Towards a Philosophy of Children
- Jul 5
- 4 min read
When philosophy imagines the subject - the rational actor, the citizen, the individual - it almost always imagines an adult. The philosophical subject is mature, autonomous and self-governing. Children, when they appear at all, occupy the margins. They are treated as incomplete beings, defined by what they are expected to become rather than by what they are.
Our everyday language reflects this assumption. "They need boundaries." "They are testing us." "They don't understand yet." The child appears not simply as another individual but as a distinct category whose members are governed by rules they did not make and authority they cannot challenge. Childhood, from this perspective, is not just a biological stage but a political condition. To understand it, we need to look beyond developmental psychology to the organisation of power itself.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, childhood was interpreted through the language of psychoanalysis. Following Freud, the family became the theatre of unconscious desire, structured by the Oedipus complex and its dramas of rivalry and identification. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose a different starting point. The family is less a psychological destiny than the child's first political institution. The child's desires, fears and attachments emerge within relations of material dependence and asymmetrical authority. Psychoanalysis translates these relations into the language of family romance, but in doing so it obscures the political reality of childhood. What appears as an unconscious complex is also an encounter with hierarchy, command and subordination.
These relations extend well beyond the family. They crystallise in institutions such as the modern school. Schools are usually presented as sites of emancipation, places where children acquire the knowledge needed for adult life. Yet children learn to speak, walk, negotiate relationships and make sense of the world long before entering a classroom. They possess an extraordinary capacity to learn without formal instruction.
The school undoubtedly teaches many valuable things. But its function is also disciplinary. By separating children from the wider social world and organising their time, movement and attention, the school does more than transmit knowledge. It produces a particular kind of subject: the student. This subject learns not only mathematics or literature but habits of obedience, evaluation and dependence upon institutional authority. Childhood itself becomes organised around supervision, assessment and preparation for adulthood.
The political character of childhood becomes especially visible in the figure of the little girl. She occupies the intersection of two forms of minority: age and gender. Expectations that she be "sweet", compliant or well behaved are reinforced through countless ordinary gestures and phrases - a pat on the head, baby talk, "act like a lady", "you're just a little girl". Each appears trivial in isolation. Together they construct a social position. They teach her to inhabit a body and an identity already defined by others.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the little girl therefore occupies a privileged place within minoritarian politics. She reveals how apparently natural identities are actively produced through language, institutions and everyday practices. The point is not that she is simply a victim. Rather, her position exposes the mechanisms through which social hierarchies reproduce themselves.
How, then, might these relations be transformed? Deleuze and Guattari answer through the concept of becoming-child. We normally think of becoming as the child's movement towards adulthood, but Deleuze and Guattari reverse the direction. Becoming-child is something the adult must undergo. This does not mean returning to infancy or behaving childishly. It means relinquishing the position of mastery that adulthood so often assumes. When the adult ceases to occupy the role of unquestioned authority - whether as parent, teacher or expert - a different relation becomes possible. Adult and child meet not simply across a hierarchy but within a shared field of experimentation and learning.
Becoming-child is therefore not a celebration of innocence. It is the undoing of the forms of authority that define adulthood as the norm against which childhood is measured.
This politics rarely appears in dramatic revolutions. It is more often found in the figures who inhabit the margins of literature. Herman Melville's Bartleby answers every demand with the quiet formula, "I would prefer not to." Franz Kafka's protagonists drift through bureaucratic worlds whose rules they neither master nor fully obey. These figures do not seek to replace one majority with another, but rather interrupt the smooth functioning of dominant systems through hesitation, refusal and indifference. They introduce a stammer into power itself.
A philosophy of childhood, then, is not only about children. It is about the political organisation of adulthood and the apparatus of infantilisation through which power is exercised. Children are its most obvious targets, but women, racialised groups and other minorities have long been infantilised as well, cast as dependent, irrational or incapable of self-government. It asks us to examine the institutions, habits and forms of speech that present authority as natural while defining dependence as something to be overcome. The task is not simply to prepare children for adulthood, but to question the very model of adulthood that our institutions continually reproduce. Becoming-child is the possibility of loosening that model, opening a space in which relations between adults and children are no longer organised primarily through command, obedience and hierarchy.
