Making kin,not babies? Towards childist kinship in the “Anthropocene”

Abstract

To “make kin, not babies” is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the so-called “Anthropocene”. Building on other critical engagements with Haraway’s proposal, this paper interrogates it from a childist perspective. While striving towards a “pro-child” position on kinship, Haraway only goes so far in explicating this aim. The paper suggests that challenging adultism as well as attention to children's ongoing kinship practices are required.

To ‘make kin, not babies’ is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the so-called “Anthropocene” (Haraway, 2016b, 2018). While in general agreement with Haraway’s emphasis on the need to presently reconceive kinship – understood here broadly as ways of relating which involve aspects of care, intimacy, and response-ability ¹ – this paper interrogates Haraway’s non-natalist stance from a childist perspective, i.e. one which tackles adultism and emphasises the lived experiences of children (Wall, 2019). ² The paper, then, attempts a sympathetic critique, the aim of which is twofold. Firstly, to intervene into a discourse which so far tends to sidestep insights from childhood studies. Secondly, to encourage childhood studies to deepen an emerging engagement of kinship in the “Anthropocene”.

Pursuing these aims, I first reconstruct critical interventions into the “Anthropocene” debate. Turning next to potential responses to this infelicitously named formation, I sketch Haraway’s non-natalism. Haraway’s proposal has rightly (and intentionally) sparked controversy, especially worries about derailing individualism and proximity to neo-Malthusianism. These are issues I can only broach here. Instead, I focus on some – related – concerns with the proposal which have not been prominently discussed so far. Haraway is striving towards a “pro-child” position on kinship but does not sufficiently explicate what this entails. I argue that any such endeavour demands for two components. Firstly, sensitivity to avoid the reproduction of adultist constructions of children as passive kin “being made”. Secondly, engagement with childhood studies and children’s lived experiences.

“Anthropocene” relations

While children’s contributions have been crucial to drawing attention to the phenomena referenced by “the Anthropocene”, ³ this is a word coined by adults. Reaching back at least to 1920s Soviet geology, it was specifically popularized by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer who sought to ‘emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term Anthropocene for the current geological epoch’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 17). The changes typically associated with the “Anthropocene” include those conceptualized as rapid and nonlinear climate change, the ongoing “Sixth Extinction” event, and the explosion of “anthropogenic mass”. These dynamics connect not only to severe interruptions of living conditions (shifts in seasonal patterns, drastic weather events, unravelling of habitats), but also with “marks” or “inscriptions” on earth, prompting geological investigation. The International Commission on Stratigraphy’s “Anthropocene Working Group” (AWG) has recently endorsed the idea to formalize the Anthropocene as a ‘geological time term’ (see AWG, n.d.). This requires identifying the emergence of new geological formations, evidenced by a relevant stratotype point (colloquially, a “golden spike”). Despite divergent proposals, the AWG currently favours to date the beginning of the “Anthropocene” to post-WWII “Great Acceleration” and nuclear fallout (Crutzen and Stoermer had ‘somewhat arbitrar [ily]…propose[d] the latter part of the 18th century’; 2000: 17).

Although the notion of the “Anthropocene” thus primarily intervenes in (chrono-)geology, it has quickly been taken up elsewhere as shorthand for human’s impact on earth and the latter’s general condition. A potent concept, it has not only stirred up isolationist thinking in an academy divided into “Two Cultures”, natural sciences and humanities. More generally, it has raised awareness around the interconnectedness of current crises (such as biodiversity and climate) and their generational dimensions.

Yet, its core idea of “mankind” as a ‘major’ (Taylor, 2020: 340), even ‘primary’ (Ojeda et al., 2020: 316) geological force also faces limitations. Both the concept of the “Anthropocene” itself and the discourse with which it is entangled are problematic. ⁴ In fact, despite conjuring a radical reckoning, critical studies scholars have shown how the concept of the “Age of Man” can stabilize the destructions it purports to describe. Post-Marxist, feminist, and Black studies approaches have launched important interventions into homogenising narratives, by stressing questions of agency, vulnerability, and periodization. Moore (2017, 2018), for instance, argues that the current formation cannot be reconstructed without foregrounding the emergence of capitalism – and the violence of its ongoing ‘primitive accumulation’ of ‘Cheap Natures’ and its ‘dialectic of paid and unpaid work’. Relatedly, Yusoff (2018) emphasizes how in the “Anthropocene”, Black bodies were centrally rendered ‘inhuman matter’, i.e. mere property for extraction (a rendering co-evolving with the discipline of geography). Consequently, a notion of the “Anthropocene” in a ‘future tense’ must be discarded: ‘there are a Billion Black Anthropocenes’ (Yusoff, 2018: 59).

Albeit admittedly a ‘latecomer to the Anthropocene debates’ (Taylor, 2020: 341), childhood studies have also begun to intervene in this discourse, highlighting how generation matters to differential vulnerabilities and responsibilities in current formations. ⁵ Karen Malone, for instance, writes: ‘We are not all in the Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed, the children are far more in it than others’ (2017: 249). Anthropocene crises intensify pre-existing, intersectional vulnerabilities, (also) shaped by being positioned as “child”. In line with some children’s own assessments – e.g. that children are ‘already carry[ing]' the ‘burden’ of the climate crisis and ‘will bear the burden of these harms far more and far longer than [today’s] adults’ (Sacchi et al., 2019: §§3–4) ⁶ – childhood studies have recently framed such inequalities through the notion of inheritance. Children are said to inherit ‘unliveable’ and ‘messy anthropogenic settler colonial worlds’ (Nxumalo, 2020: 542), as well as ‘uncertain futures’ (Malone, 2017: 4). While the claim that ‘current environmental crises’ are ‘being faced by children, and caused by adults’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020b: 497) needs nuanced unpacking, generational ordering and hegemonic constructions of childhood have definitely modulated that bluntly referred to as the “Age of Man”.

Given these decisive and divisive dimensions, attention to narrativization seems crucial. Here, there is some disagreement among scholars. While Moore proposes to replace the “Anthropocene” concept by “Capitalocene”, Yusoff holds that all ‘origin stories bury as much as they reveal’ (2018: 58). This connects to a point by Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘the stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big’ and therefore ironically offers the “Chthulucene” as a ‘needed third story’ (Haraway, 2016b: 50, 55). Although this may seem like verbal quibble, ‘it matters which stories tell stories’ (Haraway, 2016b: 101). Conceptual creation – in childhood studies too, e.g. of the “child-cene” (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020a) – can help counter business-as-usual agendas, such as already present in Crutzen and Stoermer’s notion that ‘[a]n exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management’ (2000: 18). Assuming clear(ly catastrophic) trajectories and invoking a ‘task’ to be solved like an ahistorical puzzle by elite researchers, these depictions rearticulate ‘the white man’s burden’ (Yusoff, 2018: 27) and encourage techno-fixes (such as geo-engineering or financial innovation) to a growth paradigm. Such scholarly critique also partly resonates with young activists’ rejection of ‘the same bad ideas that got us into this mess’ (Thunberg, 2018). Instead – while navigating technology will of course play a role – ‘multi-species politics of emancipation’ seem necessary (Moore, 2017: 599).

But what do such respons-able engagements with present conditions amount to? As Elizabeth Povinelli reminds us, pointing to ‘the fact that humans did not create this problem [but r]ather, a specific mode of human society did’ will not yet yield a ‘clear social or political solution’; complex incompatibilities between ways of life will remain which can only be addressed through situated attention (Povinelli, 2016: 12–13). In any case, as the above sketch should have shown, Anthropocene dynamics cannot be approached without referring to the vexed discourse on the “human” and the concrete relationalities upheld by it. Accordingly, Haraway has recently proposed to centre issues of ‘kinship’ in responding to present conditions. Specifically, she has called to ‘make kin, not babies’. It is this momentous proposal that the rest of the paper examines. ⁷

Haraway’s non-natalism

Haraway has suggested that if what she calls the “Chthulucene” were to have but one slogan, it should be ‘make kin, not babies’ (Haraway, 2016b: 102). ⁸ Certainly, Haraway has long been known for condensing crucial feminist interventions in catchy slogans (‘Cyborgs for Earthly Survival’, ’Run Fast, Bite Hard’, ‘only the god trick is forbidden' etc.). Linking epistemological and political questions and straddling the humanities/sciences division, Haraway has contributed to explorations of knowledges as situated, (gendered) projections in the study of animals, and the porosity of human-machine/human-animal boundaries. After encouraging feminists to think with the figure of the ‘Cyborg’, she has more recently turned to ‘companion species’ and the world-making in cross-species encounters. Given this background, it is unsurprising that Haraway has been one of the foremost critical voices in the “Anthropocene” debate, by highlighting its neglect of the plantation system, questioning human exceptionalist narrativizations, and co-creating concepts for ‘staying with the trouble’ of current multispecies conditions, such as ‘compost’ or ‘sympoiesis’. It is in this context of a call to ‘make-with’ other critters, too, that her new ‘dangerous’ (2018: 68) slogan is inscribed.

‘Make kin, not babies’ is a call that dominant modes of procreation and their oppressive pronatalism give way to low birth rates. This slogan is ‘dangerous' not least because certain strands of ‘anti-natalism’ are deeply connected to politics of the right. Haraway is attuned to connections between considerations of so-called “(over)population” and racist and imperialist state-making (2016b: 208–210); indeed, she even later offers 'make kin, not population' as a variation of her current slogan. Explicitly, she acknowledges that, across communities, sustaining offspring has differentiated relevance. But despite ‘the trouble with the category of population’ (Haraway, 2018: 99), she stresses that we cannot ignore the ‘ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers’ (Haraway, 2016b: 208) – which will reach ‘a level of 11 billion by 2100 if we are lucky’ (6) – and should not cede this turf or term to the right.

While related environmentalist concerns have also recently sparked a movement of climate-related ‘birth strikes’, ⁹ resistance to reproduction is not new. Apart from environmentalist considerations, Haraway’s proposal to make kin, not babies also relates to a tradition of queer and feminist struggles against naturalized heteronormative reproduction and its multi-faced violence. This tradition involves feminist struggles against confining women to (devalued) reproductive labour and more broadly against state-building pronatalism (see e.g. Federici, 2012: 97, on the post-WWII ‘silent strike against procreation’). Likewise, queer struggles have fought ‘reproductive futurism' and the governing figure of the ‘Child’ as the eschatology of all politics (e.g. Edelman, 2005). Acknowledging how – far from being ‘natural’ – parenting, and specifically motherhood, always is technology-mediated, queer-feminists have long entertained emancipatory technologies, e.g. concerning ectogenesis and surrogacy (Firestone, 2015 [1970]; Lewis, 2019).

Agreeing that ‘[k]in must mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy’ (Haraway, 2018: 92), Haraway and others urge “kinnovation” (making family in nonconventional ways; Haraway, 2016b: 208, adapting Lizzie Skurnick). For her part, Haraway envisions deep, multi-species connections (including through genetic sharing) and creative parenting and adoption practices. While offering some speculative and ironical fabulation (especially ‘The Camille Stories’, 2016b: chp. 8, or the idea of ‘reproductive tokens’, 2018, p. 75–76), Haraway importantly does not predetermine what exactly practices of ‘making kin’ shall look like. ¹⁰

Still, this stays troubled terrain. Both environmentalist and feminist rejections of reproductivism carry troubled legacies – of ecofascism and eugenic feminism, respectively – which have proven problematic especially in their inter-articulations. As said, Haraway anticipates such concerns – to the point where her ‘plea to “Make Kin, Not Babies”’ (Haraway, 2016b: 5–6; emphasis added) might come across as guilt-ridden (Lewis, 2017) – and tries to sensitize her proposal. Especially, she traces how in current (re-)productive regimes and across species, forced and prevented life are intimately connected (conceptualized by her as a double birth/double death dynamic creating the ‘Born Ones’ and the ‘Disappeared’; Haraway, 2018). Haraway is clearly aware of the craftings of quantifications and attaches caveats to her non-natalist proposal, e.g. by disavowing all forms of coercive population management.

Yet, some doubt whether these moves suffice. For one, despite Haraway’s caveats, her continuation of “population” discourse is alarming. Rather than merely ‘troubled', the concept is arguably ‘intolerable’ (Murphy, 2017: 137), i.e. impossible to recuperate, and consequently critical feminism’s relinquishment of this terrain not an issue of oversight or timidity but of sensitive awareness (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020: 478). After all, if ‘[r]ace is the grammar and ghost of population’, “population” seems inextricably linked to imperialist logics of quantification and coercive policies in the ‘economization of life’ (Murphy, 2017: 135; see also Schultz, 2020). This ties in with the realization that sensitive feminist politics must ‘reject […] faulty, stubbornly persistent, and dangerous neo-Malthusian logics of overpopulation’ (Ojeda et al., 2020: 327). It remains debatable whether current crises require a drastic reduction in (human) numbers – indeed, whether numbers will rise to those cited by Haraway is uncertain and rather than to numbers, concerns such as those about food scarcity relate to structures of production and distribution (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020). Against this background and in absence of concrete proposals of how the number of 2–3 billion people (envisioned by Haraway opposed to the predicted 11 billion people) could be reached without eugenics, pleading to curb “population” seems outright irresponsible.

Related to these worries about the notion of “population”, Harawayian non-natalism seems concerning for two further reasons. Firstly, Haraway explicates it in a way that pitches kin against kind, odd-kin against biogenetic offspring. Yet, this ‘entrenches a divide between nature and culture that has partially enabled the creation of the damaged world [Haraway and others] seek to heal’ as well as it ‘problematically recreates a sense that some kin are inherently valuable while others are not’ (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020: 481). Connectedly, the proposal to “kinnovate” could serve to individualize responsibility rather than focussing on (infra)structures which determine the stratification and distribution of reproduction (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020). In this vein, some scholars have read Haraway’s proposal as the abandonment of her earlier critical materialism, a development perceived either as perplexing (Schultz, 2020) or continuous with tendencies emerging in her recent work (Lewis, 2017).

These are complex matters – involving exegesis, empirics, and historiography – which I have no ambition to “settle” here. Indeed, Haraway and others continue to rework a critical non-natalist position and the debate on ‘making kin’ is very much ongoing (Clarke and Haraway, 2018; Strathern et al., 2019). For the purposes of this paper, I want to side with the critics’ cautioning against a priority of non-biogenetic oddity, and depictions of kinship as voluntarist. Still, I agree with Haraway – as do most critics – that thinking through arrangements of kinship is decisive for current conditions. Even if massifying numbers are not our concern, it seems clear – and indeed has been pointed out by feminists (of colour), among others, for a long time – that some ways of relating on this planet are especially violent and unsustainable. This includes both the dominance of patriarchal, possessive, Anthropocentric models of kinship as well as the associated policing and erasure of practices marked as “other”. Such kinship norms especially affect those positioned as children. Among other (including agreeable and ambivalent) aspects, the model of “the Family” is connected to domestic abuse, policing of child development (especially affecting disabled children), oppressive heteronormativity (especially affecting trans children), lacking support for poor, refugee, or multi-children families, and devaluations of peer relatings. In light of this, it seems indeed imperative to ‘unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species’ (Haraway, 2016b: 102). Haraway’s work will remain pertinent for this endeavour, with its potentials for challenging human exceptionalism and the dichotomy of double birth/double death through methods such as critical fabulation. But thinking-with Haraway also requires adding sensitivities to hers. And whatever one precisely makes of the former debate, I want to suggest that one crucial sensitivity concerns issues of adultism, i.e., the centring of adult perspectives and oppression of children. ¹¹

Making kin, not adultism

The slogan ‘make kin, not babies’ – while sidestepping the fraught marker of population in ‘make kin, not population’ – involves risks of its own. Connected to cautions of environmental reproductive justice, attempts to rethink kinship in the “Anthropocene” must also be decidedly childist – i.e., respond to the lived experiences of children for societal reconstructions. ¹² Such considerations are often neglected even in (otherwise cautious) critical studies interventions. Indeed, in activism and theory, ‘childhood continues to be one of the last acceptable bastions of essentialism’ (Rachel Rosen in Spyrou et al., 2018: 423). This might be because feminism and childism are sometimes framed in ‘antagonistic oppositions’ (Rosen and Twamley, 2018: 2). But despite the ‘difficult and, at times, fiercely territorial relationship’ (2) between these projects, it bears notice that along with feminisms and queer studies – and women as well as queer and trans people’s experiments with kinship beyond the nuclear family – childhood studies have done much to debunk the ‘child construct’ and its governmentalizing functions.

Additionally, however, childhood studies highlight that an exclusive focus on the “Child” and its discursive function overlooks both the material embeddedness of and the oppression inflicted upon those positioned as children in adultist societal orders (as Ellie Walton puts it ‘the materiality of the child […] slips through our scholarly cracks’; 2021: 333). Since these material dimensions are, in turn, upheld by language, we need to actively avoid reproducing adultism when talking about “babies” and other children. This involves resisting anti-child rhetoric – whether rooted in queer studies or in environmentalism (e.g. the view that ‘having children is the most destructive thing a person can do to the environment’; Mortimer, 2017). While queer-feminists recall that societies are immensely far away from not cherishing (certain, white, idealized) children, birthstrike tropes about children’s ecological footprint risk further degrading children to abstract numbers associated with consumption decisions and thereby contribute to tendencies of devaluing children as less-than-human or sidestepping the interests of real children in family policy. “Green” non-natalism also risks reinforcing (deeply intersectional) stigmas against certain children and their families by delimiting appropriate ways of being or relating. This can especially affect those children who are already constructed as environmental scapegoats, as Black children often are (Nxumalo, 2020: 538).

Notably, Haraway is acutely aware of the need for avoiding an anti-child non-natalism, urging that ‘[t]he born ones deserve real pro-baby, pro-child worlding’ (Haraway, 2018: 96). She shows herself to be deeply concerned with the plight experienced by children in worlds which, despite child-idealizing rhetoric, only care for children highly selectively, and highlights how the corollary of nation-building and heteronormative natalist pressure is the disappearance of children who are deemed of not the ‘“right kind”’ (2018: 95–96). ¹³ Elsewhere, Haraway proposes ‘making kin as a way of being really, truly prochild—making babies rare and precious—as opposed to the crazy [sic] pronatalist but actually antichild world in which we live’ (Haraway, 2016c). However, while helpful for calling attention to the starkly differentiated ways children are being valued, such formulations do not suffice to counter adultism.

In fact, the thought that ‘babies should be rare, nurtured, and precious’ (Haraway, 2016b: 208) echoes two dangerous dimensions of the naturalized Adult/Child division. Firstly, the passivation of children. In Haraway’s formulations, children predominantly appear only as kin being made – whether designed and birthed or nurtured and protected. This framing is continuous with a long-standing disregard of how children are not pre-social, inactive becomings, but indeed partake in world-makings. While childhood studies’ might have overemphasized ‘the agentic child’ (its ‘darling figure’) at the risk of reproducing neoliberal conceptions of autonomy and understating material oppressions (Rosen et al., 2019: 4), reverting to passivation is by no means preferable. The second and connected risk of implicit adultism concerns assigning children, once again, to an abstracted “Nature”. That nature and childhood are constructed in powerful conjunctions has long been analysed (Taylor, 2011). This is crucial to debates specifically concerned with the “Anthropocene” since relegating children to Nature (alternately Cheap or Precious) reiterates a “Western” (but globalized) conception of childhood highly connected to Anthropocene dynamics which ‘make natures legible to capital’ (Moore, 2018: 246). ¹⁴

Thus, rather than affirming the category of the child (“pro-child”), critical theory needs to question its workings. Just like feminist rather than “pro-woman” stances are called for, we should seek childist, not “pro-child” ones. Trying to integrate those “excluded” from a supposedly safe category of childhood does not suffice given that the very category of childhood is tied up with the ‘grammar of race’ and connected by homology to settler colonial logics, as Toby Rollo highlights (2016, 2018; see also Barajas, 2021). An anti-adultist stance is not achieved by merely self-bestowing a “pro-child” label. It requires questioning one’s own adultism and the potential discursive effects of one’s framings. Most crucially, it involves going beyond hegemonic adult-imagination about the appropriate place of children and babies in post-“Anthropocene” worlds. As Haraway reminds us, it matters which stories tell stories; the next section seeks to offer some hints at childist stories. (Haraway’s emphases on debunking the logics of ‘growth’ will of course stay pertinent here and resonate with some recent thought in childhood studies; e.g. Stockton, 2009.)

Towards childist kinship

Along with anti-racist and anti-colonialist sensibilities, anti-adultism is central to reinvision kinship practices in the “Anthropocene”. How can such a commitment be positively substantialized? In this final section, I suggest two connected routes: firstly, to learn from old and young conceptual debates in childhood studies; secondly, to follow childhood studies’ attention to the lived experience of children.

Lessons from childhood studies

Emerging in rejection of dominant socialization and developmental psychology notions of children as incomplete and pre-social becomings, childhood studies have unique insights to offer in recontextualizing contemporary practices of kinship. The attempt to ‘Abolish the Family’ (e.g. Lewis, 2019; Weeks, 2021) – i.e. the long-term endeavour of destabilizing the (white, bourgeois) normativity of reproduction privatized in coupledom and "bio-genetic" lineage (an endeavour sensitive to the dialectics of and libidinal attachments to the institutions of this norm) – can be informed by theorizing explicitly concerned with childhoods. As Leena Alanen pointed out already in 1988, given their mutual reliance, the ‘triangularity of childhood, the family and socialization’ can only be tackled together (Alanen, 1988: 54). In the wake of Alanen, childhood studies have led the way in theorizing the intersectional workings of generational ordering regulating the relatings and kinships between children and adults.

While engagements by scholars of childhood in various areas provide impulses on cracks in these orders (e.g., normative engagements with multi-parenting; Gheaus, 2019), a core contribution by childhood studies has been to highlight the (historical, global) multiplicity of childhoods. Through its contextualization of the currently hegemonic child-construct (building on historical analyses such as Philippe Ariès’s and anthropological explorations of kinship), childhood studies have shed light on extant diversity in ways of being young (and old). While hegemonic notions about childhood may seem inevitable, “deviant” ways of being-a-child-in-relation have always existed (although much is omitted in the archive). Thus, instead of seeking “innovations”, sometimes it can perhaps suffice to recognize that what today are often considered queer childhoods and families abound(ed) in various spacetimes.

Of course, just as childhood studies does not offer homogenous takes on these issues (e.g., adult privilege has often been neglected even here; Barajas, 2021), perspectives on nonnormative adult-child relationships are not exclusive to this field. For example, Alexis Gumbs, writing within Black Studies, explores how m/othering – a queer practice vis-à-vis antinatalist targeting – can ‘transform […] the parenting relationship from a property relationship to a partnership in practice’ and enable ‘non-dominating relationships with our children’ (Gumbs, 2016). What I am suggesting, then, is merely that there are fruitful and yet underexplored links to be forged to childhood studies theorizations here, for instance on how to resist generational ordering through intergenerational solidarity. ¹⁵ Engagements with kinship can specifically learn from conceptualizations of children’s agency, long central to childhood studies. Importantly, recent positions (e.g. Abebe, 2019) can help overcome neoliberal assumptions of agency as creative, autonomous choice, also implicit in notions of making kin or kinnovating. Finally, childhood studies’ methods can be insightful – after all, the field builds on an impetus to take children’s worldings seriously in their own right and continues to advance practices for this (e.g. ethnomethodology). Shifting Haraway’s suggestion to ‘make kin not babies’ and in line with ideas of letting children teach adults (Biswas, 2021), in closing, then, I want to tentatively call to witness babies (and older children) make kin. ¹⁶

Lived experiences of kinship: Multispecies childhoods

In addition to destabilizations of adultism and the conceptual explorations of childhood studies, reinvisioning of kinship can benefit from tuning into children’s practices. In entertaining the present-future of kin-making, we can listen to children’s own views on what childhood can mean (see e.g. Cassidy et al., 2017) or children’s own analyses of the oppressions they face (e.g. in the family). For reflection on how to ‘unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin’, it also helps to extend our focus beyond (idealized) Western childhoods by considering how in many places children engage in paid work, head households (Abebe, 2019) or uphold networks of care (e.g. ProNATs, 2020) – care work which ‘is often either overlooked or pathologized’ (Barajas, 2021: 32). Pursuing Moore’s quest for multi-species alliances – especially ones more immediately available than the genetic fusions envisioned by Haraway – we can also turn to already existing practices by children. I want to zoom into some of these in the remainder. ¹⁷

By learning-with the joint becomings of children and rabbits in Australia, Affrica Taylor outlines some ways of responding to the “Anthropocene” already occurring in the ‘small and seemingly insignificant events’ in children’s lives (Taylor, 2020: 354). Thereby, Taylor’s work is situated in a larger body of recent work addressing ‘multispecies childhoods’, i.e., the entanglements between human children and more-than-human animals. ¹⁸ Research has illuminated how children and dogs can become companions in precarious city settings, how children employ mimicry to explore embodiedness with other animals, and how intimate, non-innocent practices of care emerge in these encounters. In midst of all the trouble, such practices can arguably (sometimes) enable ‘non-hierarchical relations of difference’ to emerge (Hohti and Tammi, 2019: 177).

While such more-than-human encounters may seem age-independent, Taylor (in a different paper) goes further in invoking the ‘non-divisive relations that many young children already have with the world’ (Taylor, 2017: 1458–1459), thus suggesting that children’s practices are specifically positioned. This is a hazardous move. As Sjögren (2020) highlights, discussions of children in the “Anthropocene” risk essentialising children as ‘Extraordinary’, e.g. as unimplicated in relations of power or as in original touch with nature. In invoking ‘non-divisive relations’ which set (many) children’s world-relatings apart from those of adults, Taylor seemingly comes close to reproducing the mutually stabilizing essentializations of childhood and nature which she herself has helped deconstruct (see Taylor, 2011).

Still, I believe there is an important point in Taylor’s emphasis on the potential of children’s practices for shifting relationalities. After all, it is possible to attempt a regrouping of childhood and nature(s) that avoids Rousseauian essentializations (Hohti and Tammi, 2019: 171–173). Importantly, such a regrouping must acknowledge the contingency of intimacies between children and what Yusoff theorizes as the inhuman(e). Rather than “a priori” or “natural”, any heightened intimacy stems from a hybridity of discursive and material factors. These factors are inseparable from the (adultist) violence involved in the relegation of children to a separate (natural) sphere.

With these reminders in mind, one can appreciate the thought that children are often well positioned to ‘operat[e] outside of the hyper-separating logics of rational Man’s foundational human-animal divide’ (Taylor, 2020: 348). This is precisely because (many) ‘children are less likely to have learned the “rules” of the “Man versus Nature” game’ (Taylor, 2020: 345). Again, I would be careful not to formulate this in a blanket way (some children, especially outside of white “protected” contexts, have to learn many such rules early and violently) or suggest that the ‘appropriate subject of the Anthropocene is the child’ (Sjögren, 2020: 7), a vision arguably connected to the reiteration of population logics in the commercial dream of changing the world by “investing in girls” (Murphy, 2017, part 3). But beyond questions of essential identity, the fact is that some children’s conceptualizations and practices are generatively unruly, irreverent to valuations underscoring “Anthropocene” (kinship) logics. Indeed, this is a thought articulated by child activists themselves, e.g. when XR Kids (2021) urge: ‘Do not underestimate our generation and our age group. Being between 8-12 years old means that we have not yet been fully influenced by the broken system […]’. Relatedly, Taylor outlines how the Australian rabbit-becoming children are already ‘getting on with the job of inheriting and cohabiting damaged worlds without recourse to human heroicism and dominion’ (Taylor, 2020: 340). Adults can learn from such practices for modes of kinship which disidentify with heteronormative, Anthropocentric, and humanist conceptions. ¹⁹

Once more, this childist point must be accompanied by caution to acknowledge children’s non-innocence as well as their diverse material embeddedness. We need to beware of stories that homogenise across children – e.g., by neglecting how some children are expulsed from the category of childhood and its associated opportunities for multispecies play, or how, in line with voluntarist accounts of “kin-making”, children are often pictured as exclusively creative and disruptive (Cook, 2018). Sensitive ways of ‘deep hanging out’ (Somerville and Powell, 2019) with children and practices of ‘speculative fabulation’ – not just about hypothetical Camilles but with actual children – are needed for ‘changing the story’ of kinship in the “Anthropocene”.

Concluding remarks

Adressing the crises of the “Anthropocene” requires, as Haraway has stressed, questioning hegemonic kinship practices. Connected to sensitivities around individualizing responsibility or reproducing eugenic population discourse, an indispensable companion for rethinking kinship practices is childism. For one, cautions against adultist (linguistic) violence are needed. Also, turning to theoretical debates in childhood studies and the lived experiences of children can help thinking through ways of relating in destructed worlds, especially across species. Haraway’s work has already prompted stimulating reflections on “Anthropocene” kinship (including in childhood studies) and will remain crucial for unpacking extractivism, human exceptionalism, and the logics of growth. Still, some of the questions Haraway raises – especially on the possibility of a non-natalism that is not anti-child – can benefit from childist answers, or reframings. Instead of romanticizing lip service to being “pro-child”, Harawayian thought on kinship could just use a dose of childism.

This is a call then both for the debate on kinship to engage childist insights; and for childhood studies scholars to continue to confidently engage the issue of kinship in the current “cene”. Many questions remain: What can adults learn from children for tackling the infrastructures of reproduction and questions of “numbers”? What can they also learn about unmaking certain relations or about ‘cuts in relationality’ (Colebrook, 2019)? How can multispecies childhoods be approached in a way that is not anachronous but considers current technological mediations? What does intergenerational solidarity mean in reproductive matters? How can we better connect childhood studies and critical gerontology as well as queer and disability studies on these questions? For the moment, however, let us do without the ‘make kin, not babies’. I agree with Haraway that present conditions require many slogans and submit the following: ‘Make Kin With Babies’, ‘Let Children Make (You) Kin’, and ‘Kids for Kinder Reproduction’. Perhaps, rather than abandoning ‘Kind’ for ‘Kin’, Haraway’s ‘Children of Compost’ can find real companion in a ‘Kind of Kin’. ²⁰