We Got Here Because American Society Treats Children Like Property

There are widespread cultural and structural impacts that affect everyone when children are seen as pets and commodities, not developing human beings.

As America continues its descent into autocracy, people all over the political spectrum question how we got here.

I’m going to repeat what child abuse survivors have been saying for years: while there’s numerous forces that led to the crumbling of this shambles of democracy, a major underpinning is that America is not a society where children are seen as small human beings who are the future. They’re seen as property and pets.

The evangelicals simply see them as a tool for their holy war, secular individualistic Americans see them as an expensive pet to brag about. While I did not have a conservative or evangelical upbringing, I have a common thread with many people who did: we recognize that our parents abused us because we were like defective merchandise that didn’t do what the ads told them.

Pets that didn’t do the tricks they wanted, so they yelled, screamed, hit, cried to the world about what burdens we were, and then wondered why we cut them off as adults or didn’t give fuck when they died.

And you bet it’s not discussed so that kids don’t know they’re actually being abused.

And part of how we got here is this mentality that children are property.

The politically-engaged knew that Roe v. Wade was likely to be overturned by a hyper-partisan stolen court even before the memo leaked a month and a half prior.

It was like putting a loved one in hospice: we knew it was coming, we were prepared, but also knew that others wouldn’t be. Despite our overall awareness of the inevitable, a deluge of grief and primal rage broke free nevertheless.

I’m not going to get into the scientifically inaccurate and prudish twaddle peddled by anti-abortion activists, or the real-world economic and medical impacts that this draconian ruling is going to have. You cannot plead basic facts and humanity with those who cannot be reasoned with.

Rather, I’m going to get into how we got here. Controlling people who give birth is a major part of it. But it’s not the only part.

Controlling children plays a bigger role in this than you think.

Not embryos and zygotes. Living, breathing children.

You know, the same ones these same anti-choice lawmakers have no trouble seeing get gunned down on a regular basis while they blather about “precious babies” after they give their own daughters and mistresses hush money to get abortions out of state?

By treating children as property and pets instead of developing human beings, they’re failed in every way and parents/guardians are punished.

The Adoption Industrial Complex and commodification of children fuels this.

Justice Alito said the quiet part out loud in that very memo: “domestic supply of infants”. Meaning that they want children to indoctrinate and traffic.

Mindy Stern wrote a brilliant piece about her experience as an adoptee that also perfectly aligns with this concept.

She felt like she could just be returned like an ill-fitting sweater from TJ Maxx. Numerous Twitter threads written by adoptees express similar sentiments: that adoption is basically legalized human trafficking, that couples adopt children the way they would a puppy and are mad that it doesn’t happily bound up to them every day.

Adoptive parents even just come out and say it: “We bought a really expensive pet.”

This isn’t about doing what’s best for the child: it’s about getting a human pet for people who can’t biologically produce children for whatever reason.

Even if one does have a biological child, it’s not much different in terms of this expectation that the child becomes this automatic extension of the parents and not their own person. It’s exacerbated if the child turns out to be queer, neurodiverse, or another “othered” group.

Regardless of how the child got there, and if they’re considered “normal” and neurotypical or not, the underpinning remains the same. The child is seen as a commodity, not an actual person who is learning and growing.

It’s why we don’t have universal childcare!

When we treat having kids like they’re just really expensive pets, it’s primarily the children who suffer. But parents do too, whether they realize it or not.

Because when your child is seen as your pet, it’s considered solely YOUR responsibility opposed to a collective one. That quality childcare and early childhood education are seen as an individual responsibility, not a society-wide one that all young children are educated and nourished regardless of who their parents are and what they do for a living.

We get laws and policy more hellbent on punishing single mothers and poor parents than ones that actually support kids and families, like universal healthcare, childcare, and free food in schools with no strings attached.

While specifically punitive in America, this happens in other societies too. Dating culture and a feminist uprising that surged from an extremely patriarchal society have been blamed for Japan’s long-discussed low birthrate. Although these things factor in, Yuko Tamura pointed out that the culprit is something Americans can relate to but likely aren’t thinking of: lack of childcare.

Going back to America, women are demonized if they don’t want to have kids then also socially and financially punished if they do want to have them. This asinine plan proposed by Marco Rubio to take out Social Security payments to raise children and make it up when you’re old? Bulgaria has so many women in science and tech because they get maternal pensions and a job guarantee.

Read: THEY DON’T PAY IT BACK, because the Bulgarian government knows that children are the future. They can either provide for parents and children at a very young age now, or pay for it later when they grow up and have poor social and job skills, higher rates of addiction and medical issues, and the numerous other individual and public health markers of child abuse.

So on that note!

Children Aren’t Seen as the Actual Future

They’re viewed as today’s accessory for their parents’ Instagram and the almighty cash cow of parents constantly spending every penny of disposable income on their upkeep.

Children aren’t actually seen as future adults: just that human pet who has to do everything they’re told and perform just right for their parents until they turn 18, then they’re magically expected to be properly socialized and ready to go sacrifice their young lives for the capitalist machine and military-industrial complex.

When society views children as expensive pets instead of future engineers, doctors, writers, artists, chefs, designers, carpenters, and every other profession society needs to function, policy decisions aren’t actually made with their well-being in mind.

They’re merely seen as an accessory by choice or by punishment in the moment. Not a future adult.

The state of public education and the gun violence epidemic is proof of that. But it was was true of welfare reform, complete inaction on gun violence, the complete failure on COVID mitigation by both the Trump and Biden administrations, and the fact that America has such a thing as school lunch debt.

Children, a group of people with virtually no rights and very little autonomy, are taught to believe these things are their faults. Not a mass failure of society to care for them and ensure that they actually get to be the future.

So if you’re wondering how we’re speedrunning into fascism, and how immunocompromised women are unable to get life-saving drugs because hospital and pharmacy legal departments are worried about potential abortifacients while these same policymakers really do not give one iota of a fuck about saving actual children’s lives, then think harder about how children are seen as property on every level imaginable.