I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core.
The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of as normal and platonic, like getting together to braid one another’s hair or do nails or other grooming activities, along with gossip and food and music. The response I’ve gotten doesn’t tell me that the idea is being rejected because it came from someone with a masc presentation, but just that the idea itself feels icky or weird or frivolous, regardless of who proposed it.
I think we’ve reached a time of cultural compression when the the need to mask in public makes casual intimacy too costly—if we forget for a couple of hours that we’re supposed to be competing with one another, and stepping on one another’s shoulders and fingers and toes, we’ll miss an opportunity for social advancement. Moments of casual intimacy remind us of the brutality of the work environments we operate within, and since it seems that brutality is unavoidable, it is the intimacy that becomes the thing to avoid.
And since I experience this casual intimacy as a kind of vitamin—an important part of a balanced social diet—I recognize that we have created a condition where everyone is starved of something that would always be available if we would collectively let down our guard and stop performing invulnerability. We hunger for it, but someone’s rules say that we are only allowed to experience it within a contractually sanctioned relationship, so when we get feelings outside of those pigeonholes, there is a conflict—between the natural tendency toward connection, and the imposed imperative to suppress the connection.
This being so, I own that I will always be perceived as too much—”too familiar,” “flirty,” “inappropriately intimate,” “overly emotional,” “dramatic,” “too informal,”—simply because I refuse to accept the inevitability of the brutality that many people face in their work and social environments. I refuse to suppress the natural tendency toward connection. I refuse to impose a contractual constraint on where I experience intimacy. I feel it is actually my whole job to remind my community that productivity is not the goal, that free time is a virtue to be cultivated, and that casual intimacy is our actual settled and natural state.
That being so, I might describe the grief I feel about the loss of a loved one in the middle of a work meeting. I might express that an interaction with an especially loud and reckless motorcycle made me feel vulnerable when applying for a business license. I might point to the behavior of a person in a management position, and show how that person is taking an opportunity to punch down, rather than being accepting, inclusive, and supportive. “Too much” means “not silent,” and in spaces where we are expected to disappear, “not silence” equals “too much.”
And to be clear, what I am calling intimacy has nothing to do with sexuality or even physical touch. Intimacy is simply the willingness to return to our basic, true character in the presence of another, and to drop the mask that work and social navigation require of us. Intimacy is simply abandoning the performance of invulnerability for a moment or two. Intimacy is simply acknowledging the fiction of independence, and experiencing the wonder and joy of interdependence, even if only for a couple of moments.
At the present moment, I propose that the most radical and revolutionary act we can engage in (but the most powerful, since we can engage in it any time) is simply the act of casual intimacy—when we acknowledge that each of us has a way that we care for ourself, and that we could just as easily care for one another in the same moment.
As we brush our hair, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by brushing someone else’s hair. As we manage our pet’s excrement on a walk, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by helping a loved one who needs support to manage their excrement. As we feel a moment of grief for the loss of a loved one, recognize that we could just as easily feel a moment of grief alongside a friend who is experiencing a similar moment.
I propose that the more we engage in casual intimacy, the less we demand that our contractual relationships fulfill our needs for intimacy, and that that quality in itself is liberating to both sides of our relationships.
So, on that note: let’s get together soon to braid each other’s hair, or do our nails together, and have some snacks and music and gossip time, and maybe cry about our dog that just died, or about the parent that doesn’t remember us that we are caring for.
In this economy, this is the type of care that cannot be monetized, and that is only available to the privileged. Let’s privilege one another with casual intimacy, and invite whomever we can into that state of privilege—because if everyone is included in it, it is no longer a privilege, but a right—simply a natural state of being, around which we organize ourselves, around everyone’s comfort, and not just our own.
all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.
the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.
ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.
ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.
ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.
ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.
ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.
ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.
ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.
How Making Sense of My Child’s Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet?
My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.
They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.
The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.
Making Sense of the Early Adult Drive for Autonomy and Relevance
My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.
As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.
Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.
I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”
Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.
Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.
Understanding Cannabis as a Regulation Support
Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?
Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.
The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:
Excitation/inhibition imbalance (the leading cortical model in autism/ADHD research)—the nervous system runs with too much glutamatergic drive relative to GABAergic brake. CB1 agonism works presynaptically to turn down excess signal. Alt-support: deep pressure/proprioceptive input, rhythmic bilateral movement, anything that mechanically dampens throughput rather than trying to out-think it.
Low endocannabinoid tone—some autism research finds blunted anandamide signaling tied to social ease and anxiety regulation. If the system’s baseline ECS is running lean, exogenous cannabinoids are topping up a deficit rather than adding a foreign effect. Alt-support: sustained aerobic movement (the “runner’s high” is partly endocannabinoid-mediated), omega-3s as ECS precursors, consistent touch/massage.
Thalamic sensory gating failure—the filter that should mute irrelevant input doesn’t, so everything arrives undifferentiated and loud. Cannabinoids affect thalamic gating directly. Alt-support: environmental engineering, without pharmacological substitution: reduce raw input volume rather than trying to improve the filter (single-channel environments, structured monotropic focus, noise reduction).
Vagal/parasympathetic underactivation—anxiety compounding the sensory load, cannabis’s anxiolytic effect partly vagally mediated. Alt-support: direct vagal stimulation—humming, slow exhale-longer-than-inhale breathing, cold water on the face.
Dopaminergic under-stimulation(more ADHD-coded)—restlessness eased by mild dopaminergic modulation. Alt-support: novelty-structured tasks, high-engagement movement, body doubling.
Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.
Greetings, esteemed community:
I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).
This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.
Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.
Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.
The Mental Health Day
This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.
Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.
Where Do We Go From Here?
in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.
Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.
Saying that autistic people who question the current paradigm of neurodivergence are seeking proof of a superpower does real harm. Diagnostic criteria are a snapshot. To refer to the snapshot as reality, without considering the hand that crafted the lens it was taken with, and for whose benefit, or what it distorts, cannot be seen as anything other than harmful to an understanding of complex systems.
Downstream of that, to then force people to identify with a disability designation that hints at accommodation, while the already meager care infrastructure is being actively dismantled by a government that wants to put autistic people on a list and ‘cure’ us, while at the same time removing funding from research that doesn’t agree with their agenda… to watch this all unfold is beyond heartbreaking. It’s criminal and cruel, and to enter neurodiversity justice spaces and hear the rhetoric from people who are claiming to advocate for the best interests of autistic people is just another example of the gaslighting being replicated by the gaslit.
It’s also understandable. We work from the models we’ve been given to work with. We recognize that there are privileged people and marginalized people. It seems to make sense to keep the structure intact and simply reset the algorithm to bring marginalized people in. But the system depends on there being marginalized people, and changing the algorithm simply shifts the suffering onto a different group of people. If we want equity to work, for real and for everyone, we need to learn how to work together differently.
Western science is good at some things, but it is also a paradigm that is easily gamed. What question we choose as a thesis determines the field of inquiry, the variables we can see (and the ones we can’t from our viewpoint), and the output is a snapshot. If we limit our questions to support a funding requirement, a political climate, a class preserving mechanism, or a corporate agenda, the snapshot is distorted, and this has real consequences.
I live in Berkeley California. Do you know how many people I have crossed paths with who are engaged in a research project that is losing funding due to the political climate? Let’s just say that we are not living in a time when good information is on the ascendancy, even at the academic level. I know people whose whole departments are fundraising to keep the lights on, and funders are not neutral.
In hostile times, it’s time to circle the wagons and protect the children within. The wagons here are perhaps a poor metaphor, being a symbol of colonial expansion. But what works is the idea of a circle protecting the future health of our community. The civic infrastructure that was supposed to protect us is being dismantled and defunded, along with the research institutions that were ostensibly designed to help us describe ourselves in ways that align with our nature.
But there is so much we can do if we train ourselves to abandon those decaying structures and find support through cooperation. Tōjisha Kenkyū is a self-study paradigm developed by people in the mental health community in Japan, who recognized that the stories being told to them by clinicians did not match their experiences nor provide support in the ways they needed. Through deep inquiry and information sharing, people working in this modality are learning bottom-up strategies and new language that allows them to access mutual support and offer more effective advocacy.
Every healthy community has access to its own story, that changes and unfolds within its very ecosystem. The questions that arise might not fit a funding landscape, but mutual support makes things possible that top-down institutions won’t.
The understanding of neurodiversity is in its infancy relative to Western scientific paradigms. As far as I can tell, the word neuronormativity only emerged within this century. Paradigms this new are bound to experience shifts that change the landscape of our understanding. When I hear people in the neurodiversity community loudly advocating for top-down paradigms that view neuronormativity as a standard of human growth and ability, and neurodivergence as a collection of abberant deviations from the norm, I can’t help but wonder who they are representing, and why they feel so confident in articulating the boundaries of an emerging paradigm.
Nature has amazing ways of achieving balance in a changing ecosystem. The whole reason we look like we do, and not like our ancestors Australopithecus, is that we diverged. Does that make us disabled versions of our ancestors? No. Evolution is a series of mistakes, that sometimes end up being helpful to the community, even as they are divergent from what came before.
Sometimes, what’s helpful to the community is someone tall enough to reach a food source inaccessible to most, and perhaps communities who had a few statistical outliers in height were more successful. In the context of industrial productivity, maybe the tall ones are just a liability, but is that the driver of change we want to follow? Look what doing so has done to biodiversity on the planet.
Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone with sensitive hearing, who can hear the approach of a predator or track game hidden in the canopy. Again, in an office, they are just seen as annoying, asking for accommodation again. Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone who thinks differently. When I think of the process of getting nutrition out of cassava, I wonder who on earth would have the patience and determination to figure that out. I’m sure it wasn’t one person, and parts of the process probably unfolded over centuries. But it’s not hard to imagine that at some point in the process, someone with cognitive differences might have thought to try something new. That’s not evidence of a superpower. It’s a person working the way they work, in the context of a team that values them. That’s the person we all know who we find frustrating, because their thinking seems so contrary.
In a society that’s not conforming to an origin story that pathologizes differences and that recognizes that through drought and famine and herd depletion and times of bounty, differences in the community are an asset, not a liability. They might develop ways of doing things that build respect for these differences. If we look at the practices of various cultures we can actually see that this is true.
Are autism advocates who advocate for the model of neurodivergence as a deviation from neuronormativity simply trying to practice realpolitik in social terms, accepting that industrial agriculture, production, and the administrative mechanisms that support them are the way it will always be, and we should engineer ourselves to align with that reality? If so, count me out. That’s the project I thought we were trying to abandon at all costs. If not, where does your confidence come from, and why does it feel so much like a story we’ve heard before, that got us into this mess?
this is one kind of harm caused by the abled/disabled binary when it is applied as a permanent designation to people: it erases from view the environment that enables or disables a person, and it makes invisible all of the ways that the environment is designed to enable the abled person.
it functions to other into a social class an experience that everyone is living, but some don’t recognize—the experience of needing to exist in relationship.
if we recognize that no one can live outside of relationship, and that we play both roles continuously—the carer and the cared for—then we start to recognize the moment of need without needing to label someone needy.
In designating certain people as disabled, without the embedded values of care and reciprocity at the cultural level, then the abled person gets to sidestep the role of caregiver, and there is not enough care to go around, leaving the disabled to have to negotiate for care that in a different culture would be considered a human right. I’m not just talking about healthcare. I’m talking about basic human dignity.
binaries are useful conceptual shorthand that should never be applied to people without their consent. if you can understand the value of going beyond the binary based on biological gender, and the real harm that strict adherence to that binary causes, you can understand why permanent status as a disabled person might leave some people out. What I hear when I hear “autism is always a disability” is “there are only two genders: male and female.”
my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions. something in my history casts a sinister spell that even the simplest question disperses. delightful surprises arise when i go beyond the first brush of my eyes. followup questions are the love language in my dialogue with life.
Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.
If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.
For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).
Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.
I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.
That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.
Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).
What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.
What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.
How Life Outside of School Shapes Childhood Education
Part 2 in a series. In my study of what works in the effort to serve children’s needs and help them to become happy and healthy adults, I take copious notes. I find it helpful, occasionally, to compile and summarize these notes into a narrative. Why? Because my brain saves all of these notes, and my conversations are built from them, but sometimes the conversations don’t last long enough to articulate the internal narrative I’m working from. This series is an attempt to share my internal narrative, and open it to peer review. I take my notes from memory, and almost never cite sources. That being said, I invite the reader to connect any of the points made here to existing research and share their conclusions. This is a conversation, not a dissertation.
The history of American education is usually told through its institutions—the schoolhouse, the curriculum, the policy. But for most of the past two and a half centuries, the school day occupied only a fraction of a child’s waking hours. What happened in the remaining hours was not a blank space, and not the same for every child. It also counts as education—in labor, in play, in hunger or comfort, in the rhythms of a household shaped by class, race, and economic circumstance. The school day has always had a shadow: longer, less legible, and distributed with the same radical inequality as everything else. What follows is an attempt to describe that shadow in the same fifty-year intervals as the institutional history it runs alongside.
This is not original scholarship: it’s simply an overview in a legible timeline to point out patterns that have been documented in depth elsewhere. It’s a way of opening my working premises to a wider conversation. Let it be a springboard to deeper inquiry, rather than a document of record.
1750–1800: Childhood as Labor
For the vast majority of children in colonial America, the question of what happened outside school was easily answered: work. The agricultural economy ran on the labor of everyone in a household old enough to be useful. Children were useful early. By six or seven, they were tending animals, hauling water, carding wool, minding younger siblings, and helping with whatever the season demanded. The school day, where it existed at all, was short—often only a few hours in the morning—and seasonal, structured around planting and harvest rather than a fixed calendar. A child might attend for a few months in winter when farm labor slackened and be pulled back to the fields before spring.
The school day for a boy of the gentry class looked entirely different. It was longer, held in a dedicated space, and governed by a curriculum that assumed leisure time for further study. Tutors supplemented formal schooling. Books were available at home. The afternoon hours that a farming child spent at labor, a wealthy child might spend in supervised reading, music practice, or what passed for recreational activity—riding, games of skill, the cultivated pastimes of a class that had purchased the right to prepare its sons for a station rather than deploy them as laborers.
For enslaved children, education in anything other than farm labor was forbidden. Their hours belonged entirely to the labor economy of the plantation. Play existed—ethnographic and autobiographical accounts document the games children made in stolen moments—but it was unauthorized, shadowed by the constant proximity of surveillance and violence. Indigenous children in mission settlements were similarly subject to regimented labor under the guise of civilizational education.
The journey to school, where school existed, was almost always on foot. Distance was a real barrier: rural families might live miles from the nearest schoolhouse, and in winter those miles were genuine obstacles. The children most likely to attend were those who lived nearest—which in most communities meant children of the more established families, since the poor tended to live at the margins.
The baseline: Childhood is labor for the majority. The school day is short and seasonal, fitted around agricultural need. Time outside school means more work, not less — except for the children of families wealthy enough to have purchased their children’s time.
Who benefited: Children of the gentry and merchant classes, whose non-school hours were structured around cultivation and leisure. Their childhoods had room in them.
Who was excluded: Farm children, working poor children, enslaved children, and Indigenous children under mission control, for whom the hours outside school were simply more hours of work, or were not theirs to direct at all.
1800–1850: The Mill Child and the Country Child
The early industrial period splits the picture further. In the expanding cities and mill towns of the Northeast, children as young as seven or eight entered factory work—the textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, the print shops, the glass factories. The school day competed directly with the work day. Many families could not afford to send children to school at all; a child’s wages were a structural part of household budgets. Where children did attend school, they arrived already tired, often having worked early morning shifts before the schoolhouse opened, and left to work again in the afternoon.
The common school movement of this era, championed by Horace Mann and others, was partly a response to this reality—an argument that children needed time set aside for learning. But the reformers were also motivated by anxieties about what unsupervised working-class children did with unstructured time: they played in streets, joined gangs, and generally failed to develop the habits of industry and deference that a properly ordered republic required. The common school was partly a moral intervention into children’s time—a way of filling hours that might otherwise be filled unproductively.
For rural children across the country, childhood outside school still meant the farm. The school day remained short—typically four to six hours—and the school year, even where compulsory attendance laws were beginning to appear, was rarely more than a few months. Play was largely unstructured and took place outdoors: sledding, swimming, fishing, musical ring plays, games of chase and capture that children organized themselves without adult direction. This was not ‘organized unstructured time’ as we think of it today; it was simply that adults were busy and children were left to occupy themselves within the bounds of the property.
For children of wealthy families, the period outside school was increasingly formalized. Music lessons, dancing lessons, and supervised social occasions were the architecture of upper-class childhood. Summer was spent at a second property or a resort. The journey to school might involve a private carriage. Physical distance from school was not an obstacle; it was a marker of social status.
The baseline: The school day is lengthening slightly in urban areas but remains short and seasonally compressed. For working-class and mill children, hours outside school are working hours. For rural children, unstructured outdoor play is the norm. For the wealthy, non-school time is a curriculum of its own.
Who benefited: Children of comfortable rural and merchant families, who had access to unstructured play time, modest material comfort, and a household economy that didn’t depend on their labor.
Who was excluded: Mill and factory children, whose time outside the schoolhouse was largely absorbed by wage labor. Enslaved children. Indigenous children. The urban poor, whose street play was viewed with suspicion and increasingly subject to institutional intervention.
1850–1900: Streets, Fields, and the Factory Floor
By the second half of the nineteenth century, child labor is at its historical peak. The 1900 census—counting at the end of this period—found nearly two million children between ten and fifteen engaged in paid labor, a figure that undercounts younger workers and those in agriculture. In cities, children sold newspapers, shined shoes, worked in canneries and textile mills and coal mines. The school day, now more standardized at roughly six hours in urban public schools, sat in the middle of a much longer day that began before dawn and ended after dark for many working children.
Recess as a formal institution begins to appear in this period, but unevenly. Urban public schools in wealthier districts might have a paved yard and a structured break. Schools in poor neighborhoods had whatever outdoor space happened to be available, if any.
The physical journey to school was almost always on foot, often considerable distances. In rural areas, children might walk two to four miles each way. In cities, the walk passed through neighborhoods where the density of poverty was itself a lesson—in precarity, in the reality of disease, in the density of adult labor.
For the children of the wealthy, this period introduces something new: organized sport and supervised leisure as a class institution. The private school sporting culture—crew, baseball, track—begins to take shape at the prep school level, and trickles into the recreation of upper-class children generally. Summer camps begin to appear in the 1880s, initially as health retreats for urban children of means. The concept of a childhood structured around physical development and wholesome outdoor recreation is being invented—but invented specifically for and by the affluent.
The baseline: Child labor is at its peak. For millions of children, the school day is bracketed on both sides by paid work. Recess exists in wealthier schools; outdoor play is an improvised affair for the poor. The wealthy are inventing organized recreational childhood.
Who benefited: Children of the professional and owning classes, whose non-school hours are increasingly structured around health, sport, and social formation. Their childhood is being designed.
Who was excluded: Working children in mines, mills, canneries, and streets, for whom the hours outside school were the hours that fulfilled the family budget. Rural children who walked hours daily to attend school for a fraction of the year.
1900–1950: The Playground Movement and the Leisure Gap
The progressive era produces the first serious institutional attention to children’s time outside the classroom. The playground movement—led by reformers like Jane Addams and Joseph Lee—argues that unstructured street play is dangerous and that structured outdoor recreation is a democratic necessity. Cities begin building public playgrounds in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, partly out of genuine concern for child welfare and partly as a form of social control: get children off the streets and into supervised spaces where their energies can be directed appropriately.
Compulsory attendance laws, now on the books in most states, extend the school day and the school year. By the 1920s, a six-to-seven hour school day with a fixed academic calendar is becoming the norm in urban schools. The school day is getting longer; the hours outside it are shrinking, at least in theory. In practice, poor and working-class children remained heavily engaged in household labor—caring for younger siblings, helping with domestic work, working in family businesses—while attending school in the time that remained.
The radio arrives in the 1920s and the after-school hours begin to take a new shape for middle-class families: a domestic, supervised, commercial leisure. Children’s programming fills the late afternoon. Consumption begins to organize childhood time in ways it never had before. This is largely a middle-class phenomenon; the poor listen where they can, but the new consumer childhood—snacks, toys, entertainment—belongs primarily to those with money to spend on it.
For Black children in the segregated South, the school year was often dramatically shorter than for white children—sometimes only three or four months—and the hours outside it were dominated by agricultural labor on a seasonal schedule that white landowners controlled. The gap between the childhood available to a white child in a northern suburb and a Black child in the rural South created a gap in what childhood itself meant to integration into society.
The baseline: The school day standardizes at six to seven hours. Playgrounds appear as institutional interventions into children’s time. Consumer leisure begins organizing middle-class childhood. For poor and Black children, time outside school remains dominated by labor, with wide regional disparities.
Who benefited: Middle-class white children in northern cities, who gain access to supervised playgrounds, consumer entertainment, and a lengthening period of structured childhood. Their afternoons are beginning to look like what we think of as childhood.
Who was excluded: Black children in the rural South, subject to truncated school years and heavy agricultural labor; immigrant and working-class children whose household economies still depended on their labor; children in overcrowded urban tenements with no access to outdoor play space.
1950–2000: The Suburban Afternoon and the Forgotten Child
The postwar period produces what many Americans still imagine when they picture a normal childhood: the suburban afternoon. School ends at three o’clock. Children walk or are driven home. The neighborhood is safe enough for unsupervised play; someone’s mother is usually around. Dinner at six. Television in the evening. This is the dominant image of mid-century American childhood—and it is the childhood of white suburban families, made possible by the GI Bill, federally subsidized highways, and housing policies that systematically excluded Black families from the neighborhoods where that afternoon was happening.
In cities, the picture is different. Urban public schools often lack the outdoor space of suburban ones. After-school hours in dense neighborhoods are spent on stoops, in streets, in apartments where multiple families share small units. For children of working mothers—a category growing rapidly through this period—the after-school hours can mean latchkey solitude, or the informal supervision of older siblings, or the streets.
The length of the school day remains roughly stable—six to seven hours—but what surrounds it begins to diverge sharply by class. Affluent families begin investing in after-school enrichment: music lessons, sports leagues, tutoring, summer programs. The infrastructure of organized childhood expands enormously in the 1970s and 1980s for families with money. Youth soccer leagues, swim teams, private music instruction, SAT prep courses—the non-school hours of wealthy children become as intentionally structured as the school hours, sometimes more so.
For poor children, the after-school hours are increasingly unsupervised and under-resourced. Public recreation programs are cut during the fiscal crises of the 1970s. Community centers close. The street remains, but the organized infrastructure of working-class neighborhood life—the settlement house, the church league, the union-sponsored recreation program—is fraying. The gap between what a wealthy child does from 3–6pm and what a poor child does in those same hours begins to compound into measurable outcome differences by high school.
Children arrive at school by bus, by car, and on foot—but increasingly, in wealthy districts, by car in the exclusive sense. The school run as a daily parental ritual is a product of this period. In poorer districts, the school bus (or public transit, or walking) remains the norm. The physical experience of getting to school—comfortable, supervised, door-to-door versus exposed, crowded, long—is itself a daily index of the broader divergence.
The baseline: The suburban afternoon becomes the idealized image of American childhood—and the reality for white middle-class families. Enrichment infrastructure expands dramatically for the affluent. Public recreation resources contract for the poor. The after-school hours become a second site of compounding inequality.
Who benefited: White suburban children, whose afternoons are safe, supervised, and increasingly enriched by organized extracurricular activity. Their non-school hours are an extension of their educational advantage.
Who was excluded: Urban and rural poor children, whose after-school hours are unsupervised and under-resourced; Black families systematically excluded from the suburban neighborhoods where the postwar childhood was being built; working-class children whose mothers’ labor left them alone after three o’clock.
With Change Comes Resistance: The Leisure Gap Widens (1970s–1990s and beyond)
As the institutional history of education produces its backlash—against busing, against equity funding, against the framing of school as a site of redistribution—the same dynamic plays out in the texture of children’s daily lives. When public recreation programs are cut, they are cut in the name of fiscal responsibility. When after-school programs lose funding, the loss is framed as an unfortunate necessity. The cumulative effect is that the public infrastructure of childhood—the commons of play, the shared recreational space, the after-school program that any child could attend—quietly contracts, and the private infrastructure of childhood expands to fill the gap, accessible only to those who can pay for it.
This is not accidental. The same political grammar that converts equity funding in schools into an unfair advantage converts public investment in children’s time into government overreach. The playground, the public pool, the after-school program—these are all, in the backlash framing, things that responsible families provide for themselves. Public provision is for families who failed to provide. The logic individualizes what is structurally produced, and then blames the individual for the structural outcome.
By the 1990s, the research literature on out-of-school time is documenting what is already obvious to anyone paying attention: children in poverty spend their after-school hours very differently from children with resources, and those differences compound across years into significant gaps in academic preparation, social-emotional development, and college readiness. The response is a wave of after-school program funding—21st Century Community Learning Centers, extended day initiatives—that partially addresses the gap while leaving the underlying inequality untouched.
2000–Present: Scheduled Childhood and the Unsupervised Hours
The contemporary period produces two childhoods in increasingly sharp relief. The first is the fully scheduled childhood of affluent families: school, then sports practice, then music lesson, then homework, then sleep—every hour accounted for, every activity selected for its developmental and resumé value. This childhood is exhausting and productive and deeply anxious. It is also, on the other hand, very good preparation for competitive college admission and the professional-managerial economy that follows.
The second childhood has no such schedule. It is the childhood of children whose families lack the money, time, or stability to organize their non-school hours. It is spent on phones, in front of screens, in apartments, or in neighborhoods where the outdoor infrastructure of play has been allowed to deteriorate. It is not necessarily an unhappy childhood—children are resourceful—but it is not building toward the same outcomes. The difference between these two childhoods, played out across millions of families, is one of the primary mechanisms by which inequality reproduces itself across generations while appearing to result from individual choices.
The school day has lengthened in many districts—particularly those serving high-poverty populations, where extended day programs have been implemented as an equity intervention. The journey to school has shifted: in urban areas, a growing number of children are driven rather than walking, reversing the pedestrian norm of earlier eras and further sorting children by the access their families have to a car and flexible time. Remote learning during COVID collapsed the boundary between school time and home time entirely—with consequences that followed the same distributional lines as everything else. Children with quiet space, adult supervision, and reliable broadband managed. Children without those things largely did not.
Play, as an unstructured and self-directed activity, is declining across class lines—but most sharply for the children who have historically relied on it most. Recess is being cut in schools under academic pressure. Outdoor play in neighborhoods is declining due to parental safety concerns that are partly real and partly a function of media-amplified fear. The physical and developmental consequences of this decline are well-documented and not evenly distributed.
The baseline: Two divergent childhoods separated by money. The affluent child’s non-school hours are maximally structured and developmentally intentional. The poor child’s hours are under-resourced and unsupervised. The school day is lengthening in high-poverty districts as a compensatory measure. Unstructured play is declining everywhere.
Who benefited: Children of wealthy families, whose after-school hours function as a second, private educational system. Their non-school time compounds their advantage.
Who was excluded: Children in poverty, whose unstructured hours are the most visible symptom of everything the public system declined to provide. Children in under-resourced neighborhoods where the infrastructure of play—the park, the pool, the after-school program—has been allowed to deteriorate.
The Through-Line
The history of what children do outside school is not separate from the history of school. It is the same history, told from the other side of the door. In every era, children who benefited most inside the school building also had the most outside it: more time, more space, more safety, more supervision, more materials, more adult attention, more room to be children rather than workers or caretakers or simply left alone. The children who benefited least inside the building had the least outside it. The gap between the two was not a gap in effort or aptitude—it was a gap in what the society was willing to organize and provide.
What the school can do is always bounded by what it cannot reach. The child who arrives hungry, exhausted from an unsafe commute, responsible for younger siblings, carrying the anxiety of household instability—that child is not starting from the same place as the child who arrives rested, fed, driven by a parent, and free from adult responsibility for the next seven hours. The school day measures from bell to bell. The field of education begins much earlier, and runs much later, and is shaped by forces the school rarely controls and almost never names.
A genuine alternative to this history would have to account for what happens outside the building—not as a supplementary concern, but as a structural one. The hours between 3—6pm are not separate from the school day. They are its extension.
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
