The noticeable thing for me about free school meals discourse is how children are treated as the property of their parents. It’s “parental responsibility” to feed children, so children starving doesn’t count as suffering in and of itself. -

Free school meal discourse argues that, as children are objects belonging to their parents, they don’t have rights to food or protection on their own, as citizens of a wealthy nation. -

Also as children are simultaneously viewed as objects and as young objects requiring instruction, it renders state cruelty “benign” (Sanchez-Eppler), as their starvation becomes a form of lesson or upbringing for the nation. -

So politicians are proud of starving children to teach parents responsibility because this is a part of how the Empire has always operated. Children were put into institutions, transported, forcibly migrated, imprisoned in residential schools, to teach us all how to be British.

Ideas of parental responsibility and teachability mean that but poverty, austerity, etc always affect children most. This is a “iuvenilisation” of poverty, cruelty representing itself as some kind of public service. -

We need to stop talking only about the parents’ performance. Children deserve food because they are people. They are an important group in society, to society. They live 24 hour days like the rest of us, they think, experience. They have rights to state funds like everyone else.

Being young doesn’t take away rights, but society continues to struggle with this. Your boss can’t punch you, but you might want the right to hit children? you can’t be starved to teach colleagues a lesson, but you might demand the right to starve children to teach their parents?

And finally, it’s no random coincidence that it’s centres like Roehampton’s centre for children’s literature that are seen as disposable by the ignorant VC class of U.K. universities. Nothing to do with children is valued on its own terms - including their history and literature.

As a historian of childhood I live in a country of performative cruelty towards children, but at the same time have to handle being patronised by colleagues as someone who does a sort of historical babysitting. Because nothing related to children is valued in this vicious country