https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341426069_Adultism_Sage_Encyclopedia
As sexism is to women, adultism is to children and young people. Some confusions about the term and then some problems which adultism can increase will be considered.
From the 1960s onwards, the campaign for women’s rights was advanced by two useful words. First, “sexism” succinctly identified the root of the problem of discrimination against women. It transferred the blame for women’s inferior status, and their seeming lower ability and intelligence when compared with men, away from women themselves and onto powerful social structures of prejudice. Gradually these sexist structures are being identified and dismantled, and women have growing opportunities to show that they can be at least equal to men.
The second useful word, “feminism,” turned what might have been a weak negative term about disadvantaged inferior women into the name for a powerful positive movement. Similar words linked to former weakness and shame have been transformed into slogans of strength and triumph, such as Black Pride and Gay Pride to fight racism and homophobia. Children have no such clear language to advance their status. Adultism and childism are seldom-used terms and, confusingly, childism sometimes denotes respect for children, like feminism, but sometimes denigrates them, like sexism. Similarly, adultism can mean positive respect for adults, or criticism of overbearing adults besides disrespect for children.
The international power that “adultism” denotes of adults’ coercive control over children endures in practice partly because the theory and language needed to challenge it remain undeveloped and confused. Sexism and racism are now so well recognised that there are laws against them. Yet there are no laws against the routine denigrating of children and even “childish” is assumed to be an insulting word. Perhaps because all the discriminated-against adult minority groups are now more protected, denigrating of children has increased; disadvantaged adults feel less shared solidarity with children than formerly, and they risk seeming childish themselves if they side with children. So childhood is still further isolated away from adulthood than when, for example, children and women used to be scorned equally.
“Adultism” has been the diagnosis for a supposed mental disease in promiscuous adolescents who commit “adult” crimes such as prostitution. This links to the way “adult” and “adultism” frequently denote libertarian and sexual concerns, from which children are expected to be excluded. This firm exclusion of children lends a useful moral veneer to what could seem to be immoral or amoral libertarianism. Protecting children, who are seen as too young to make choices or to guard themselves from dangers, can seem to be the caring, responsible moral side of the libertarian coin that would otherwise be purely selfish and lawless.
Just as “adults” can only exist when there are “children” (otherwise everyone would simply be “people”), “adultism” depends on the inferior age group of children to validate claims that adults are superior and reliable and that it is therefore normal, natural and moral that adults should control supposedly volatile irresponsible children. So “adultism” usually denotes prejudice against children and over-respect for adults. Can adults be over-respected, and do adults not show the highest levels of reason, maturity, wisdom and altruism that human beings can achieve? Yes some adults do, but many do not, while many children and young people are reasonable, wise and kind. However, although sexism and racism are clearly misguided and unjustly deny adults’ equal rights, children do not fully share this equality. And many children benefit from adults’ authority and responsibility provided the adults’ are respectful and benign.
Adultism and developmentalism are problems when they falsely correlate virtue and ability with age. Adultism over-estimates adults. It splits off their negative and failing qualities, and projects these on to children, while assuming that all virtues such being wise, kind and reliable only exist in adults and therefore adult control must not be questioned. Adultism works in self-fulfilling prophecies by setting unjustly high barriers and low expectations for children’s involvement in activities and relationships, increasing children’s likely failures and attributing these to their incompetence and their need to be subordinate.
Jack Flasher identified adultism as the abuse of power over children through excessive nurturing, possessiveness and restrictions by parents, teachers, psychotherapists, the clergy, police, judges, and juries. Erica Burman criticised imperial adultism, which treats childhood as a domain to be colonised and civilised, and which shapes public understanding and policies that demean children through adult-centred paternalistic research and services. Adam Fletcher analysed institutional adultism at three levels: attitudinal, cultural and structural.
Donovon Ceaser found that adultism is so endemic that it even pervades programmes deliberately concerned with social justice which aim to increase equality. Adultism worked in one such programme, unnoticed by the adults, though not by the young people, intersecting with prejudices of race, sex and class until Ceaser drew the organisers’ attention to these hidden influences.
Barry Checkoway contended that young people internalise adultism, which causes them to question their own legitimacy and ability, their trust in themselves and in their peers, leading to their over-dependence on adults’ approval. Violent forms of physical, sexual, verbal and routine adultism set up complex chains of reactions of distress, anxiety and anger from young people. Adultism limits their abilities to engage in peaceful, cooperative, mutually respectful and democratic activities.
Adultism is sometimes said to “socially construct” children, but as real human beings, children cannot be constructed like mindless passive Lego models. However, their beliefs, behaviours and relationships, their sense of identity and how others regard and treat them can all be powerfully influenced by adultism. In many ways, adultism can damage not only young people but whole present and future societies. As with sexism, progress begins with naming and openly challenging the great problems of adultism.
Burman, E. (2016) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London: Routledge.
Ceaser, D. (2014) Unlearning adultism at Green Shoots: a reflexive ethnographic analysis of age inequality within an environmental education programme, Ethnography and Education, 9: 167-181.
Checkoway, B. (1996) Adults as Allies to Young People Striving for Social Justice. Detroit, MI: WK Kellogg Foundation.
Flasher, J. (1978) Adultism, Adolescence, 13: 517–523.
Fletcher, A. (2013). Ending Discrimination against Young People. Olympia, WA: CommonAction Publishing.
