it is tempting to see Flanagan’s views as outside the mainstream, the first edition of hi book received the Canadian Political Science Association’s prize for the best book on Canadian government and politics. Flanagan, a political-science professor at the University of Calgary and advisor to former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996.
- 13.
Singer, in his more recent work (2015), is more open to political advocacy, though he remains skeptical that “whether policy advocacy offers better or worse value for money than direct aid programs.” (p. 164) He also does not include any discussion of our or major donors’ direct responsibility for or complicity in poverty.
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Hanes, D.W. (2019). Child Poverty, Impoverished Parenting, and Normative Childhood: Some Words of Caution. In: Brando, N., Schweiger, G. (eds) Philosophy and Child Poverty. Philosophy and Poverty, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22452-3_2
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