Birmingham Children’s Crusade, 1963
Adultism – ever heard of it? I hadn’t until a few years ago, when I attended a program by the brilliant facilitator, coach and trainer, Nanci Luna Jimenez of The Luna Jimenez Institute for Social Transformation.
Nanci is a distinctive voice on transformational social justice for individuals and organizations. Over three days of training I got to confront my own biases on racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and adultism.
Now I know about the first two, racism and sexism, from personal and historical experience. Ableism and homophobia I am aware of, although I’m not as knowledgeable as I should be and undoubtedly have prejudices on the subjects I have not addressed.
But I never even considered adultism a thing. Even though, on a basic level, it is one that every adult practices. Yes, every adult. After all, isn’t it perfectly acceptable to tell children what to do, as well as how and when to do it?
Every child has heard, and every adult has said things like, “Do as I say, don’t talk back, I’m the adult, I pay the bills here, you live in my house, I’m not your playmate, I brought you into this world and I can take you out, I know what’s good for you, I know better than you, you’re too young to (fill in the blank), you’ll understand when you’re older, when you get a job you can do what you want, it’s my way or the highway, and if you don’t like it you can leave.”
This is not about the need to protect our children as we raise them, to provide guidance or set boundaries for them as they develop.
This is about how we thwart their creative impulses, deny their intuitive knowledge, stifle their self-expression, stop them because of our own fears, and demand their conformity in all things just because we are older than they.
Historical and current events provide numerous examples of young people with more vision and courage than adults:
Claudette Colvin – when as a 15-year old in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, she refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a crowded segregated bus, was dragged off and arrested, nine months before Rosa Parks did so.
The Birmingham Children’s Crusade – when more than 1,000 children skipped school to march in Birmingham in 1963, facing police dogs, fire hoses, arrest and jail, helping to turn the tide of the Civil Rights movement.
The Soweto Uprising – when after the introduction of Afrikaans as the official language of instruction in South African schools, 20,000 students took to the streets in protest. Many were beaten, shot and killed.
Malala Yousafzai – who at the age of 12, began speaking out against the Taliban policy of denying education for girls in Pakistan. She was shot in the face on her school bus by a masked gunman. At 17, she became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Never Again MSD – the students of Marjory Stone Douglass H.S. in Parkland FL, who survived a deadly mass shooting in 2018, and organized the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. for greater gun control, with 880 similar events taking place nationally on the same day.
Greta Thunberg – who in the 9th grade, began skipping school to protest outside the Swedish parliament to address climate change. At age 17, rather than fly, she sailed across the Atlantic to address the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit.
Claudette Colvin, 1955 (left) / Soweto Uprising, 1976 (Right)
In the book The Prophet, poet Khalil Gibran writes On Children:
“…They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
I’ve only just begun to explore the link between colonialism and adultism as the training ground for all other oppressions. It’s a whole new area of discover I must pursue in order to grow as an activist in my own life.
Many in our country are now examining the impact of systemic racism and our participation and complicity in it. Let us also remember what we owe those who come after us and those yet to be born as they face the world we are leaving them.
