i definitely agree with your positions on youthlib, adultism and the nuclear family model, however my question is - what's your positive plan, if any, assuming you could remove / already have removed these oppressive constructs?
Ok first off: this has been sitting in my inbox for several months, and I’m really sorry that I haven’t answered it sooner, and I feel really bad about that, and I’m not even entirely sure why (I started drafting my answer a while ago, then developed a sort of mental block around the whole thing and somehow only got over it today); I’m sure this probably feels irrelevant by now, or unnecessary, and sorry about that!
If the question is “what will replace adultism/nuclear family wrt performing their [actual] current functions,” the answer is—nothing. Their purpose is to control large swathes of people, to regulate certain behaviors, and to concentrate power and resource in the hands of some at the expense of others. There is no need for anything that oppresses and abuses youth to exist at all, and it should not exist, and the whole point of a youthlib movement is to get rid of them.
If the question is “what will replace adultism/the nuclear family/current educational institutions/etc in doing what they currently claim to do/be for,” that’s a rather different question.
Adultists claim that the nuclear family allows for youth to be sheltered, fed, clothed, and taken care of: that without it, youth will die en masse, will starve on the streets, etc. But this is not actually true; the prescription of the Family leads to many neglectful/abusive parents refusing to or inadequately feeding, clothing, and caring for their children. If youth were able to easily acquire food, clothing, shelter, and other resources without having to rely on parents, that would solve this problem. If youth were not forced to remain with their biological family, they could leave when they wanted, the same way anyone else would leave a living situation or relationship they find harmful to themself, or just not something they want, and form relationships that they do want, when they are able to do so and not under social, economic, and political pressures to remain.
I question the popular framing of what will you do when The Revolution is Over, as if these are only things we can do later, rather than things we are (or should be) doing now, and things which are a part of revolution itself and also contribute to the undermining of oppressive structures. What we hope we’ll be doing Then is what we’re struggling to do right now. One of those things is simply living our lives the way we wish (while not preventing others from living their own lives the way they wish). Like anyone else escaping abuse, youth who have escaped adultist oppression will start doing the things they want to do which they were previously unable to because they were forced to not do them. The youthlib project works toward maximizing the ability of doing these things unimpeded, and also doing the things themselves. i.e. moving around in public spaces without harassment, living with people they want to live with, dedicating their time to hobbies or projects they find useful or other things without being dragged away to meaningless forced labor daily.
One thing adultism (like other oppressive systems) promises is to prevent not only various harmless activities but also harmless ones. Adultists claim that if not subject to adult rule, youth will be violent toward each other, and that without adultism, there would be no recourse for victims of abuse by other youth. The adultist’s solution is to maintain figures with far more power than either party so that adults will be able to stop a youth abusing another youth. This is clearly wrong, of course: this makes it so that when adults abuse youth, there is no possible recourse (apart from seeking an even higher authority, which poses the exact same problems as this); most adults don’t even bother to use their power to stop abuse between youth, as it is in their interest to uphold hierarchies among the people they oppress, and they are themselves pro abuse, so why would they care to stop abuse? It is far more common for a parent, a teacher, etc who is called on to stop a case of bullying to disbelieve or blame the victim and to punish the victim instead. (When they do punish bullies/abusers, this isn’t usually great either, because they are simply enacting more abuse by the more powerful onto the weaker.)
How do adults resolve adult-on-adult abuse or victimization? Most appeal to a third party of higher authority than them both (the manager, the boss, the cop, the judge, the state leader). Some don’t, and instead resolve the conflict by seeing where they are at right now, and what they need, and acting accordingly. Without the reassuring (but ultimately poisonous) presence of a Higher-Up to solve the problem, how would youth deal with violence among themselves? The same things many are doing right now when struggling against abusive authority figures, or trying to stop a bully without the help of indifferent adults. Youth liberation simply means that the many barriers to this are taken down (and the process which takes them down is also the process that solves the problems themselves). Without the ability to lock up “violent juvenile offenders” in psychiatric wards to “fix” them or detention facilities to “neutralize their threat,” how would we stop harm? Community protocols, mutual aid, self-defense... everything everyone is doing now, as part of their day-to-day lives, these are the options that we struggle to make more available and more successful.
I generally don’t like trying to give answers to questions that are too vague or broad, because it’s rather difficult for me—my mind is much clearer when I am answering about specific situations—but I can discuss some of the things that have come up in conversations with my friends, or conversations I’ve seen my friends have. One was about the family. We talked about what could be the alternatives to the current “bio parents = raise them in their own house” model. I think we can generally agree that 1) a parent who don’t want to raise their kid should not have to, for both their sake and for the kid’s; adoption should be an easily available option, but without the bureaucratic bullshit and abuse and neglect we have going on right now; 2) if a child is too young to state which particular person(s) they would prefer to live with, and doesn’t indicate with other reactions that they dislike an adult/prefer a different adult, we’re not for grabbing babies out of bio parents’ arms to redistribute on some bizarre planning principle; 3) it should be easier for more than just two adults to live in one home taking care of a child/children, and children and adults should be able to get outside and move around more, and non-familial adults should be able to help out with raising a kid more (i.e. the old “it takes a village” mantra). Education not coercive and strictly regimented; information (i.e. libraries, bookstores, archives, the internet) available and more specific teaching programs (i.e. specialized educators, other teachers, classes) available but not forced. Better mental health services. Cultural shifts; earlier education about boundaries, consent, autonomy, and abuse being wrong. Disability accommodations without bullshit red tape. Neurodivergence, mental illness, physical illness, and disability testing and information more widely available and not limited by ableism. Improved mental health services, harm reduction, queerness not stigmatized/treated as taboo, youth who come out as weird early not invalidated or locked up.
Some less “formal” things I’m particularly interested in right now are things like accountability processes, protocols when harm occurs, and getting each other to get better and more proactive at stopping harm and de-platforming abuse/abuse advocacy. This involves things like group education/information sharing, but also practicing, and acknowledging and resisting incentives to enable harm for the sake of “group cohesion” or other social pressures. I imagine this would look similarly IRL, though I’m not really socially connected with anyone offline because of certain limitations in my circumstances. But I have been reading about how IRL leftist communities have fared; applying something like the above to youth would involve being more aware of predator red flags, working against incentives to ignore discomfort from boundary violations, encouraging each other to respect consent and to not tolerate boundary-crossing, and collectively removing predatory/abusive/bigoted adults from spaces/events or positions of power that allow them to continue carrying out harm. Some other things would be, i.e., distributions of food and clothing to those in need without violent and unjust gatekeeping; current versions of that look like mutual aid, or shoplifting and theft when otherwise unavailable.
There’s a lot I haven’t covered, and I don’t feel up to trying to cover everything that could fall under the above (especially not in one go); a lot of people have discussed other examples and answers elsewhere (tweets, posts, blogs, papers, orgs...) and there’s been even more written out in much more detail in books (first that came to mind was Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now & Abolish the Family, I haven’t read them yet but I’ve heard good reviews and they seem to have that kind of planning goal, specifically discussing the nuclear family and other possible kinship formations which were a thing your ask mentioned in particular so).
