A bill was introduced in the US Senate that would prohibit social media usage for children under the age of 13. A nine-year-old was killed in a mass shooting. A Montana legislator was barred from the floor of the state house after she spoke against a bill that would prevent minors from receiving gender-affirming health care. Legislation that would loosen regulations on child labor had been passed in multiple states.
That is a sampling of items that were in the news during one week in the spring of 2023. There was nothing particularly unusual about that week’s news topics. Throughout the 2020s, children and issues affecting children have featured prominently in social and political discourse. In that regard, there is nothing particularly unusual about the 2020s, as Alison Gash and Daniel Tichenor compellingly argue in Democracy’s Child. “Children are a regular focal point of democratic politics,” they write, and controversies involving children are not only “waged in legislatures, courts, government agencies, and elections but also in schools, boardrooms, hospitals, churches, athletic fields, and bathrooms” (p. 14). Gash and Tichenor present a wealth of evidence in support of their conclusions, organized around the themes of control, leverage, and agency.
Governing children often requires delineating when and how young people should be controlled, protected, or granted autonomy. Indeed, there are a dizzying array of laws, policies, and court cases pertaining to children. To help navigate among them, Gash and Tichenor classify policies along two dimensions: whether a policy aims to control children or expand their autonomy and whether the policy advances the interests of children or of others. The resulting four categories include two that place controls on young people. On the one hand, paternalistic laws do so in furtherance of children’s best interests, such as regulating child labor and providing social welfare benefits to minors. On the other hand, the subjugation category includes policies that limit the interests of children while promoting others’ interests (e.g., ending a child’s formal education due to parental religious preferences and parental consent requirements for abortions). Similarly, practices that enhance children’s autonomy can be designed to further children’s interests (protecting student speech on school grounds) or can instead result in abandoning children while serving the goals of others (treating children as adults in the criminal justice system). This conceptual framework is one of the major contributions of Gash and Tichenor’s book. It helpfully illuminates differences across various policies, identifies which polices are best placed in the blurry boundaries between their categories, and allows scholars to trace historical changes in both our understanding of childhood and in who is thought to be best positioned to protect children (for instance, fathers or the state).
Beyond the realm of policies that focus on children, young people can be leveraged in political debates regarding policies that tangentially, if at all, pertain to them. Occasionally this has entailed adults mobilizing children to engage in political action, such as during the 1960s civil rights movement. Primarily, however, Gash and Tichenor argue that young people are leveraged as verbal or visual symbols to advance a cause. Take the case of Ryan White, the teenager who contracted AIDS via a blood transfusion and was prohibited from attending his high school due to fears of transmission. His personal story helped shift the public narrative about AIDS away from victim-blaming gay men and intravenous drug users. Conversely, an innocent children narrative has also been deployed in opposition to LGBTQ rights policies, with opponents arguing that same-sex marriage or same-sex couple adoption will expose children to LGBTQ recruitment efforts. Gash and Tichenor also provide multiple examples of leveraging children in the domain of immigration. Nativists have long attempted to “other” the children of undocumented immigrants and propose policies denying rights and services to these children. More recently, migrant children separated from their families were, by policy design, collateral for the Trump administration’s restrictive border policies.
Finally, Gash and Tichenor profile many examples of children’s political agency, each chosen to exemplify a particular aspect of youth political engagement. Some youth movements emerge from adult organizations in order to pursue different policy aims or tactics. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did this in the 1960s, just as Dreamer activists did so in 2010. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School students’ gun reform activism and Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes are examples of teenagers springing into action because of adult inaction regarding pressing issues. Throughout their discussion of agency, Gash and Tichenor remind us that young activists succeed in capturing public attention for their causes in part because they defy adult expectations about children’s dependency, limited abilities, and political apathy.
Democracy’s Child is an important addition to a discipline that has devoted little attention to children. Furthermore, compared to existing political science scholarship, this book is notable for the breadth of its focus and contributions. Gash and Tichenor engage scholarly debates in political philosophy, public policy formation, political socialization, participation, and intersectionality. Their book is packed with informative case studies, historical and contemporary, from a wide range of policy areas. They incorporate fictional characters and works of literature as illustrative examples, and Gash and Tichenor’s writing is engaging. These strengths will make the book appealing to a wide audience of scholars and students. Much of it is relevant for courses focused on public policy making, whereas the chapter on children’s political agency would enhance political participation and social movement courses. Given the thought-provoking material on childhood as a societal construct, as well as whether children should be considered full or partial democratic citizens, early chapters of this book would also be relevant for discussions regarding democratic theory, representation, and rights and liberties.
Gash and Tichenor’s book will be agenda-setting for research exploring children, governance, and democracy. Organizing relevant material into their three themes of public policy controlling children, adults leveraging children, and children as independent political actors will be a useful framework to guide research. Public policy scholars will undoubtedly identify many fruitful avenues to pursue within and across these topics, including analyses of our current political moment. Insights from Democracy’s Child should enrich socialization studies that explore the impact of laws, political discourse, and political engagement on adolescents and young adults.
The book also contributes to work that uses intersectional analyses. Gash and Tichenor identify many situations where childhood interacts with race, gender, and other identities to shape laws affecting our discourse surrounding children. Thoughtful intersectional approaches such as theirs will be necessary to analyze many current issues affecting young people, such as transgender policies, gun control, abortion, climate change, and parental involvement in their children’s education. At the same time, Gash and Tichenor’s book in its entirety presents a strong case for intersectional researchers to incorporate age more fully into their scholarship. Elevating childhood as an identity worth scholarly inquiry would be one indication that the discipline treats children seriously as democratic subjects, symbols, and actors.
