The Children Are Not Okay

We use our children to justify any political action while doing nothing to help them.

In March 2020, both my children began sleeping in my bed. My daughter would begin the night in her room. But eventually, she would wake up in the middle of the night and come into my bed. Half awake, I’d hear her tell me about the dream that had upset her. Something was chasing her, a monster made of mud. A beast made of bugs. She was surrounded by butterflies but they were scary and she didn’t know why. The sky was filled with a thousand hot air balloons and they made her so afraid. In her 9-year-old mind, the ordinary had become horrific.

My son, 5 at the time, didn’t even pretend to sleep in his own room. He flat-out refused to sleep anywhere but my bed. He cried when I even made the suggestion. He told me he was too afraid to be alone.

I’d roll over and make room for both of them. I’d bought a king-sized bed in 2019 and it was just them and me. So there was room. But the bed was filled with limbs and very little sleep.

I was exhausted. I was working all the time. I was desperate and I told my therapist this in a video session. “They’re children,” she said. “They need comfort. Let them stay for now.”

Her own children, who were much older than mine, had returned to her bed seeking comfort. And she told me she always made room.

American children are not okay. Sexual violence against teen girls is on the rise, while their mental well-being has plunged. There are new reports of children being exploited for labor and dying while working factory jobs. Many children who went to school before the shutdown haven’t returned and remain unaccounted for.

Red states are taking up bills that would make it easier for children to get jobs. They are banning books from classrooms and making it harder for trans kids to receive gender-affirming care or to compete in sports that align with their gender identity. Groups like Moms for Liberty claim they are fighting to protect children but only succeed in banning books about Black and LGBTQ people and making it harder to be a queer kid in America. Reproductive rights are under attack and lawmakers say they are doing it to save the babies. But without access to safe, legal abortion, women who are victims of domestic violence or who are poor will be forced to have children they cannot protect. A similar burden is falling on teen girls.

Meanwhile, the childcare tax credit has ended and child hunger is on the rise. And an average of seven children die each day from gun violence. 

Americans use our children to justify any political action while doing nothing to help them.

For decades, politicians and pundits have ginned up fears over children’s safety to wage war against the imagined threat of the moment: rock and roll, movies, video games, TikTok. Child safety was used to justify the Comstock laws; now it’s used as an excuse for book bans. Her sentencing of child sex offenders was used as a reason to cast doubt on Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown during her confirmation hearings. (All accusations were spurious, of course.) As historian Gillian Frank explained to me in an interview last year, “We saw this in the anti-busing movements and the anti-integration movements. We saw this in the anti-abortion movements of the past. We saw this in … the anti-pornography movements of the late ’50s, early ’60s [and] in Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center”

There has never been an easy time to be a child in America.

In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, historian Steven Minsk observes, “There has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, at least not for most children. Childhood has never been insulated from the pressures and the demands of the surrounding society, and each generation of children has had to wrestle with the social, political, and economic restraints of its own historical period.”

Minsk details how our concept of childhood is a particularly modern one, invented during the Enlightenment, which brought new ideas about individuality and personhood. Those ideas changed perceptions of children. That, combined with advances in medical technology, meant that there were simply more children. Concurrently, industrialization brought families out of the farms and into the cities, where children’s labor meant long, brutal hours in factories. Some historians argue that children working on farms meant self-sufficiency and independence, while others assert that it was still dangerous and abusive and lonely. But the plight of children in factories, combined with the rise of the middle class — and with it, the bored housewife who needed a cause — meant that Britain and America began passing child labor laws. 

It’s interesting to read about protests against those laws. No child should be forced to crawl through tunnels in a coal mine. But hungry families often had little choice. Laws protecting kids as separate beings from their parents were seen as an attack on those families. 

Separating the child from the parent has always been a fraught enterprise. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Guardian about children who died at the hands of abusive parents who’d used lax homeschooling laws to hide them from mandatory reporters. The stories pitted concerned teachers and social workers against parents’-rights groups who believe they should be able to do whatever they want with their children. Bad actors are seen as an individual problem.

We want to believe that most parents are good. Most parents want the best for their children. But at least 1 in 7 children is a victim of abuse, and most of that violence happens in the home. When my kids were in preschool they learned about “stranger danger,” but never how to protect themselves from the people most likely to hurt them — a friend, a relative, a pastor.

The biggest lie parents tell themselves is that the danger is on the outside. The truth is that most danger comes from inside the home.

Skinamarink, an independent horror film that came out in 2022, depicts the fear and danger of a home where children are in peril. Doors and windows disappear. The children cannot escape. The house, it seems, is devouring the children. I had to turn it off. It’s an abuse story — children unable to leave the very place people assume they should be safest.

History isn’t linear. The modern struggles of parents like Moms for Liberty to raise ideologically pure children is reminiscent of the Puritans’ strict religious and moral education. An ideology is the most brutal on its deathbed. And conservative groups understand that in order to survive they have to control the future. 

But trying to protect children from the evils of the world does not work. All those children raised in the religious right of the 1980s and ‘90s are less religious than almost any generation in American history.

Minsk points out that, very often, Puritan children kidnapped by Native American tribes would refuse to return. He wonders whether the comparative freedom and the lack of punitive religious education were a motivator. He quotes a captive who noted that while Native American children had chores and tasks, there was very little corporal punishment and children were allowed to play and do their jobs in a leisurely manner. Meanwhile, Native children taken by settlers seemed always to want to return home.

Whenever the image of the child is invoked in political conversations, it’s important to pay attention to which child is the one allegedly at risk. It’s so rarely the trans kid denied the chance to play sports or the gender-affirming care that reduces the risk of depression and self-harm. It’s so rarely the Black boy perceived and shot by the police who is allowed the assumption of youthful innocence. It’s not the migrant child cleaning the floor of the slaughterhouse who is the focus of moral panic and outrage.

The pandemic has been brutal on our children. Brutal in ways we have yet to discover. And I know of no other way of getting through this than making room, giving all children a soft place to rest.

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Men Yell at Me is an independent newsletter written by Lyz Lenz, an author and journalist living in Iowa. And is edited by Serena Golden. Subscribe for weekly essays, opinions, and original journalism. Paid subscriptions support this newsletter and allow it to continue.