A Last Note on the Nuclear Family

Against confining practices, young persons have always demonstrated ademocratic capacity that needs not only to be expressed, but exercised at will. Ending on a positive note with one fictional model of a radical peer public from Louise Fitzhugh's Nobody's Family is Going to Change, the conclusion reasserts that children should have the right to a public and participatory identity. Children can form fair, self-governing youth publics when given the chance. We, as the public, need to stepup in providing community connections as well as greater collective support forchildcare beyond the traditional nuclear family.

No Child Is an Island

This chapter turn sattention to the shrinking territory young people are permitted to roam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, due to protection is teliding of participation. "Islanding" in 1920s and 1930s comic strips and later Robins on adesis contextualized with in analysis of protections. By the twenty-first century the sentimentalized suppression of youth was fascinatingly demonstrated by the popularity and corporate sponsorship of competitive teensailors attempting global circumnavigation, as well as a corresponding protectionist legal and media backlash. In the failure of Abby Sunder land's global venture (with much parent-blaming) and Laura Dekker's success (inspite of immensepersecution from child protectionists), the author considers these subtler consequences of protectionist premises.

Women and Children First

At its most basic and cliché level, protectionism require slip service to "putting children first, "while obscuring just exactly what that means or how it can be done. This chapter expose sharsh hierarchies of survival usually hidden by sent imental romance and heroic narrative, enabled by eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryprinciples of property and ownership, in which children were far from first and often dead last. Though the chivalrousecho "women and children first" would become adominant sentiment in fictionalized modern survival narratives, early maritime historiestella different story about protective measures for children at sea, which the author highlights through historic accounts of rescue practice during famous ship wrecks, the legal predicament of Amistad "orphans," and even customs of survival can nibalism. Protection, where present, ishighly selective, and even where seemingly fairly applied can impedeparticipation.

The Price of Protectionist Pretense

This chapter evaluates children's books about illness as potential rights-bearing, or rights-suppressive, discourses, through the lens of anthropological findings about actual children facing potentially life-threatening disease or in oculation to protect against it. Adults often actively with hold the truth from dying child patients, denying their ethical rights to medical honesty, awareness, and agency. Children's books about canceren act the same denial and dishonesty about terminal illness by establishing a common pretense for politely avoiding the touchy subject, demonstrating the pervasiveness of a protectionism that in fact impinges upon children's participatory rights to full knowledge and self-determination about their bodies. Ultimately "cancer books" tend to "protect" parents during their emotional struggle to support children rather than respecting young patients and readers by acknowledging their right to be in formed and participate as knowing medical subjects.

Babies in Boxes

This chapter will setup a temporal contrast for twenty-first-century tendencies by reaching further into a generalized past, beginning with folklore and traditions of child a bandonment and adoption, to connect and compare them with familiar modern parallels like baby boxes and foster care, reflected more lightly in 1920s comic-strips like Frank King's Gasoline Alley (1918-1959), Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre (1919-1938), and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (1924-1968). Woven in with "real world" examples will be representations from popular narratives like Pullman's Golden Compass (1995) and Neal Shusterman's Unwind (2007). This chapter should setup recognition of ways in which participation was actually greater forsome children before industrialization peaked, revealing through contrast adominant modern motif of child containment.

Introduction: Familial Fallacies

Perils of Protection utilizes literary and historical parallels to identify a deep structure of protectionism that, through a history of privatizing childhood, has infact left minors increasingly isolated indwindling (and sometimes none xistent) social units such as "nuclear family," vulnerable to multiple in justices made possible by eroded or unrecognized participatory rights. Tracing the ideologies used to rationalize protective encroachment on child participation, the author links these shifts to premise shidden but in herent to industrial modernization, privatized property, and the nuclearized family. This pattern of oppressivelogic will be exposed in the varied contexts of "women and children first "policy in ship wrecks, geographic restriction through enclosing child spaces, abandonment practices, censorship, and medical consent. The authoral so highlights pervasivemotifs of chivalry, fragility, and manipulation through containment: ships in bottles, enclosures, islands, babies in boxes, baskets, playpens, and the "prison-houses" of language and pretense.

The Prison House of Comics Censorship and Participatory Resistance

This chapter centers on child rights to access knowledge and entertainment of their choosing with the example of comics censorship in the 1940s and 1950s in particular, and a case study of resistance in Sheldon Mayer's comicbook series, Sugarand Spike, which was conceivedat the height of this controversy. Favoring evidence in letter columns, fan mail, and letters to the Senate Sub committee on Juvenile Delinquency protesting against censorship, the author demonstrates how protests for participation were for the most part ignored in the name of protecting minors. By utilizing archival materialas an indication of the reciprocity between comics creators and readers, the author demonstrates the capacity of many minors for democratic participation demonstrated within the medium and industry of comicbooks.