Children are not one essential thing except perhaps sacred

If, like me, you’ve spent a fair bit of time on the internet or in playgrounds or generally in places where parents converge, then you know that people have strong opinions about the way childhood should look like, and they’re not afraid to share them.

There are the Let’s Take Back Childhood people, and the Screens Are Ruining the Youth people, and the Children Need Structure people. All of the above, and so much more, proclaimed with the confidence of someone who has studied the topic at length and has evidence that all children everywhere will thrive their way. Adults love to bend ideas of childhood, and consequently their children (and by default, if they happen to have a platform, other people’s children) to their own ends.

We need to ask ourselves who gives us the right to make any sort of choice that does not take our child’s voice into account, that does not take into account the multiplicity of experiences that children present us with, and their sovereignty as full people.

This, crucially, is what is often missing from all the conversations: what do the young people think/want/believe/desire/need/dream/hope/experience?

Because I love to overthink, I often wonder what my own two children, who have been unschooled, or rather just lived life as unschoolers (because unschooling isn’t something we do to children), will one day say about their childhood. Theirs is the only opinion about their childhood that matters, in the end.

I used to believe that unschooling was some sort of a purity test, because that is what I had been led to believe: that I had to remove the harm that had been done to my children and that we could somehow go back to how it should have been, how it always was, a sort of natural state of learning - some use that word in unschooling circles still, in fact, natural learning, as if there is such a thing as learning that is unnatural.

I used to believe there was a way childhood should look, and that I was striving for it with my family. Not that I was returning to a time when it was that way (there are no tradwives in this home!), but that perhaps we could touch back on our innate wildness, our evolutionarily ‘normal' ways of being.

What I have learned though, is that I cannot and should not shape my children to be who I believe they shoud have been, regardless of whether I think it’s a ‘biological norm’ (something I’m increasingly wary of, frankly). Not only that, but there is a point at which I need to stop trying to overthink, rationalise, even make sense of them as if they are creations I am trying to fit into a concept that I have formed. (Because actually, that’s exactly what adults do - we believe we have created children and therefore proceed to mould them into an idea of childhood we have also construced.)

The theme of my reading this month has been: there is no one childhood.

One of the hardest, most radical shifts for many of us when we begin to deschool is recognising that our understanding of children is to a large extent socially constructed. It is hard because it is scary; it knocks down all of the paper houses we have built for ourselves, the ones we’ve found some sort of shelter under, the ones we thought would save us, would provide us and our child a guaranteed future.

There are some biological needs children have that appear to be consistent across cultures, even though the ways they are provided do vary culture by culture. But the way that children are viewed and conceived of, our adult construction of who children are, and consequently the ways that we treat them, is something that we have essentially made up - this is what it means to state there is no universal child. There is no one way to define childhood.

And not just that; it might actually be desirable for childhood to be just a little bit “opaque,” in a world where understanding and clarity pave the way for forces that insist on taking over, flattening, colonizing children. (This is something I read in Theorizing Childhood, and I love the way it is described in the book. I had never thought of understanding as a form of seizing, as violence.)

Can we say then that childhood is so many things but never one thing, except perhaps sacred: it’s a time we get to nurture a child in all the ways they appear to need it, a time they get to grow within their community, form connections with people and place.

This piece was going to be about the famiglia nel bosco, the family in the woods. But instead it’s actually about all the children.

Because the political party that shouts Protect Children! when they are snatched from their parents by the government because they are homeschooled should also show the same uproar when they are snatched from their parents by the government’s armed militia when their parents are just trying to build a better life.

But the thing about childhood is, that it’s only sacred when white bodies are holding it up as sacred. Can you imagine a pale-haired, pale-skinned child, brutally taken from their parents, kept in a home and forbidden from being reunited with their family?

You don’t have to. It happened. But not in the US. Come along with me.

The ‘family in the woods,’ as they became known, whipped up a huge media storm in Italy: on the surface, a family that is off-grid, non-vaccinating, unschooling and living in the woods is truly nothing out of the ordinary for us here in Maine. But this mother and father and their three children live near Palmoli, in the Italian region of Abbruzzi. And the thing about Italy is that only a sliver of the population homeschools, and off-grid is not a known concept, and choosing not to vaccinate your children is considered borderline neglectful. The family had been on the local authorities’ radar for a few years, but things came to a head in November 2025 when they were rushed to the local emergency room after eating poisonous mushrooms they had foraged.

The details above then came to light, together with further information about their lifestyle and what appeared to be most worrying to local social services: the children, twins aged 6 and an older child aged 8 could not write their names and were allegedly ‘behind’ academically.

This aspect caused such an enormous uproar and was a huge part of the reason the children were removed from their parents: while homeschooling is permitted in Italy, unschooling is extremely misunderstood and the court essentially viewed it not as a form of homeschooling but as something altogether separate and basically a form of educational neglect.

Of course, the case was immediately politicised, with the far right seizing on the parental rights aspect of it,and the left having all sorts of opinions on what children ‘should’ be learning at any given time, and what sort of life they should be leading. The three children were subsequently moved to a care home where they have daily access to their mother, and the father was left to live in their family home.

This feels like the repetition of a familiar story that I’ve written and talked about before: the right always sides with parental power, and the left sides with public institutions.

The famglia nel bosco story was shocking to Italians, but utterly unsurprising to me: I know that the parental rights movement in the US has been bolstered by the political right, and that a lot of our rights as homeschoolers come from this movement. I also know that it is the left that continues to defend public schooling even in the face of the facts: failing schools, increased segregation, struggling kids, and so much more. It is so boring that this story hardly ever changes.

It is so boring that some of us sit here, in the uneasy middle that isn’t even the middle, it’s just someplace else entirely: a place where we don’t want ‘parental rights’ but rather we want an acknowledgement that freedom for our children means freedom for ourselves too, and for all children and all people we all, that we are bound together; and a place where we support and guide our young people rather than act as if we know best, as if they are our property.

It is so boring that some of us are still waiting someplace else trying to explain that it’s not that we don’t want people to have free childcare or education, it’s not that we don’t support teachers, it’s that we don’t think it has to look so much like prison, we don’t think work needs to look so much like prison either.

We don’t think there is one way for a child to exist, we don’t think there is such a thing as one childhood, one universal child.

And so, when I looked into the famiglia nel bosco, it felt so disheartening to see the same exact patterns play out in terms of the ways a family’s situation was immediately seized upon and politicized.

What feels most disappointing to me is the same old reaction of the political left: why do we cling so hard to public education? Why do we hold on so tight to the rigidity of every child going through the same motions, with little to no regard for the individual child?

Have we forgotten that when we talk about what children should be doing, we’re talking about something we made up? Have we forgotten about the 100 languages of children (which, by the way, we Italians should know about! Remember how Reggio was born as an anti-fascist movement?!) Why does the average person believe that if a child is not ‘on track’ with reading and writing at age 6, then their future prospects will somehow be stunted? Do we understand that the entire idea of child development is a Western imperialist capitalist construct?

I’m reading Unschooled by Caro Giles, where she tracks, meeting by painful meeting, her family’s path to fight for a funded education that supports their diverse and complex needs, many of which make it impossible to learn inside a conventional classroom. Increasingly, schools simply are proving unsuitable. It’s not that children don’t fit in school, it’s that schools are too rigid for the multiplicity of childhood - schools predict for just one childhood, and expect all children to squeeze themselves into it. It’s no longer realistic or desirable to expect children to do this. In fact, it’s actually harmful, as Caro’s descriptions of her daughters’ struggles make abundantly clear. And I know for a fact she is not alone. Caro lives in the UK but the story is the same in Italy, in the US.. worldwide, perhaps.

But was the family in the woods neglectful? Was it a case of the children being not unschooled, but educationally neglected? And if so, did the government do the right thing?

I find the issues that lie on the border of something to be hard, because it’s tough to know based on the information we have from the media, which itself also often leans left or right.

It occurs to me that this story would have looked very different had this family been not a white, educated British-Australian family but a working class, immigrant, brown or Black family. Would the political right have swept to defend them then? Would anyone even have cared about the children’s wellbeing, about whether they could read or write Italian?

The same questions, but opposite, might be asked about Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5 year old who was taken by ICE agents earlier this week, and used as ‘bait’ (actual words used by ICE) in order to detain his father.

Where was the political right, defending the clear violation of the ‘parental rights’ of this child’s parent?

This essay was going to be about how we decide what is unschooling and what is neglect; how much responsiblity do local governments have to take care of children, when they suspect there is neglect? I’ve written before why mixing unschooling up with neglect is somewhat of a red herring, although not an utterly useless question.

The ‘parental rights’ people will have you believe that the state should take their grubby paws off our children because we, the parents, always know best. But sometimes, a child’s first abuser is in fact their parent. The home is most often the site of physical and sexual abuse of children. Parents often control, police and surveil their children to greater extents than the outside world, and perhaps this is something many of us are reluctant to admit because our excuse is that we do it out of love.

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And so I empathise with the local government and courts of l’Aquila when they acted because even though separating children from their parents was arguably not in the the best interest of the children, the initial impetus for taking action was in good faith: they were worried about the way these children were living (this family had been on the local services’ radar since at least 2024), isolated from society, without electricity and running water, possibly without a suitable education, in a context where all of these things are red flags.

While I don’t like the idea of the state stepping in and tearing families apart, and while I know that the state has a history of targeting Indigenous people and marginalized groups in this way in some countries, in the context of Italy I can see why this felt like a way to safeguard children.

Approached from another angle, it could also come across as a way for a heavy-handed state to enforce conformity on its citizens, to single out difference and come down hard on something it simply isn‘t willing to tolerate let alone understand.

Foucault and others have pointed out the way that forcing people into institutions brings the violence of the state upon them. He tracked the way schooling (one of the conditions for reuniting the children in the woods with their parents is weekly check-ins with the local school to assure their academic progress) is a means of enforcing discipline on children through a ‘cellular’ model that echoes that of the jailhouse: children are separated, ranked, isolated or placed together, moved around according to arbitrary logics of space, time and architecture. Adults are placed in positions of power, and also ranked in a separate hierarchy of their own.

The result of Italy not knowing what to do with this family, is that three children who were isolated and perhaps lifestyle that was unconventional and that I would personally not endorse based on what I’ve read of the very light and love vibes of Catherine Birmingham’s blog, but who didn’t seem to be in immediate danger, are now separated from their parents. According to some sources, they are perhaps also significantly traumatised and we know that a sense of safety is one of the main components of a healthy learning environment (and wasn’t learning one of the state’s main priorities?).

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I am sitting on my sofa, bracing for a winter storm that’s supposed to be coming to our little island in Maine, hoping against hope that we won’t lose power, and mourning yet another killing at the hands of ICE. It’s interesting to me that the tactics state power uses to discipline, separate and control us are constantly shifting, camouflaging, and yet they are fundamentally similar. And, when they don’t fit our political agenda we have become so good at unseeing them.

I do not mean to compare the children of the family in the woods to the children taken by ICE to any other child that is a casualty of our bad politics, our wars, our poor decisions. There is no hierarchy of pain when we are tearing children away from their loved ones and carers - there is only the issue of who is coming to the aid of those children based on what those children look like, based on our conceptions of what children ‘should’ be doing, and what that reveals about the soul of our culture.

There is also the issue of when are we ready to call something oppression and violence and when are we still tip-toeing around it because fundamentally our ideas of who children are don’t involve children are fully-formed people.

The thing that sends me into despair, is that I don’t trust any of the systems we have put into place to substitute what we once, hundreds of thousands of years ago, seemingly had.

And what pulls me out of despair and fills me with hope is that we have work to do to rebuild a semblance of family and community that keeps us all accountable to the children in our lives, so that they are not at the mercy of a violent state, so that they have a range of trusted adults to rely on, so that the children’s parents also have a range of adults to keep them accountable and support them in what is some of the hardest, most crucial work anyone will ever do - loving and caring for a child.

Thank you for getting to the end of this long long essay and for supporting my work and writing. I love you all!

Fran x