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Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children. By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Reviewed by Susan Honeyman
In 1975, two psychiatrists, Chester M. Pierce and Gail B. Allen, identified and defined "childism" as "the automatic presumption of superiority of any adult over any child; it results in the adult's needs, desires, hopes, and fears taking unquestioned precedence over those of the child," qualifying that "[i]t goes beyond the biologic necessity that requires adults to sustain the species by means of authoritative, unilateral decisions" (15). Now, psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has resuscitated the term, arguing strongly for greater recognition of adult prejudice against children as a first step in rethinking treatment, parenting, and political policy affecting the young. She acknowledges that the term has been occasionally used in the opposite sense of "child-centered," but seems aware that only one meaning can ultimately stick, and so her purpose seems to be to make it stick in a useful manner. Though her work mentions literature only occasionally in passing (e.g., Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sartre, Anthony Burgess), the book should be of interest to scholars in children's literature, especially those focusing on works from the 1960s to the present in the U.S., and those invested in psychoanalysis, traumatology, or children's rights.
First, as Young-Bruehl insists in her introduction, language is key to enabling the reconceptualization of adult-child relations and the mobilization of pro-child advocates to productively focus on the genuine causes of a prejudice that, she argues, "is built into the very way children are imagined" (5). As a specialist in the field of prejudice studies, Young- Bruehl continues in the tradition of Pierce and Allen, arguing that the first prejudice most people suffer from is childism-maltreatment due to small size and young age-and that in the child victim of childism, all other prejudices develop through socially expressed personal vengeance, into racism, sexism, or any bigotry toward others with less power (44-45, 146, 175, 227). Labeling and understanding this cycle is essential to stopping it. In her first chapter, "Anatomy of a Prejudice," Young-Bruehl explains the process and why it goes...