Democracy's Child: young people and the politics of control, leverage, and agency

Democracy's Child places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions, and transformations in US politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. Yet as the book shows, these movements reflect a long history of youth political mobilization and leadership, including Progressive Era labor organizing and 1960s civil rights and anti-war activism. Children also are crucial subjects of government and adult control, inspiring contention in nearly every realm of public policy, such as education, social welfare, abortion, gun control, immigration, civil rights and liberties, and criminal justice. And young people are regularly leveraged in political life as influential symbols of innocence and deviance, or treated as political collateral (as the spectacle of "kids in cages" under the Trump administration's "family separation" policy vividly captures). In a narrative that ranges from history and law to young adult literature, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape. Along the way, the book provides information about age or childhood as a potent category that combines with gender, race, class, immigration status, or sexual orientation to produce powerful systems of privilege or disadvantage.

The politics children make -- Governing children: paternalism, membership, subjugation, and abandonment -- Leveraging children in democratic politics: symbols, recruits, and collateral -- young people and the politics of agency -- Looking back, to look forward: centering children in democratic politics.