It’s okay if child liberation & family abolition make you uncomfortable.

Ask questions, acknowledge your feelings — these are the growing pains of a radically new idea.

A glitched image of two adults and a child lying on a picnic blanket.

I remember that I first encountered the concept of family abolition on Tumblr when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and that it made me massively uncomfortable. To remove the system of protection and nurturance that guide a young child’s life seemed to me to create a horrifying vacuum of meaning, into which absolutely anything could climb and take advantage.

Without the structure of the family, who would prevent a child from being abused by any and every random adult that ever had access to them, I wondered? And how could a child ever be expected to get ahead in life if they didn’t have multiple loving relatives devoted to their wellbeing, who spoke to them, read to them, taught them how to cook and to clean, how to balance a checkbook, drive a car, and distinguish good from bad?

I myself had been a survivor of multiple assaults, including some intense violations when I was a child, so I found the whole concept triggering. I knew that not every person could be trusted around children, and that young people were naive and largely powerless, and so they needed someone to defend them. That some people…