this book is out now!!! it's a short read, less than 200 pages, and it's SO good. i literally had to pause halfway through just to send the author a message about how much i liked it. definitely leans more utopian than scientific, but that makes sense given the format, and i think it has a lot of good things to say.

once you really start thinking about how restrictive the world is for children and how many bullshit justifications we retroactively come up for it all the time, you can't stop seeing it everywhere. this book makes a good case for including children in our political efforts not as rhetorical devices but as an actual class of oppressed people.

I think about this so often these days, as we repeatedly expose countless children - individuals whose futures we willfully dim - to Covid-19, a disease with an ever-increasing list of long-term ramifications.

I was a chronically ill child who experienced a post-viral illness - the result of a mononucleosis infection - similar to the one we are calling “long covid.” As long covid eclipses asthma as the most common childhood chronic illness, and as children rack up more and more repeat infections, I think about how difficult my adolescence was - how illness colored everything and alienated me not only from myself but from so many people, and how it taught me not to seek needed medical care or to constantly question my own physical reality even when others began to affirm it. A recent Rolling Stone article about long covid in children left me weeping - here were more children being willfully walked into that kind of lifelong disaster. The children in that article mostly had caring parent advocates who validated their struggles and worked hard to see medical and educational establishments acknowledge and accommodate their needs, but that is a result of selection bias. Parents who participated in this article did so because they were already seeking care for their kids.

So many children will suffer the same health problems and receive no care, only accusations of laziness or stupidity or hypochondriasis or attention-seeking. They’ll hear those accusations not just from doctors, classmates, teachers, administrators, and siblings (as I did), but also from their parents. I was lucky to have parents who mostly did a good job advocating for me, even though they often failed to find the best way and I often still ended up feeling like a burden they could have done without. It is hard and scary to parents a child with complex health issues, so I give them a lot of grace for scars they gave me despite their best efforts, especially given how much more poorly parented they were themselves. Having worked with children and seen the way some parents behave, knowing what my parents experienced and what many kids experience today, I am confident that my folks - flawed as they were - did a better job of it than most will do.

So many people have children for the wrong reasons. They pay no attention or all the wrong kinds. They don’t really fully understand that their children have their own identities - that they are as real as adults. They feel constantly inconvenienced by their children. They don’t really even try to accept the responsibility they chose. This isn’t even the worst case scenario. Many parents see their children as property - as objects to be used, abused, for any kind of emotional or physical need, and tossed aside when not “functioning properly.” Both the middlingly shitty parent and the cruel parent will fail utterly to support a chronically ill child. A middlingly shitty parent will abuse a chronically ill child simply for having needs. A cruel parent may kill one, or simply let one die. Even families that might treat non-disabled and healthy children as whole people worthy of love can neglect and abuse a chronically ill child for the crime of having complex needs & failing to perform tasks other children can.

This is an ongoing crisis, mostly invisible at the current moment because children have so few rights. They certainly cannot advocate for safer conditions to the extent that adults can (and we see how even adults who advocate for more safety around respiratory viruses are already fighting an uphill battle), and they must rely on adults to acknowledge their needs in order to even begin trying to get them met. They may not have the context to know everything that’s being stolen from them, but many will intuit or simply physically sense that something is wrong and have no way to communicate about that wrongness because the world, by denying the ongoing costs of covid 19, denies them any language or framework for grappling with and describing it.

Those that make it to adulthood (because I promise that some will die before they make it there as a result of issues doctors may misdiagnose as depression or laziness, and others will die of post-acute sequelae that become too obvious to be ignored but were treated too late) will arrive there with a ton of baggage. The baggage will be medical, but it will be social and economic, too. It will change how they engage with every person in their life, how and whether they seek work or medicine or love, what kind of energy they have for civic engagement, what kind of forgiveness they’re willing to extend to a society that utterly failed them.

I can’t talk to most parents about this. It is impossible to even hint that they are abdicating a basic duty of care when they themselves are so triggered by any mention of a pandemic that for some time forced them to spend more time with their own children than they found tolerable. I believe that the often untenable conditions for parenthood in my country and the unsuitability of most people for the job even in tenable conditions is part of what drove people to seek a premature end to still-necessary precautions; anything that would get their kids back in schools and out of their lives for as many hours of the day as possible was an improvement on the claustrophobia & unbearable responsibility so many of them felt in 2020 and part of 2021, when they couldn’t outsource the careful work of child rearing to the state (or, for those better off, the highest-status private school in their budget) & after-school programs. And then they sent their kids back to school without advocating for good ventilation or any other precautions against an ongoing pandemic.

I have absolutely no doubt that this will have terrible consequences for our society. It will burden today’s children. It will burden tomorrow’s children. Some may, as teens or adults, learn the words for what was done to them, and find ways to live with it. But we’re never going back to the world we could have had - the world we could have given them. We stole it from them by building this awful facsimile.

People with 3D printers who make prosthetic fingers and limbs at home are about to come out with some truly wild DUNE ass shit

The paper is in open access

actually ☝️ this account is actually a Wretched Impersonator whose identity is unknown but officially endorsed by andy c himself