Children deserve a voice in shaping policies
“I love naps but I stay woke!” The adorable toddler holding this sign went viral in the Women’s March of 2017, inspiring parents all over to create similar signs and attend marches with their little ones. Children, after all, are often the most compelling reasons for us to fight for a better future. Seeing them show up in their own bodies and raising their voices is powerful and poignant.
Children have historically been a part of protests and social change. Notably, the civil rights movement from the 1950s included schoolchildren who insisted their reality match the laws of racial integration. In our current times, children have continued to show up alongside adults — from the women’s marches to Black Lives Matter to climate change walkouts.
Protests are a disruption of society — that’s the purpose of a protest, to interrupt the regular functions of life to draw attention to a cause. Because of this, protests are inherently rife with tension, public action and potential danger. Experienced activists receive training to navigate a protest in order to make protesting as safe as possible and also effective in accomplishing their goals.
Are children sophisticated enough to understand the nuances of a particular cause to decide for themselves their participation? Are they old enough to know the dangers and implement safe practices? Should we, as a society, include children in these public confrontations? These are some of the questions parents are asking themselves, and not just parents, but all caretakers and adults who care for the well-being of children.
I do not think we live in a time and place where sheltering children from
protest makes sense.
This Saturday, Houston Women’s March is organizing to protest troubling current events in Texas, including Senate Bill 8 limiting women’s reproductive freedoms. Girls and young women are showing up to advocate for their own bodies. There’s a sense of enfranchisement as conscientious families realize they can channel their voice and energy into momentum for change, together as families — including children. But are the little girls and young women putting their own bodies at risk by going to protests even as they advocate for their bodily autonomy? Parents are wrestling with these dual tensions, on this issue as well as many others.
The question of protesting with children, like many questions throughout the pandemic, involves a risk assessment. To answer it, we can ask ourselves:
How old are the kids?
What kinds of temperaments do they have?
How risky will the protest be? What are the chances of violence erupting? What percentage of the people are vaccinated or will be masked?
What kinds of risks do you normally tolerate for yourself ? For your kids?
Do they understand what the protest is for? Why is it important to you? To them?
Are they old enough to consent? Are they cognitively developed enough to give thoughtful consent, with thorough knowledge of the decision-making factors, including nuanced power dynamics — between authority and youth, parents and children, governors and governed?
What are the benefits of bringing them? Do they outweigh the risks?
Whether it’s responsible to bring the kids to protest will be different for every family and every cause, but what is responsible is to at least be asking these questions.
Should children be allowed at protests? Reasonable parents may debate this question and choose for themselves. However, what should not be debatable is our children’s right to understand the realities of the world in which they live. Protesting, after all, is only one of many strategies we, as conscious citizens in a democracy, shape the society we want to live in. To exclude children from conscious citizenship is to deny them their human rights — and children are human, despite the many ways social structures are set up diminish the potential impact of their contributions.
As parents and caretakers, we have a responsibility to develop their framework for understanding how they are situated in their communities and how the health of a community impacts them. Regardless of whether a parent will bring their children to Saturday’s march in Houston, the children deserve access to information about how their bodily autonomy is threatened, and they deserve the choice to participate in demanding better policies. Whether or not we give them the containers for understanding it, they already experience the impacts of policy decisions. And as long as they experience the impact, they have the right to know the process by which we make change so that they, along with the rest of us, can live life worthy of their humanity.
Wang Brandt is the author of the children's book, “You Are Revolutionary!” and “Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy, and Kindness.” She will be reading from her new children’s book Oct. 11 at HISD Parker Elementary.