Madeline Lane-McKinley’s Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy rests on the premise that “we live in a world that is profoundly against children.” It’s an argument borne out by the litany of horrors that children are suffering around the globe, which Solidarity with Children evokes in its opening pages: the massacre of children in Gaza by the Israeli military, police shootings of children and mass school shootings in the United States, the separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, children in the Democratic Republic of Congo being forced to work with bare hands in cobalt mines. “Roughly one billion children worldwide,” Lane-McKinley, a feminist-Marxist cultural scholar and critic, writes, “experience physical, sexual, or emotional violence each year.” Later, she reports that “seventy-seven percent of substantiated child abuse cases in the U.S. involve a parent, where the leading cause of death for children is homicide, and where more than seven hundred children die each year due to abuse or maltreatment from one or more parents or caregivers.” Bolstering her theory that the adult domination of children inherent in the capitalist family structure must be eradicated, Lane-McKinley argues that “it is precisely as an ideal that the private family hides these miseries from public view.”
At its heart, Solidarity with Children challenges the status quo authority of adults and demands that we respect children’s agency, thoughts, opinions, and desires. The book forms “a call for solidarity, which demands a thorough dismantling of the premise of adult power in these logics of protecting, saving, and including children, replacing them with more rigorous forms of political collaboration and comradeship,” Lane-McKinley writes. “It is a call that asks for nothing short of remaking the world.”
But while the examples and statistics she cites in her introduction suggest a complex set of global emergencies for children’s safety and well-being — and while Solidarity with Children asks readers to think radically — Lane-McKinley is careful to frame her intervention not as a manifesto or a comprehensive treatise but as an essay, which she defines as “something like ‘a little attempt.’” Solidarity with Children taps out at just over 150 pages and is structured around three main sections that each tackle what the author calls “different ways of thinking about children that naturalize and legitimate their domination by adults”: the history of childhood as an idea and ideal, the institution of motherhood and the problems of the private family, and the ways that schools have subjugated children.
As the essay meanders through these sections, Lane-McKinley mostly leaves behind the real-world horrors of her introduction, preferring instead to engage at length with examples from literature (J. M. Barrie’s depictions of childhood in his Peter Pan works, Oscar Wilde’s visions of adolescence in The Picture of Dorian Gray), film (Zéro de conduit, If…, and Bambule, which offer imagined student uprisings), Marxist theory (Engels, Wages for Housework), and her own experience parenting her now-teenage child. A representative passage marries a close reading of Barrie with French philosophy: “Neverland summons what is desired of childhood through the dream of an island — that which, whether in joy or fear, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, ‘dreams of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone,’ while it is likewise ‘dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.’” The distance can feel wide between Lane-McKinley’s cultural and philosophical musings and the plight of children in cobalt mines.
Solidarity with Children is at its most concrete — and at its best — when Lane-McKinley reflects on co-parenting her own child, Z, now a teenager. She writes about how her family adjusted to life during Covid-19, coming to “shared agreements about public masking and potential exposure.” She acknowledges that “my partner and I struggled to put the idea of collective decision-making into practice, and to weigh the value of shared decisions against the desire for our child to feel cared for, and loved, under the apocalyptic conditions we’d brought them into.” Toward the end of the essay, Lane-McKinley describes an experiment that approached child care “as something more like a protest camp: organized by adults and children together, taking seriously the politics of play, care, education, and collaboration.” For five summers at a lefty summer camp that included parents and children, she and Z developed activities and adventures that centered kids’ choices and brought “forth a political life that Z and I have nurtured together since, in solidarity.”
Lane-McKinley does not specifically identify as a family abolitionist in Solidarity with Children — she writes that the language of family abolition, like demands for “full surrogacy,” can “sound scary” to children. Yet her argument for child liberation rests on the utopian idea of dismantling the relationship between parent and child as it exists in capitalist society. “If there is a history of childhood at all, it is a history of a property relation, of the idea that children can be owned,” Lane-McKinley writes. By this, she appears to mean that by having legal custody of a child, a parent controls much of that child’s life without interference from outside the family unit, circumscribing their freedom and agency. Her essay is explicitly in conversation with two recent major works in this utopian feminist tradition — Sophie Lewis’ 2022 Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (which shares many points with Lewis’ best-known book, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation), and M. E. O’Brien’s 2023 Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. These books invite readers to imagine a world where the responsibility for care is spread among free communities, and where children are no longer subjugated by adults.
For Lewis, family “is the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society,” a situation that creates “property rights” for parents over children “but also quasi-exclusive accountability for a child’s life” — a situation that she argues is bad for children and parents both. Her vision is for “a world in which all people are cared for by many by default,” a post-family world in which it is not biology or law but comradeship that binds us. Lane-McKinley similarly bemoans that “so long as there is private property, childhood must be defined and limited by it, and we are left to speculate on what else childhood could be.”
Like Lewis, O’Brien argues for collectivizing care and moving beyond the limits of the family, writing that “family abolition is a commitment to making the care necessary for human flourishing freely available throughout society.” But O’Brien alone engages substantively with the American institution most responsible for removing children from families in our distinctly nonutopian present: child protective services (CPS) and the larger family policing system, commonly called the child-welfare system. O’Brien correctly links how the “family ideal” is weaponized against parents and children alike, pointing out that “poor, brown, and Black families are invaded, surveilled, and disciplined. When these families fail to measure up to a standard rooted in property ownership and whiteness, welfare workers will separate children and parents, incarcerate, and punish.”
The modern American system of surveilling and punishing parents has its roots in a moral panic.
Lane-McKinley’s book largely overlooks such concerns. While analysis of cultural products like novels and films can provide powerful reflections of social attitudes, Solidarity with Children suffers from a mismatch between its intended project and its approach. Lane-McKinley wants to think through how we might “imagine a political movement that’s not ‘for the children’ but actually with children, and for our future” and “make this imaginable not just in the abstract but in our everyday lives.” But real, everyday life is insufficiently mapped in this essay — a hazard of the utopian genre. When Solidarity with Children does engage with historical and contemporary examples of children’s rights abuses, they tend to get short shrift in a few paragraphs that explain atrocities committed in order to demonstrate how adult domination is bad for children. It’s another exercise in “imagining otherwise” that falls short on material analysis. That’s a problem because it is difficult to build a clear vision of a better, more just world for children and adults alike — and to imagine how we might create that world inch by inch in our everyday lives, as Lane-McKinley wants us to do — without a concrete understanding of the urgent issues on the ground and, importantly, how child liberation might ameliorate them.
A form of child abuse Solidarity with Children fails to substantively engage with is, in fact, state surveillance and the separation of families. Child separation is an everyday occurrence in the U.S., and its causes and effects stem from tragedies no less atrocious than the events that Lane-McKinley enumerates. As I read the book, I kept thinking about a talk I had seen last February at a conference at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, where I live, about the family policing system. The talk was by April Lee, a Black mother of three from Philadelphia, whose children were taken away by CPS in 2012 after she became addicted to opiates and were separated into different foster homes. Lee’s addiction had followed a traumatizing assault. “The only ‘help’ I was offered was to remove my children until I learned not to feel the gravity of my pain,” Lee writes in “Lies My Child Welfare System Has Told Me,” an essay in Family Court Review.
Lee fought for five years to reunite with all of her children, and once they were finally home, she needed to “reintroduce them to each other and to their family.” Through her work as a peer advocate and later as director of client voice at Community Legal Services Philadelphia, which provides free legal representation and social services for parents with CPS cases, Lee learned how common her experience of family separation was. “Children being taken because a parent can’t afford child care, or for a lack of food…I have sat in case meetings and heard firsthand about what everyone thinks is needed without asking a person, ‘what do you need?’”
The conference I attended marked the debut of a new nonprofit advocacy group, Philly Voice for Change, which Lee co-founded with lawyer Yalonda Houston. The organization seeks to empower and assist people affected by the family policing system, which comprises CPS agencies, family courts, and foster care. Lee said that she was pushed to start her own organization because there are not enough impacted parents at decision-making tables in Philadelphia, a city that separates families at a rate exceeding the national average. As is the case nationwide, Black children in Philly are disproportionately placed in foster care, frequently for findings of “neglect” that intersect with poverty. (Native and LGBTQ+ children are also overrepresented in foster care in the United States.) Children often face more danger in foster care than at home — a recent investigation found that the nonprofits that run foster care in Philadelphia have been sued nearly 70 times for “allegedly allowing kids in their care to be burned, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, in 14 cases, killed.” The conference responded to this state of affairs with discussions of how to build community power to counteract the civil legal system and support families in getting what they need to stay together.
The movement to abolish family policing — led predominantly by minoritized and marginalized women and families — offers a vision of communalizing care and solidarity between adults and children that dovetails with what Lane-McKinley is arguing for in Solidarity with Children. Rather than a mandatory reporting system, family policing abolition argues for a mandatory supporting system, where a robust social safety net provides universal basic income and guaranteed housing, universal medical care and child care, and mutual aid and peer networks that create a village of care that respects the needs and desires of children. Yet the two movements seem at odds: one primarily concerned with dangers to children from outside of the family and the other concerned with the dangers of adult domination and abuse that emanate from within.
CPS caseworkers frequently construe conditions of poverty as neglectful.
As someone who has studied the history of family policing in America, I’ve noticed a strange, unintentional affinity between family abolitionist arguments, which frequently cast the family as a locus of violence, and arguments that historically have shaped family policing strategies. The modern American system of surveilling and punishing parents has its roots in a moral panic spurred by investigations into physical child abuse and right-wing backlash to antipoverty programs.
At the center of the panic was a University of Colorado pediatrician’s article in a 1962 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that proposed a new diagnosis, “the battered-child syndrome,” for any child exhibiting an injury — ranging from bone fractures and bruises to sudden death — that didn’t seem to match up with the explanation provided by their guardian. The article proposed that X-rays and clinical experience could allow physicians to deduce when a child was being physically abused by their parents or caregivers: “To the informed physician, the bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell.” The article asserted that perpetrators of physical child abuse were typically “psychopathic or sociopathic characters” who exhibit “alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, unstable marriages, and minor criminal activities.”
The news media quickly jumped on the battered-child syndrome bandwagon, hyping a silent epidemic of grievous physical child abuse perpetrated by pathological parents. While there have always been tragic cases of children abused in the home, there was no reliable evidence that such abuse was a problem that was hiding in plain sight or that it was growing. Yet by 1970, the public bought into an estimate based on a public opinion survey that as many as 4 million American children were being physically abused by their parents per year — a distortion of the scale of the problem that did not help the children who were really suffering. (The child abuse researcher responsible for publishing the estimate would later call it “meaningless.”) In 1981, after the federal government began actually studying the issue, it found that a significant but much smaller number of American children — 212,400 — were subjected to maltreatment, comprising both physical abuse and neglect, in a year.
Congress reacted in 1974 with the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which governs federal funding of states’ family policing systems. Though the panic had begun with fears of parents physically abusing children, CAPTA blurred the lines between abuse and neglect, defining child maltreatment as “the physical or mental injury, sexual abuse, negligent treatment, or maltreatment of a child under the age of eighteen by a person who is responsible for the child’s welfare under circumstances which indicate that the child’s health or welfare is harmed or threatened thereby.” While children suffer real harm from neglect, CPS caseworkers frequently construe conditions of poverty as neglectful, and punish parents instead of providing needed material aid to keep children safe at home. In order to qualify for federal funding of “programs and projects designed to prevent, identify, and treat child abuse and neglect,” states had to set laws that reflected this vague and broad definition of child maltreatment. These laws also required the mandatory reporting of suspected maltreatment by physicians and other professionals working with families.
Congress passed CAPTA during the presidency of Richard Nixon. He had just vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act — which would have created federally subsidized universal day care — and disliked the antipoverty programs of his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Research had already established that poverty is correlated with increased incidence of child abuse because the constant struggle to meet material needs increases stress, family tensions, and overwhelm. Yet CAPTA’s primary sponsor, Democrat Walter Mondale, would have known that casting child maltreatment as a poverty problem would jeopardize the legislation. Instead, he argued that “you may go into some of the finest communities from an economic standpoint and find child abuse as you would in the ghettos of this country.” The law thus cemented an understanding that child maltreatment is associated with individual parental pathology rather than faults at the societal level.
CAPTA created an apparatus for the rampant surveillance and reporting of poor families — disproportionately families of color — as well as the separation of families to “treat” child maltreatment. Researchers estimate that one in three children will be subject to a CPS investigation, an intrusive and traumatic ordeal, before reaching age 18. For Black children, that statistic is more than one in two. Increased reporting of suspected maltreatment by mandated reporters and others has not increased child safety; only about 7 percent of reports to hotlines end up being substantiated, and neglect cases make up the vast majority. Meanwhile, fear of being reported to CPS — and of having one’s family broken up by the state — keeps vulnerable mothers, who bear the brunt of surveillance, from seeking needed assistance from medical professionals, social workers, teachers, and therapists. Victims of intimate partner violence, for instance, often avoid reporting their abuse because doing so might trigger a CPS investigation and the removal of their children. In 2024, 13 percent of children who entered foster care had domestic violence listed as a reason for removal. Neglect was associated with 75 percent of cases, while physical abuse only comprised 17 percent. State laws define neglect in varying ways, but it typically involves the failure of a parent or caregiver to provide necessary food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision for a child, creating a situation in which the child’s health, safety, and well-being are at risk.
This history can help us understand why family policing abolitionists and family abolitionists like Lane-McKinley sometimes sound like they’re talking past each other. In the decades since the passage of CAPTA, poor and minoritized people have fought for family preservation and reunification — and for a social safety net and community support that helps children thrive. Family policing abolitionists acknowledge that extreme cases of abuse do exist within families, but they argue that the solution to helping children in these circumstances is building up systems of support that would enable community care in times of crisis. Yet family abolitionists sometimes fail to engage with the all-too-real concerns of state surveillance and separation that animate vulnerable women fighting to keep their families intact.
The beauty of family abolitionist work lies in its utopianism.
Lane-McKinley, for example, doesn’t acknowledge that, as a middle-class white woman, her parenting choices and liberty to engage in collaborative decision-making with her child are unlikely to come under the scrutiny of CPS. And by consistently portraying parents as aggressors against children, Lane-McKinley fails to display solidarity with families whose freedom is curtailed by the state, and she betrays a lack of understanding about how poverty and shredded social safety nets drive abuse and how the family policing system punishes parents and children alike for societal failures. The statistics she cites about child maltreatment and fatalities in the United States, for instance, are incorrect or misleadingly framed. While Lane-McKinley claims homicide is the top cause of death for children, CDC data from 2023 (the most recent year for which there is data) indicates that the leading cause of mortality in the U.S. for children ages 0 to 19 was, in fact, accidents. Further, her source on child fatalities — the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s report Child Maltreatment 2023 — makes clear that neglect causes nearly twice as many child deaths as physical abuse. One could argue that these children are victims of a country that lacks a functioning social safety net.
Is there a way to bring together family abolitionist thinking and activism against family policing? The answer matters because it should help shape how the left addresses the many, many problems facing children. The beauty of family abolitionist work lies in its utopianism, but work like Lane-McKinley’s might benefit from being more seriously grounded in the conditions of today’s most vulnerable children.
Here in Philadelphia, I find hope in cross-movement organizing, particularly in the work of Philly Childcare Collective, a group that provides free and donation-based child care at liberation movement meetings and events. Philly Childcare Collective operates under the beliefs that “child care is a political act,” “whole communities are needed to care for children,” and “children are powerful and creative autonomous beings” — beliefs that overlap with the ideals of Solidarity with Children. Founded by queer and trans BIPOC anarchists, the group joined with Philly Voice for Change and other organizations in June at a vigil to mark the first annual Stolen Children’s Month, which demands the “abolition of all systems that steal children and separate families, including the family policing, adoption, and foster industries; the ICE detention and deportation machine; and the prison-industrial complex.” At the vigil, affected families — including children — shared their grief for children taken by Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services. It was a reminder that the systems that instrumentalize children’s welfare devalue their families and, in doing so, harm children themselves.
Kristen Martin is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.