Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Zinnia Lane-McKinley

NW I wrote down a short list of the ways that children, and images of children, are currently circulated in the media. These are: images of children starving in Gaza; the babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas; the Epstein case and the ongoing discussion about paedophilic cabals; and kids separated from their parents by ICE. What do these groups of children have in common, if anything? 

MLK It’s difficult, because sometimes the problem comes from well-intentioned political activists. The ethics are complex. How do we avoid fetishising or instrumentalising these images and dehumanising these children even further? In the case of Gaza, we rely on these images to raise awareness of the genocide. With the Epstein case, there’s a despicable desire to dig up evidence, as a kind of gotcha effect. It has little to do with the survivors. In every circumstance, we have to really ask ourselves – because children so often can’t speak for themselves or don’t speak for themselves as a matter of protection – how do we speak with them, without furthering these problems epitomised by parental rights, of a kind of proprietary conception of children? Parents are not the only people who act as if they own children – that’s the subject position of children in so many political conversations. Looking for those historical traps of how we talk about children is really important to refocus and de-individuate the problem from simply a matter of parental behaviour.

NW The first chapter of the book is titled “Dreams Called Childhood”. How is psychoanalytic thought threaded through the book, and this idea of the subject position as understood in psychoanalysis?

MLK Childhood is not something that one ever gets over – it’s something we carry forward into the so-called adult world. Whenever we’re speaking about children and childhood, our own experiences are at stake. Childhood is a kind of fantasy, or a dream, insofar as it only exists once it’s over to people. In most cases, children aren’t constantly thinking to themselves, “Oh, I’m having my childhood”. Childhood is a spectre that promises things, throughout our lives, that it can’t deliver. If we interrogate what we want from childhood, it’s something more like integration, liberation and the freedom to grow old together in ways that feel decent and caring. I want to reject the idea that we inherit a tragedy upon becoming adults, that this wonderful time is over. We still participate in this collective fantasy in different ways, but it’s something that we can see as a shared struggle.

NW Something I liked is your suggestion that it’s the dependency of the child that adults are uncomfortable with. The child is a political subject dependent on systems and people beyond their capacities. 

MLK Absolutely. When we speak of child liberation, there is a desire to direct that towards something like autonomy, but I’m trying to reroute it to the reality that we all depend on each other. That’s actually not distinct to children at all. This idea challenges some of the discourse which argues that we should liberate children, so that they can have an austere individual autonomy. Self-determination is important for all of us, but the fact of our collective dependence is the most important element. If you’re lucky enough to get to an old age, it comes back to you. I have a 90-year-old grandmother, and she sometimes speaks about the ways in which she feels like a child. The idea of childhood imposes a limit to the power of individuals up to a certain age, but it’s also something that can be rendered by institutions of power at any point.

NW In the book, another idea is that solidarity is a form of intervention. Sometimes, solidarity is used to describe a feeling more than a set of behaviours. I was taken by the idea that it can be an intervention, especially because intervening in the lives of children is something we see the right doing with catastrophic effects when it comes to things like denying health care for trans kids.

MLK I was inspired to think about solidarity as a collective practice – something that’s muscular, as something that needs exercise and practice, that is situated in the everyday. In the beginning, I was very clear that I was not going to write a radical parenting book. As a parent, I’ve learned a lot from these books, but I don’t see myself as an expert in child development or child psychology – the book is about the promise of enacting our political struggles together. To get there, a lot of thinking and questioning has to happen. Towards the end of the book, I suggest that solidarity is something like science fiction, and that we’re better off approaching it as a thought experiment or a site of collective inquiry. There’s no programme or prescription for how people should interact with children. It has to be figured out from the bottom up, in collaboration with children.

NW There is a triad you lay out in the last chapter of childishness, utopianism and madness. How do those three things interact with each other?

MLK I studied utopian literature for a very long time, and there are so many allegations about the foolishness or naivete or madness of utopian thought in its history. Why are you focusing on something impossible? It’s about reckoning with what makes certain things impossible, and unthinkable. From my experiences talking with and playing with and being in the lives of children, I know there are questions that children will ask about the world that adults wouldn’t dare. That inquisitiveness is something that we can really learn from as adult comrades and collaborators. There’s a pathologising of hopefulness that we enter. I was having a nice time recently with my kid and their friends, lying in a grassy field, daydreaming and laughing. In those moments, you may encounter something profound about what it means to share a life together, what you want in growing old and what you want from the world. That’s the political horizon I wanted for the book. I don’t want utopian dreaming to be seized and instrumentalised – it’s about finding ways to infuse our everyday lives with it, because that clearly strengthens our ability to work together politically, between moments of greater revolutionary potential. I’m aware, having lost friends to suicide, that having access to what the world could be otherwise can be tremendously tragic and painful. There’s a kind of revolutionary impulse in being mad, but we have to have that madness together. It’s so precious. .