-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email view in app Life was bleak for children of working-class families before the "child savers" movement of the early 1900s that gave us child labor laws , among other labor reforms. But even though children today are not worked to the bone, life for many American children is still similarly bleak , as scholar Adam Benforado reflects. "A hundred years on, children still go hungry ," Benforado, a Drexel University law professor, writes in his new book on the topic, " A Minor Revolution .
" He continues:. "Children still end up on the street when their families can't make rent. Not a handful of children—millions.
" They experience lead poisoning, toxic metals in baby food, death trap bassinets, and vaping. "Among the twenty richest countries in the world, America is dead last on childhood mortality," Benforado says: "Car crashes and firearm injuries persist as the leading causes of child fatalities because we've vigorously blocked gun and vehicle safety laws that our peers passed years ago. " He argues, "We know so much more about what is good and bad for young people, but we do so much less about it.
" Why? Because we prioritize other principles, like parents' rights and corporate profit, over child welfare. I first met Benforado when he and I worked for judges on the same court. He was an unabashed critic then and stayed that way, dedicating his first book, " Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice ," to questioning the way we as a nation define criminal behavior and then police, convict, and sentence it.
"A Minor Revolution" is arguably even more ambitious. In it, Benforado sets out a breadcrumb trail of facts and anecdotes leading his reader to indict everything from the foster system to military recruiting to self-financed higher education. His unifying argument is anti-inertial: We don't have to do things the way we've always done them; we can change the rules to put kids first in a way that will benefit us all.
Related How unaccompanied youth become exploited workers in the U. S. That starts by being honest with ourselves about some discomfiting contradictions in the status quo.
"We've somehow ended up with a justice system that treats kids as adults when it comes to policing and punishment but not when it comes to basic rights," he writes, noting that each year 76,000 children who aren't allowed to watch R-rated movies are prosecuted as adults. In some states, they're deemed fully responsible for rash choices made under peer pressure but not responsible enough to sell a bike or go to the dentist alone. These rules aren't just wildly inconsistent; they're also backwards, according to science.
Studies show that a teen's "capacity to understand and reason her way to a decision is comparable to an adult's ability in situations that allow for coolheaded deliberation," Benforado explains. In other words, research on the adolescent brain says "yes" to letting them vote and "no" to prison. "We need to notice children, notice the suffering of children, and rethink our approach to law, to business, to every field.
" Benforado knows his recommendations — which include changing the way we tax investment income and inheritance, allowing youth to serve on juries, and much more — will be met with dismissal and defense: "[S]econd-class citizenship always seems natural, obvious, and justified to the privileged," he writes, drawing parallels between kids today and women in the 1800s. That comparison seemed fair to me, but also ludicrous. So I gave him a call to better wrap my head around these big arguments for recognizing little people.
Our exchange has been edited for length and clarity. You start and end the book with tales of kids with incarcerated parents, even arguing for considering whether a person has dependent children in criminal sentencing. Why do you keep coming back to these families? For this book, I really wanted to have conversations.
Some of the most powerful moments, the ones where I just felt overcome with emotion, were talking to people whose parents had been locked up when they were kids. They drove home what is at stake when we talk about children's rights. The plight of these children is also a particularly powerful example of one of the book's core themes: Most harm to kids really doesn't come from the intentional actions of bad people; it comes from our failure to consider them at all as we build products and infrastructure, as we create laws.
We built this system of mass incarceration without a thought for what it would do to the millions — and it really is millions over the last several decades — of kids whose parents end up taken away from them. "It was just devastating to be speaking to a grandmother who was incarcerated when her girls were little, hearing about what they went through and how it resulted in drug abuse and their own trouble with the law, and then learning that her grandson is now in foster care. " We need to notice children, notice the suffering of children, and rethink our approach to law, to business, to every field.
When I first became a law professor, I taught business organizations, and whenever I'd bring up the possibility of holding a corporation criminally liable — instead of just the officers running it — my students' reaction would be, "Well, that wouldn't be fair to innocent shareholders. " And I'd say, "But what about the kids of all the people we lock up?" And the response I'd get is, "Huh, yeah, I didn't think about that. " And I think if we stop to notice the impact of our processes, we have this incredible chance to rebuild society.
And your argument is that this "child-first" reimagining would move, say, the criminal justice system toward prevention and rehabilitation, which should be its overall goals anyway, right? That's exactly right, and it makes this book a different type of rights book. I say we shouldn't prioritize the interests of children simply because it's the right thing morally to do; it would also allow us to be the society we all want to live in. And that's because the most pressing societal issues are best addressed in childhood.
If we want to deal with crime or public health or underemployment, childhood is our highest-impact intervention window. One of the most upsetting truths that came out of the interviews I did for the book was the intergenerational trauma that comes from locking up the parent of a young kid. It was just devastating to be speaking to a grandmother who was incarcerated when her girls were little, hearing about what they went through and how it resulted in drug abuse and their own trouble with the law, and then learning that her grandson is now in foster care, having mental health problems, already teed up for the criminal justice system.
So part of your argument is that children are a bit of a canary in the coalmine, and what's hurting them eventually hurts us all. But a separate thread says children aren't mini-adults. What does research say about how are kids different,, and why should we have different rules for them? Well, take the fact that young people are three times more likely than adults to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
The standard approach to interrogating someone in the U. S. is you bring them down to the station, you kind of assess whether they're lying to you, and if the detectives sense they are, the police go into a manipulative attempt to get a confession that involves both maximization, with threats that very bad things are going to happen unless you confess, and minimization, the idea of "It's not a big deal … just say you did it, and everything will be okay.
" And the data suggests that young people are especially vulnerable to these techniques. And because confessions are considered such a weighty type of evidence, false confessions produce wrongful convictions. And this is true even when they've been read their Miranda rights? Two-thirds of kids don't understand all of their Miranda rights.
Even when they do, young people are particularly likely to waive them, in part because they tend to be more trusting of authority. They also exhibit what's referred to as "the illusion of transparency," meaning they think what's obvious to them is obvious to other people. Like police officers or a judge.
Yeah, so they may think to themselves, "I know I didn't commit this murder, but I'm experiencing acute distress in this windowless room with these two cops screaming at me. This is horrible. I want to go home.
If I just say back exactly what they're telling me happened, they'll go and interview other people and collect evidence and realize I'm innocent. " What they don't know is that after you confess, the police stop looking for anyone else. And this isn't research that's just come out in the last six months; it's stuff people have been studying for four decades.
Have you watched "Making a Murderer"? No. Well, there's this powerful scene where they have this interrogation of a kid at school. And the police are pressuring and pressuring him, and he basically says, "Okay, yes, I did it," after these very leading questions, and then he says, "I have a project due, can I go back to class now?" And that's how their thinking goes.
It's like, oh my God, what? Want more health and parenting stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist . I see that tying into the research you cite on adolescent brains focusing more on immediate rewards than long term consequences. Another bit of social science you surface is that they'll do almost anything to avoid disappointing a peer.
I just interviewed someone who was prosecuted under the felony murder rule, so he hadn't pulled the trigger but was treated as if he had. He was offered a plea deal which was bad for him but good for the loved one who'd fired the weapon. That guy, to his credit, said, "It's okay if you want to go to trial.
" But sitting there as a 14-year-old, the man I interviewed said, "I seen the sadness in his eyes. " That was his calculus: He took the deal, at least in part, to make his peer feel better. Yeah, we see peer effects in a whole range of areas.
It's not simply that young people are risk-taking in all situations. When it comes to raising their hand in class, for example, they can be quite risk-averse. But they do tend to take more risks, and when peers are present that tendency is amplified.
So what should the new rules be? Should the police not be allowed to lie to kids the way they can lie to adults? Should a therapist or licensed clinical social worker have to be in the room for these interrogations? This is a great example of the coal mine thing. Illinois is at the forefront of banning lying to juvenile suspects. All states should do it.
But they shouldn't stop there. They should ban all lying by the police. That's just been shown to create horrible injustices in our system.
Focus on kids, fix it, and then our next step is fixing it for the population at large. Let's switch gears and talk about parents' rights. Two quotes on that topic jumped out at me.
You say, "In America, our old cars are scrutinized far more than our young homeschoolers," and then, "The education of children is not a private matter. " What's the legal history of how parents got so much control over what their children learn and are exposed to? Sometimes it can feel like the argument over parents' rights is this entirely new thing. Like we go onto CNN, and there's a story about parents' rights.
But it's not. If you go back to the 1920s, there were some foundational Supreme Court cases — Meyer , Pierce — announcing the fundamental liberty interest of parents in the upbringing and education of their kids. The Court said in Pierce, if it is your kid, you have a right to "direct his destiny.
" In these twentieth-century parenting cases, the Court was focused narrowly on parents choosing a school or deciding whether children spend time with their grandparents or whatever. But now it's kind of seeped into our culture as a larger parents-first mindset. Our starting point today, when we're talking about kids, is "Well, the parents ….
" With all we know about gun violence and its impact on today's children, we can't interpret the Second Amendment by asking, "Well, what did people living in a time of cartouche boxes and muskets think these words meant?" It's interesting reading your book in a post- Dobbs era. As you know, I write a lot about education and whenever people ask me what one thing would I do to advance equity, I say I'd reverse Pierce , which said parents can choose private school rather than all kids going to public school. My thinking is that if everybody's kids were in the same boat, privileged parents would force a rising tide to lift it.
But that plan has always had a dismal chance of working, because the legal system has for so long respected precedent. You could chip away at the edges of an old case like Pierce or carve out an exception, but settled precedent was settled. Dobbs is horribly unsettling.
When it came to a woman's right to choose, the Court basically said, "Nope, we changed our mind. " So maybe that means we can question those parents-first rulings too? I think that's exactly right. And we should also talk about how the Court interprets the Constitution.
We have long been told by conservative legal scholars that originalism … Hold on one sec. For non-lawyers to catch up, the two opposing schools of thought have been " originalism ," which basically means asking what the language meant to the people who created it at the time it was written, and then the idea of a " living Constitution ," where we think about the principles and the underlying values those folks were going for, and construe their words in light of our times. Right.
And we are now in a moment, as a result of the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and to a lesser extent the whole judiciary, where conservatives are actually admitting that originalism was a fraud from the outset. They're saying, it was a useful tool to constrain libs when we were in the minority, but we won and we should now just follow conservative principles. And this is maddening for a lot of progressives, who are like, "But you went to these conferences and told us over and over that originalism was the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution, and now you're just throwing it out the window?" And I want to say, "Yeah, toss it out.
" And go with a living Constitution instead? I think the best path forward for ensuring that all children have access to books and medical care is to focus on children's rights, not to try to forge some progressive parents' rights movement to combat the conservative parents' rights movement. Yeah, a child-first approach to interpreting the Constitution is a version of the living Constitution, and I think one that has more substantive bite. With all we know about gun violence and its impact on today's children, we can't interpret the Second Amendment by asking, "Well,
