P is for Parents, P is for Politics

‘Gravity of Tenderness’ by The Fabler.

Researchers spend their time trying to deconstruct (themselves) before daring to hope they might add another brick in the wall. They seek to strike hard at the metal-and-steel structures of our institutions, so as to expose their rickety foundations. For the boldest, it is about hurling paving stones at our certainties. Then they must reinvent themselves as architects and masons, shore up their blueprints, and determine how to render them “politics in matter.”

The desk where I work at home sits in what might be a future child’s bedroom, and I can’t help thinking of those blocks children stack before letting them loudly crash down: the same tireless process of deconstructing, then building. As a researcher and a soon-to-be parent, I wonder how to pass on all these new houses, all these new foundations, to a small soul itself still under construction. Like so many museums or monuments to be visited, the home is also a construction, open to critique and debate, yet essential to transmission. More specifically, my partner and I situate our legal research within feminist, TWAIL, and critical approaches: should we keep these issues confined to our offices, which do not seem so neatly sealed off from the child’s bedroom after all? Would it not be a logical continuation of the inherent politicization of our homes and families to raise awareness of the patterns of domination we expose every day, while avoiding a slide into militant excess?

These questions led us, during our almost daily visits to bookshops, to linger over a certain type of children’s books: political books, so-called “progressive” books. In this reflection, I propose an analogy between these books and those that have emerged around issues of consent, to show that such works offer a first key for opening the door to a discussion of the politics of educating one’s child as a critical or feminist legal scholar, especially when it comes to children’s books.

Once Upon a Time, The Story of Consent

Since the 1990s, and with renewed momentum in the post-#MeToo world, books addressing consent and how to set boundaries have become increasingly common and widely discussed. In France, for example, where the issue is highly contentious and publications on the subject regularly make headlines, according to the CIVISE (Commission indépendante sur l’inceste et les violences sexuelles faites aux enfants), every three minutes one child is a victim of incest, rape, or sexual assault. In other words, in a class of thirty students, on average three have been, or are, victims of incest. And yet the subject remains a massive taboo, and institutional systems offer very little education on the matter.

Francophone adult literature was shaken in 2020 by the publication of “Le Consentement” by Vanessa Springora, and again in 2023 with “Triste Tigre” by Neige Sinno. In children’s literature, picture books adapted to different age groups have been published, notably “Le Loup”, written by Mai Lan Chapiron based on her personal story. At the end of the book, a workbook written by a clinical psychologist specializing in child protection offers concrete tools in cases of abuse, addressed both to parents and to child-care professionals.

The legal developments prompted by adult literature and by survivors’ voices have thus also found continuity in children’s literature. As for English-language children’s books, one can cite “Yes! No!: A First Conversation About Consent” by Megan Madison & Jessica Ralli, for ages two to five, developed by early childhood development experts. Other explicitly titled works include “We Ask Permission and We Are in Charge of Our Bodies” by Lydia Bowers, which aim to prevent sexual abuse while building a child’s autonomy with respect to their own body. These books therefore translate concrete legal norms on consent and sexual abuse into “child-level language.”

This form of education about norms seems essential and can of course take many different forms, but these educational tools have the advantage of being accessible to the greatest number. Moreover, they provide the initial keys for grounding a conversation that may feel more or less self-evident depending on the parent.

In the Not-so-Distant Realm of International Law, There Lived…

When it comes to international law and, above all, raising awareness of the historical and systemic oppression that characterizes our global patterns, authors of children’s books are producing politically engaged works focusing on voting rights, activism, and even capitalism. A must-read in this category is undoubtedly Innosanto Nagara, an author born in Indonesia who emigrated to the United States and writes the so-called “Books for Kids of the 99%”, a series that includes the bestseller “A is for Activist”, acclaimed in particular by Naomi Klein. In the same vein, there are books such as “V is for Voting” (2020) by Kate Farrell or, for high schoolers, “You Call This Democracy?: How to Fix Our Government and Deliver Power to the People” (2020) by Elizabeth Rusch. Current events are also not lost on children’s authors such as Laura Korzon, who published “Baby’s First Book of Banned Books” (2023), containing a summary of each of the titles banned from libraries under the Trump administration. Once again, a recent policy controversy is echoed in children’s literature, in a simple way that lays the first interesting building blocks for gradually constructing a discussion on these topics. Each child also has their own personal path to awareness, which may be influenced by their social situation, but also by music, films, or other forms of art. In this sense, some researchers have (quasi) praised Disney’s efforts in its animated film “Encanto” to represent Colombian culture faithfully and as an authentic “celebration” rather than “appropriation.”

All Children? Only Books?

These tools are, first and foremost, intended for children who start from a position of privilege or who come from the Western world. Still, why not include these books in their stack of “life resources”? Children will in any event be confronted with mainstream, heteronormative, and capitalist discourse through school, the media made available to them, advertising in the street, and their interactions with other children. Fairy tales, Disney films, cartoons, comic books: even when carefully selected, most still carry these classic narratives. Exposing a child to other horizons can happen through these books, which address serious themes while remaining adapted to a child’s level.

While some will cry indoctrination, these books in fact position themselves on the side of de-indoctrination from the messages conveyed by traditional media and narratives to which children will inevitably be exposed. Marginalized voices and the impact of our systems upon them should stand at the center not only of our research as thinkers of international law, but also of our role as parents responsible for our children’s education. Teaching a child their rights, and the law, is to give them tools for thought and for potential revolt against injustice that might affect them, or others. Innocence is not synonymous with ignorance, and glossing over systemic forms of oppression while letting mainstream media (mis)shape their critical thinking or divert them from certain realities does not make them “more childlike”, but rather more likely to become unwitting accomplices.

The first form of socialization is affective, made up of projections that begin even before birth, as Dorothée Dussy reminds us. These affects then reinforce the “bottom-up” effect that complements the “top-down” one described by Pierre Bourdieu, whereby institutional violence filters back onto families. Each person’s experience thus also rises from below, and socialization within the family is an essential element for understanding the patterns of domination that persist throughout life.

A New Alphabet

These books offer an alphabet book that puts words to different situations of oppression. The very same words that make up the alphabet of research and struggle for scholars, particularly within feminist and TWAIL traditions: capitalism, imperialism, oppression, occupation, and… commitment to change. Children’s literature becomes a site for the transmission of law, and for claims to decolonize and transform it, in a concrete way through words tied to diverse legal situations that must be brought to light. It can serve as the keystone of a conversation, an opportunity for forming initial attachments to a value system and to “multiple and open consciousnesses”. Legal norms, along with their limits and consequences, become literary experiences that children can grasp.

Of course, openness to different perspectives and awareness of patterns of domination are not limited to books explicitly “dedicated” to these themes. After all, “A Bear Called Paddington” (1958) is often read as a pro-immigration story, inviting openness to the Other regardless of origin, migratory status, or particularly luxuriant body hair beneath a blue coat… Such awareness can also develop through reading books by authors with diverse backgrounds, telling stories that fall outside traditional frameworks and are set in places other than the Global North or its hegemonic imaginaries. Far from the idea of turning ourselves into parents modeled after the father in “Captain Fantastic”, it is possible to introduce stories with intention and care, so that these developing souls encounter different horizons from the very beginning of their social and literary lives.

Happy Ending?

Passing things on through deliberate, conscious speech and carefully chosen words is part of an ethics of care. The work and role of parents as transmitters must be valued and supported, and these books offer ways of opening certain pages of family history that parents will then go on to write together with their children. Raising awareness and naming things is not about imposing an ideology, but about accompanying the development of beings capable not only of perceiving injustice, but also of denouncing it.

Revealing the fractures of the system in a child-appropriate way, while accompanying the child, is not over-politicizing them. Since the child is already politicized simply by belonging to a society traversed by global, local, and private forms of domination, it is instead a way of refusing the alternative of silence, which is itself a form of transmission (or betrayal?). This informal and private form of legal pedagogy offered by these books must of course be adapted to the child, to their age and their language, just as this applies to almost everything in education.

Western parenting is increasingly shaped by alternative movements that, in the best of cases, seek to revalorize, and in the worst, appropriate without acknowledgment of origin, practices such as Indigenous or more “natural” ones (for example, babywearing or upright birthing rooms). In this context, it is important not to erase voices that remain oppressed and minimized, even as their practices increasingly inspire ours. Dismantling structures of power can begin early, and literature can serve as a compass for such understanding. To remain silent about oppression is a new form of violence, and liberation from oppression cannot occur without first illuminating the positions of servitude that are structurally maintained within our societies.