We Despise Children.
"Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. Honor thy father and mother which is the first commandment with promise that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth" Ephesians 6:1-3
On its surface, this seems like a promise. An act of love, an offering of stability, and a gift of longevity. It’s the kind of thing you read over and over again to inspire comfort… right? The man that preached with this text did not let me revel in the comfort of these words.
“This is a conditional promise!” He bellowed.
“Obey your parents or die”
I was not even a teenager when this threat was leveled against me and the rest of my school on a Sunday morning. Laro kutu de ni o. Before the sun had completed its ascent into the sky, this preacher had already threatened a room full of children with death because he wanted us to obey without question. To be stripped of will, bereft of independence, but most of all, he wanted to stoke fear.
Hello, my name is Irawooluwatan and I am The Tired Insomniack. Tonight, the thing that causes me sleeplessness is the idea that as a society we despise children.
I know its bold of me to assume that we carry what is possibly the greatest negative emotion towards arguably the most undeserving demographic, but whether you clicked on this to disagree, agree, find out why I think this, or even if you landed here by chance (or due to the aggressive marketing of my friends), let's talk about how as a collective we are very dishonest about the way we feel towards the youngest of us.
As this is a very loaded statement, I will be referencing Christian scripture, folklore and nursery rhymes, weird things I found on the internet, and a host of other things to prove that I did not pull this idea out of thin air. Well, I kind of did, but it is not unfounded.
I grew up in church, I will not mention any denomination in particular but they were all quite conservative. If there was one thing I got from this upbringing, it's that I needed to be very scared, not just the proverbial “Fear of God” that was hammered into me from inception, but I needed to have the kind of fear that makes one tremble in their skin. The kind that keeps you awake at night because every time you close your eyes, you can see the images of fire and brimstone, and if you were unfortunate enough to have read one of those “I died and went to heaven and hell” ‘testimonies’ your favorite cartoon characters would likely be the ones doing the torturing. The nightmares that I jerked awake from drenched in sweat were full of images of hell, the devil, and missing the rapture. Every Sunday, I and the rest of my school would be scared straight as the Reverend would preach. Whenever we saw the man clad in a tan suit and oversized tie (how can a tie be oversized on a grown adult man?), we knew that we would be told tales of how "the end times were near!" and that we'd rot in the fiery pits of the abyss if we did not surrender our souls to Christ. The vivid images of endless pain and turmoil would be painted so often that even as I sit here writing, I can hear the voice of the man reverberate in my ears. When you are bereft of love and care fear is the next tool of instruction and the preachers wielded it well.
I promised to reference scripture, and don't worry, I will not be taking it out of context. I will also not start with Abraham and how he would have sacrificed Isaac. I might be basic, but I’m not that basic. Instead, I will start with David the son of Jesse, the man after God’s own heart, the king who plotted and completed the murder of Uriah after he raped Bathsheba. I want to pause here for a bit and talk about this. The power imbalance in that relationship left no room for consent. It amuses me that people can think Bathsheba had agency in the situation. A man, sorry no, A KING who could have your husband killed just so he could fuck you on the regular is not someone you say no to and still expect to have your head remain affixed to your shoulders. Bathsheba had no choice, just options; be raped or die, and when death is the alternative the picking has been done for you. Now, back to the matter at hand, David. At this point Uriah is dead, and Bathsheba is pregnant by David. The prophet Nathan goes to David and tells him a parable about a rich man, a poor man, and sheep. In the parable, the rich man had a flock of sheep and the poor man one ewe lamb. The rich man decides to throw a party and instead of using one of his sheep, he slaughters the solitary lamb that the poor man owns. David is enraged by this story and declares in 2 Samuel 12: 5 “As the Lord liveth, this man shall surely die.” Nathan, who at this point must be looking at David like “this hypocritical motherfucker” tells David that David is the rich man in that story. David would then make a statement that would be another building block in my feminism, “I have sinned against the Lord”. Not the man he murdered, the woman he raped, or the child he fathered into a short life of pain, God. He said he sinned against God. Nathan then curses him, and before I tell you the curse I need to remind you that David and Nathan are portrayed as the heroes of this story, Nathan curses the child to die. The child dies after seven days of intense agony, and when the mercy of an end is granted unto the infant by God, David who had been performing grief and repentance finally ends mourning. He takes off his sackcloth, he washes the ashes from his face and bathes, he adorns himself, and he ends his fast. Bathsheba's son is dead and the king has lunch.
Oh but Irawo, surely, this must be an anomaly. Nope, wrong. In the book of Judges 11: 17- 40 the story of a man called Jephthah is told. Verse 1 of chapter 11 describes him as a mighty man of Valor. At that particular point in time, Israel was at war with the children of Ammon, and he, Jephthah that is was going to battle. For some reason, he made a pact with God that if he emerged victorious, he would sacrifice the first person that came to greet him. As the heavens would have it, he would triumph, and upon his arrival, his only child would be the first person to welcome him. The song and dance of performing grief would ensue, and his daughter, a child would be murdered. If you thought I was done then you do not know me. In the book of 2 Kings 2: 23-25 Elisha curses children to be torn apart by bears. How many children? Forty-two. Why? Well, because they made fun of his bald spot. I was told this story to prevent me from mocking people because it is easier to teach fear than inspire empathy. I was told the story of Jephthah as a cautionary tale to never make promises I would not regret, and in the story David, the child was nothing but collateral damage. The child was not even dignified with a name, and Bathsheba’s grief over the loss of her husband and first child has been lost to time. Job lost everything, from his property to his children, and it seemed only a matter of time before his faith and life would join the list, but as the heavens would have it, he was steadfast in his belief. This faith would be rewarded with the twofold restoration of all the things he had lost. I ask you this, his children nko? Did our preoccupation with his property prevent us from asking “What of the children?!”. Haman's uprising ended not just his life, but the life of his sons. The justification? You ask, well, so that they would not grow up to do unto the King as was done to their father.
I understand that not everyone grew up with an Abrahamic Faith, and we can even make the shallow argument that assuming this is all true, it happened millennia ago. So, let us look at the stories we tell children. Growing up, I had a bedtime storybook with nursery rhymes like
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed”
Pray tell, what did they do to warrant a whipping? Even though I think Goldilocks was a colonizer that should be checked, she was only a child when I was taught to delight in her terrorization. I was told a perversion of Wee Willie Winkie that would scare me and my siblings to sleep.
"Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown;
Rapping at the window, crying through the lock,
Are the children in their beds?
Now it’s eight o’clock."
Then there's the tale of Rockabye baby on the treetop that falls, Hansel and Gretel that barely escape the witch that wanted to turn them to dinner, light-fingered Jack that was punished for being swindled by an old man, Tom-tom, a Yoruba story I was told was of a boy that had to feed his family his derrière, the boy that cried wolf who was torn to shreds, the folklore my grandmother told me of a child who misbehaved and his punishment was to die in a cemetery, Moremi that sacrificed her son Olorogbo to Esinmirin, the story of the Ugly Duckling, and The Hunchback of Norte Dame. I love the last two stories because they tell those of us perceived as undesirable that our lack of possession of the aesthetic upper hand would cost us in life. Telling the kids facts and prepping them for the real world.
It would be unfair of me to just mention the Ugly Duckling and Quasimodo in passing because these stories are telling. There have been studies conducted on how intelligence and beauty go hand in hand. This is not because those who align with the arbitrary beauty standards of the time have a greater intellectual capacity, but rather, we tolerate them more, and by extension invest more of our time and resources into them achieving according to the narrow standards of success we have set for them. This is where I will tell you that it is not because we love children that we treat them this way as even the most cherubic still face the consequence of existence. It is because they are desirable. We see them as good clean slates for the reproduction of our ideas and ideals. We project personalities unto them even before they can speak, and the very moment they deviate from our imagined construct, we pull away and cast them aside as we do the disabled and undesirable. Claude Frollo’s distaste for Quasimodo was not just because ugliness is a vice, but because he was aware that Quasimodo would not be as “productive” a member of society as an able-bodied, not unattractive person. If health is akin to morality, you cannot see those who are unhealthy as anything but immoral and useless. We see children as vehicles for our tarnished dreams and abandoned desires. We see them as products to be consumed. We adore the fragility of infants because we see them as potential hosts for reproducing our morals and values, then we pervert “spare the rod and spoil the child” to a violent form of carceral punishment as opposed to the guidance and gentle prodding it could be interpreted to be.
Now that I have gotten the lighter topics out of the way, allow me to delve into something more serious, the adoption and foster care system. It is no news that the foster care system literally fucks children up. The abrupt repeated displacement of children can lower their trust in adults and any form of authority, lower their propensity to trust that they are safe, can hinder their ability to form lasting bonds, and even promote anti-social behavior that can increase their perceived need for violence. Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old girl who was murdered by the police in Ohio had been through about five placements in two years. Imagine what that did to her ability to deescalate a situation, or feel safe and secure. Now combine that energy with her existing in the body we relegate to the margins of society. She was a fat black girl. A child like her was not just holding a knife, she was brandishing a weapon of mass destruction, and in the eyes of the law, she needed to be cut down by any means necessary. We have already made it normal for children to be gunned down in schools, why should it be different in the streets. We as a society are also very complicit in the normalization of harm against children, we even laugh at it. Taoma and Ade were able to build a following off the comedic portrayal of violence against children, and we laughed because we knew what it was like to be smacked for every little misstep, for our mistakes to be blown out of proportion and met with violence so great we can still remember how we felt in the moment. Let’s not forget the teachers that threaten to “clip the wings” of children who have not even learned to fly. We bulldoze the desires and aspirations of children and we call it discipline, as though calling a stone gold will confer it value. We do this and justify it with scripture “Aya omode in were di si, sugbon pasan lo ma le jade” This is from the book of Proverbs 22:15 "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him". Tell me, how is this love?
In 2020, the Stauffers would go viral for a thing the internet unanimously saw as objectionable. They would "rehome" a special needs child they adopted from China with Myka Stauffer saying “I was not selective or fully equipped or prepared. I received one day of watching at home online video training”. The Stauffers who had three biological children would claim that their adopted child was violent towards their other children and that he needed care that was beyond their capacity as though they were uninformed. They were told prior to the adoption of their child that this would not be a typical case, especially as the child was from a different country, autistic, and nonverbal. There is something here about the white savior complex and its failures, but I will let it go because I want to discuss something closer to home. In old Nollywood, there was the trope of the“barren woman” and her husband adopting a child. They would then be miraculously blessed with “the fruit of the womb”, and the adopted child would be maltreated or returned to the orphanage. I wish this was relegated exclusively to television and not reproduced in real life, but my naïveté might be my undoing. If we genuinely loved children, we would not see adoption as a thing far removed from birthing a child, but because we see children as property that we brand with our names as we saddle them with the weight of a lineage, the water of the womb will have to be thicker than the blood of the covenant.
I know I said I was not going to talk about Abraham, but that is because my beef is with Sarah. Sarah the matriarch that facilitated the rape of her handmaiden Hagar, and when the consequence of that action was made tangible by the birth of Sarah’s son Isaac, She looked to Abraham and said “Cast out this bondwoman and her son”, the son, Ishmael that was born from her impatience and greed, the son who now threatened the legitimacy of her child’s birthright. “Her son shall not be made heir with my son”. There are two ways to see this, first, the woman who is aware that her maid is being assaulted and raped by her husband, but calls the maid a witch that was sent by the devil to break her home, and second, how we don’t see adopted children as legitimate parts of the family. When pastors say the Bible is a complete book, they are right, but not in the way they intend. We hear of the women who adopt children, but the moment they conceive, the child is either returned like a dog to the pound or relegated to a subpar life of domestic labor. Tell me, are those the same children we claim to love?
There is this horrid thing I despise called The Tanner Scale. It is a ridiculous five-point system that measures the sexual maturity of the physique of an individual. If my problem with it has not yet been made apparent, let me state it. Most black girls I know looked like number 5 before we turned 13. This useless scale contributes to the unfair adultification of racialized and even non-racialized black children all over the world and by extension the normalization of our harm. Biko, how long did it take for R. Kelly to be muted again? Words like “fast”, with the Yoruba equivalent being “be” used to qualify girls help shield molesters of children from accountability. That is where we hear nonsense like “A child with the body of a woman.” The sad part is that we don’t even need the scale before people begin to move mad. Around 2019, a video was circulating on Facebook. It was a nurse that was justifying the rape of an infant. A fucking infant. She claimed that the baby was “plumpy” so she could not fault the man for giving in to his instincts. The not-so-shocking part of this is that she is not alone in this thinking. Don't we tell girls to cover up when the shady men come to visit?
Chris Rock said only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. He was fucking wrong. We tolerate children on the condition that they conform. “I would kill my child if he chose to be geh!” This is a sentiment held by a lot of Nigerians, but before the western world begins to snicker at the “backward minded Africans” let me state that if not for the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal system the colonizers called Christianity that was forced upon the continent of Africa, we might not be in this situation today. Let us even take a look at the United States of America. Florida passed a bill that would not only exclude trans children from sports but would also subject any child to genital inspections if their gender was disputed. The bulk of the problem will now rest at the feet of black children who society already deem unworthy of care and affection. Heaven forbid a black girl is too tall, her timbre a little too deep, her shoulders a bit broad, or her arms hairy. Caster Semenya has had to literarily defend her womanhood time and time again. While Michel Phelps was lauded for his genetics, Caster Semenya was reprimanded for hers. L'lerrét Ailith said in an interview that “The black body is a site of moral confusion” she is absolutely right. In the last thing I wrote, I cited the work of Sabrina Strings and how in her book Fearing the Black body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, she mentions that prior to contact with the continent of Africa, the western world held bigger, fatter bodies as the ideal, but the very moment black people were present with similar body types, those bodies had to become other, they had to be demoralized and dehumanized. The western construct of femininity exists to exclude black women and punish white women who do not submit. It requires our conforming to arbitrary standards, and the perpetual policing of those who do not to be seen as worthy of protection and ownership.
Children deserve nothing but care, affection, and love as they do not exist of their own volition. Technically none of us do, but children need to be shielded from the ills of the world, and they deserve to grow up in a space fit for even the “least” amongst them. They also deserve the exploration of themselves and the discovery of identity. Remember the Cuties movie, yeah, the one that we hated before we saw? The one the “protect the children” faction of the internet seized as they convoluted its narrative with their half-baked critiques that were as deep as saucers before the movie was released tainting the message it held? Yeah, that one. The movie is hard to watch, but not for the reasons you think. It's hard to watch because you get to see a child stumble through adolescence without a guide. Fighting to be anything but her mother. Craving the attention of her guardians, care of her community, and approval of her peers. It was not a salacious tale beckoning us to delight in the sexual exploits of children, we have Riverdale, Euphoria, and other “teen” dramas for that. It was a story of a girl begging to be heard, begging to be seen, begging to be free. But our inability to sit in discomfort hindered the message that the movie held. That all children need a space for discovery, for question, and for experimentation without the fear of exploitation. But that takes time, requires absolute honesty, and the seeing of children as beings with minds of their own, so rather than provide this, we acquiesce to fear and control.
I still struggle with bell hooks' belief that love and abuse cannot coexist as I don’t want to live in a world where I have not known love. The ones that love me have hurt me, and I have hurt the ones I love. So to temper this fear, I believe that you cannot give what you do not have. If all you have is a hammer, even the things that don’t resemble nails might be pounded into submission. The day I was steadfast in my belief that my father loved me was when I received a spontaneous text message (he hates texting). The words were simple and clear “I am proud of you”. I grew up in a home where gestures of affection were freely given, and the phrase “I love you” was liberally used, but when I read that text message, I felt more loved than I probably ever had. Before my father's message, I had done nothing spectacular, said nothing profound. I gave him no novel reason to delight in my existence, but he was proud of me. I read those words as an acceptance of me as I am. That whether or not I contribute to his joy, I am deserving of his care, of his affection, of his love. When my partner asked me what I thought love is after I had prodded him with hypotheticals (I told you I was basic), I was swift with my answer because it is a thing I think I know well. I said that love is choosing a person despite them and because of them. It is seeing them as they are and accepting all of them without question, without condition. Like the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. The kind that leaves behind the 99 for the 1 because that 1 is deserving no matter what. Children need this to thrive. I believe I have taken enough of your time, and thank you for awarding me the privilege. Good whatever time of day it is wherever you are, and I hope that when you close your eyes in search of sleep, you have a better night’s rest than myself. Ajire.