Children

Bekah McNeel 3-04-2024

A woman holds a baby, as displaced Palestinians, who fled their houses due to Israeli strikes, take shelter in a tent camp amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 6, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

When Israeli troops stormed Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, the ensuing chaos effectively shut down the hospital, with soldiers forcing women and children to leave the maternity ward according to Doctors Without Borders. The invasion of the hospital underscored the heavy toll the Israeli assault has had on pregnant people and infants. Doctors Without Borders described Israel’s incursion as forcing “inhumane” birthing conditions.

Bekah McNeel 9-19-2023

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer smiles from behind a mock U.S. Treasury check as he holds a press conference on the expanded Child Tax Credit payments at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2021. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

During the pandemic, something peculiar happened: The child poverty rate in the U.S. fell, reaching an historic low of 5.2 percent in 2021. The decline was largely a result of the federal spending in social safety nets like Medicaid, SNAP, and the Child Tax Credit, as well as direct payments to families. Anti-poverty advocates celebrated the win.

Bekah McNeel 8-02-2023

A young boy reads a Bible. Samantha Sophia via Unsplash. 

Joshua was one of the star students in his Sunday school class at a Black Baptist church he and his family attended; his teacher raved about Joshua’s helpfulness and engagement. But when it came to preschool, Joshua’s parents were perplexed.

“Every day the preschool teacher has something negative to say about [him,]” Joshua’s father later told researchers.

Laurel A. Dykstra 3-20-2023
The book ‘Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive’ has a cover with swirling paint strokes of blue and pink. The book is hovering at an angle, cast against a light purple backdrop.

Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive, by Rachel A. Cornwell

“GIRLS JUST SIT AROUND and talk about being friends, but the boys go on daring adventures!” Arkansas first-grader Evan’s less-than-feminist argument for joining the Boy Scouts became the title of his mother’s book. Rachel A. Cornwell wrote Daring Adventures: Helping Gender-Diverse Kids and Their Families Thrive for kids exploring gender identity in unsupportive communities and for families seeking to support them. A United Methodist pastor, Cornwell emphasizes that full acceptance of transgender and gender-diverse people is entirely compatible with a life of faith.

At a time when Christians are championing anti-trans legislation, it is critical that cisgender, heterosexual Christian leaders publicly affirm trans and gender-diverse people. With the high rate of suicide among trans youth who experience rejection from family or community, books like Cornwell’s save lives.

For Daring Adventures, Cornwell draws from her own family’s experience with Evan’s gender transition and shares insights from interviews with nearly 20 other families of transgender and gender-diverse children. I was particularly touched by the high schoolers who started an online group for younger kids: They talked about favorite animals, transgender celebrities, and drew pictures of their future selves.

An illustration of a child with red-brown skin and dressed in white socks and a white shirt with teal pants  sitting on a rug while playing with a ring stacker toy; a yellow ring sits on its head like a halo.

Illustration by Pete Ryan

ENSURING THAT EVERY child can realize their full potential is a civic and faith imperative. Yet millions of children in the United States are having their futures sabotaged due to a lack of care, stimulation, and nutrition between birth and age 3. These three years, often referred to as the period of early child development, or ECD, are the most fragile and formative because most of a child’s brain is developed during this period. During the first few years of life, a child’s brain forms more than a million neural pathways every second and grows to 90 percent of the size of an adult’s brain by age 6. As a result, this period can determine whether a child realizes their full potential. The things young children learn, the experiences they have (and the amount of damaging stress to the brain they suffer), and the love and care (or lack thereof) they receive can all have an outsized impact on their lifelong mental, emotional, and physical health.

During my time working at World Vision and the World Bank, I became passionate about the crisis of ECD in low- and middle-income countries, a cause that remains urgent. However, I have become increasingly convicted about the imperative to also address the child development crisis in the U.S. Tragically, the U.S. is not doing well by its youngest generation, especially when compared to similarly wealthy nations. More than 9 million children in the U.S. face food insecurity, which hampers their healthy brain development, and in the last year, 1 in 7 children experienced child abuse or neglect. Without affordable child care, millions of children become at risk for “adverse childhood experiences” that could lead to debilitating impacts on their health and well-being.

Rebecca Randall 2-21-2023
A collage of illustrations and photos. Among them include a mother with her face blurred out as she holds her child. Another picture shows a toddler covered in a white silhouette as they stand outside. There is art of a world map and baby bottle as well.

Illustration by Ricardo Santos

EVANGELICALS AND OTHER Christians involved in adoption and “orphan care” ministries have often evoked Paul’s use of adoption as a metaphor: God “adopts” us into the family of God, so we should adopt children as a manifestation of the gospel.

But New Testament scholar Erin Heim, a U.S. domestic adoptee herself, has raised questions about Pauline adoption metaphors. “The thing that always gets said — ‘contemporary adoption is a horizontal expression of God’s vertical adoption of us’ — there’s something at face value that is a little bit comforting about it, but that doesn’t sit very well for very long,” Heim said in a podcast about her research on these metaphors.

Adoption by nature is a vertical relationship, Heim explained, referring to power inequities between parents and children and between cultures. “There’s no such thing as horizontal adoption,” she said. “When we make mini vertical things that [try to] look like what God does in the Bible, it’s idolatry.”

Christians were pioneers in the establishment of international adoption to the United States in the 1950s and later spurred an orphan care movement during the peak of international adoption in the early 2000s. Since 1948, roughly 1 million children globally have been placed in new families, far from their original families and culture, through intercountry adoption, according to demographer Peter Selman — more than 380,000 of them between 2000 and 2009.

While faith has guided Christians in promoting adoption, religious narratives also have upheld harmful power structures and practices. “White saviorism” and racial hierarchies have led to the separation of children from their cultures of origin. Adoptees who are now adults have shared stories of struggle within families and societies that deny or misunderstand these dynamics.

2-16-2023
The cover for Sojourners' April 2023 issue, featuring a story about international adoption. There's a photo collage with one showing a toddler on a beach, and two photos with mothers holding babies. There's a map illustration and another of a baby bottle.

Wrestling with the complicated legacy of Christians and international adoption.

Jordan Anderson 3-10-2022

Cross Lake School on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota. Image via catalog.archives.gov

Across the nation, Catholic Church leaders are beginning to reckon with their institution’s role in operating Indigenous residential schools and the lasting consequences these schools left on Native American communities. One state seeing growing momentum to address this history is Minnesota, which had 15 boarding schools; Catholic groups operated at least eight of them.

Jenna Barnett 6-22-2021

The God presentented in the new children’s book What Is God Like? is a shapeshifter. Matthew Paul Turner and the late Rachel Held Evans, with the help of Ying Hui Tan’s vibrant illustrations, depict God as a woman, a shepherd, a gardener, and even as a blanket fort.

Vincent Hale 7-21-2020

A young activist at a May 2020 protest in Atlanta / Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images

“I TEACH MUSIC and theater, so it was a little difficult to teach via an online platform. I started an initiative called ‘Worship Wednesdays,’ and I took over our school’s Instagram Live page. We started with vocal warmups and a song where the kids could move around—I choreographed the dances myself. Then I went through another two or three songs. We set it up so kids can request to appear on the screen with you, so I’d have some of them come and sing that way.

What I noticed is that students were seeking engagement with each other. The Instagram Live thing was cool because they got to interact. They couldn’t see each other’s faces but they could engage in a chat. Growing up is all about interacting with your peers, and so they had been missing out on that opportunity.

Sandi Villarreal 7-21-2020
Parenting

Illustration by Nick Blanchard

EACH SPRING, I plan how to survive the summer. Without the school-year routine, our family leans on relatives, friends, summer camps, and cobbled-together vacation time to get our kids through. But this year, everything stopped: In a pandemic, you can’t visit Grandma or drop off the toddler for a playdate. If raising children takes a village, our village has been scattered. And while the nation collectively experiences this ongoing trauma, parents are attempting to shepherd our children through the same.

A large part of parenting is risk assessment—a constant cost-benefit analysis of how the decisions you make will affect your children for the rest of their lives. When I was pregnant with my third child, now 1, I read Emily Oster’s Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool to alleviate the added anxiety. Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, correctly observes that with constantly changing internet recommendations on everything from breastfeeding to screen time, “there is reassurance in seeing the numbers for yourself.” She lays out the scientific data so parents can make informed decisions; for me, it offered confidence—and a rare sense of control.

But that sense of security goes out the window in a pandemic, unforeseen economic collapse, and necessary reordering of our institutional constants. Parents face new risks with precious little, and everchanging, data to guide our analysis. The most common fear shared by parents I’ve spoken to is that our kids won’t be OK—that in trying to find the balance between naked truthfulness and parental protectionism, we’ll lean too heavily to one side, that the wrong decisions will leave lasting marks that follow them into adulthood.

“I don’t know what the world is going to look like. Will I have the wisdom and the capacity and the ability to help guide her through?” Susi McCrea tells me. When we spoke, McCrea was 32 weeks pregnant and living in northeast Washington, D.C., with her husband, Christopher, who was recently laid off, and 1-year-old daughter Katja.

“Will we be able to help [Katja] build the resilience that she needs for something that’s so full of uncertainty—and maybe just a really uncertain world for quite some time—without instilling a lot of fear?”

Kate Ott 3-18-2020

As adults are forced into major social and work-related changes, we can quickly lose patience with our children, forget their perspective matters, and resort to “just do it”-type responses. I want to encourage parents to take a deep breath and invite children into a new way of being in the world shaped by COVID-19. Children are morally resilient and creative when we give them the chance. So, how can we talk with our children about this pandemic? Let’s use the love commandment as our guide.

Anna Sutterer 7-19-2019

Sr. Carol Zinn, executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, summoned the image of the Good Samaritan. She said nations will not be judged by their GDP or success on Wall Street, but how they treat the most vulnerable and marginalized.

Matt Reynolds 7-12-2019

Image via the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General/ REUTERS

Ocasio-Cortez insisted on being sworn in, taking the unusual step after several Republicans on the panel sought to blame conditions at border patrol stations on what they said was Democratic inacmition on drug cartels and other criminals trying to enter the country illegally with children.

Cindy Brandt 3-26-2019

Being a parent is to get a front row seat to the construct of being human — from the intense physical engagement of a variety of bodily functions — feeding, pooping, bathing — to emotional regulation, and profound spirituality. As I argue in my book, parenting children is one of the most critical strategies in creating justice, beauty, and carrying out the work of God in our world. 

Military drone. Credit: Shutterstock

Ten children, part of the same extended family, were killed by a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan, along with three adult civilians, the United Nations said on Monday. The air strike early on Saturday was part of a battle between the Taliban and combined Afghan and U.S. forces that lasted about 30 hours in Kunduz, a northern province where the Taliban insurgency is strong.

the Web Editors 8-06-2018

Undocumented immigrant families walk from a bus depot to a respite center after being released from detention in McAllen, Texas, U.S., July 26, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott

"Imagine your family ripped apart. That’s going to have reverberations across family members for years to come."

Maria Marroquin Perdomo and her 11-year-old son Abisai drive away from the Casa Padre facility in the backseat of her attorney's truck minutes after mother and son were reunified in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., July 14, 2018. Abisai was held at Casa Padre while his mother was detained at the Port Isabel detention facility. REUTERS/Loren Elliott

Marroquin Perdomo gave her son a set of colorful handmade cards she had made for him in detention. On one of them, she had drawn flowers surrounding a Bible verse – Salmos (Psalms) 121:8.

It reads in English: “The Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.”

Immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents under a new "zero tolerance" policy by the Trump administration, are being housed in tents next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S., June 18, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

U.S. Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego last month ordered the government to stop separating children from immigrant parents entering the United States illegally and set deadlines for the government to reunite families.