Making Kin, Not Babies - Towards Childist Kinship in The "Anthropocene" - Nikolas Mattheis, 2022

18/01/2023 10:01 Making kin, not babies?
Towards childist kinship in the “Anthropocene” - Nikolas Mattheis, 2022
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Abstract
To “make kin, not babies” is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the
so-called “Anthropocene”. Building on other critical engagements with Haraway’s proposal,
this paper interrogates it from a childist perspective. While striving towards a “pro-child”
position on kinship, Haraway only goes so far in explicating this aim. The paper suggests that
challenging adultism as well as attention to children's ongoing kinship practices are required.
To ‘make kin, not babies’ is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the
so-called “Anthropocene” (Haraway, 2016b, 2018). While in general agreement with
Haraway’s emphasis on the need to presently reconceive kinship – understood here broadly
as ways of relating which involve aspects of care, intimacy, and response-ability1 – this paper
interrogates Haraway’s non-natalist stance from a childist perspective, i.e. one which tackles
adultism and emphasises the lived experiences of children (Wall, 2019).2 The paper, then,
attempts a sympathetic critique, the aim of which is twofold. Firstly, to intervene into a PDF
discourse which so far tends to sidestep insights from childhood studies. Secondly, to Help
encourage childhood studies to deepen an emerging engagement of kinship in the

“Anthropocene”.
Pursuing these aims, I first reconstruct critical interventions into the “Anthropocene” debate.
Turning next to potential responses to this infelicitously named formation, I sketch Haraway’s
non-natalism. Haraway’s proposal has rightly (and intentionally) sparked controversy,
especially worries about derailing individualism and proximity to neo-Malthusianism. These
are issues I can only broach here. Instead, I focus on some – related – concerns with the
proposal which have not been prominently discussed so far. Haraway is striving towards a
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09075682221098155#:~:text=To “make kin%2C not babies,it from a childist perspective. 1/35
18/01/2023 10:01 Making kin, not babies? Towards childist kinship in the “Anthropocene” - Nikolas Mattheis, 2022
“pro-child” position on kinship but does not sufficiently explicate what this entails. I argue
that any such endeavour demands for two components. Firstly, sensitivity to avoid the
reproduction of adultist constructions of children as passive kin “being made”. Secondly,
engagement with childhood studies and children’s lived experiences.
“Anthropocene” relations
While children’s contributions have been crucial to drawing attention to the phenomena
referenced by “the Anthropocene”,3 this is a word coined by adults. Reaching back at least to
1920s Soviet geology, it was specifically popularized by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer
who sought to ‘emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing
to use the term Anthropocene for the current geological epoch’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000:
17). The changes typically associated with the “Anthropocene” include those conceptualized
as rapid and nonlinear climate change, the ongoing “Sixth Extinction” event, and the
explosion of “anthropogenic mass”. These dynamics connect not only to severe interruptions
of living conditions (shifts in seasonal patterns, drastic weather events, unravelling of
habitats), but also with “marks” or “inscriptions” on earth, prompting geological investigation.
The International Commission on Stratigraphy’s “Anthropocene Working Group” (AWG) has
recently endorsed the idea to formalize the Anthropocene as a ‘geological time term’ (see
AWG, n.d.). This requires identifying the emergence of new geological formations, evidenced
by a relevant stratotype point (colloquially, a “golden spike”). Despite divergent proposals, the
AWG currently favours to date the beginning of the “Anthropocene” to post-WWII “Great
Acceleration” and nuclear fallout (Crutzen and Stoermer had ‘somewhat arbitrar [ily]…
propose[d] the latter part of the 18th century’; 2000: 17).
Although the notion of the “Anthropocene” thus primarily intervenes in (chrono-)geology, itPDF
has quickly been taken up elsewhere as shorthand for human’s impact on earth and the Help
latter’s general condition. A potent concept, it has not only stirred up isolationist thinking in
an academy divided into “Two Cultures”, natural sciences and humanities. More generally, it
has raised awareness around the interconnectedness of current crises (such as biodiversity
and climate) and their generational dimensions.
Yet, its core idea of “mankind” as a ‘major’ (Taylor, 2020: 340), even ‘primary’ (Ojeda et al.,
2020: 316) geological force also faces limitations. Both the concept of the “Anthropocene”
itself and the discourse with which it is entangled are problematic.4 In fact, despite conjuring
a radical reckoning, critical studies scholars have shown how the concept of the “Age of Man”
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can stabilize the destructions it purports to describe. Post-Marxist, feminist, and Black
studies approaches have launched important interventions into homogenising narratives, by
stressing questions of agency, vulnerability, and periodization. Moore (2017, 2018), for
instance, argues that the current formation cannot be reconstructed without foregrounding
the emergence of capitalism – and the violence of its ongoing ‘primitive accumulation’ of
‘Cheap Natures’ and its ‘dialectic of paid and unpaid work’. Relatedly, Yusoff (2018)
emphasizes how in the “Anthropocene”, Black bodies were centrally rendered ‘inhuman
matter’, i.e. mere property for extraction (a rendering co-evolving with the discipline of
geography). Consequently, a notion of the “Anthropocene” in a ‘future tense’ must be
discarded: ‘there are a Billion Black Anthropocenes’ (Yusoff, 2018: 59).
Albeit admittedly a ‘latecomer to the Anthropocene debates’ (Taylor, 2020: 341), childhood
studies have also begun to intervene in this discourse, highlighting how generation matters
to differential vulnerabilities and responsibilities in current formations.5 Karen Malone, for
instance, writes: ‘We are not all in the Anthropocene together – the poor and the
dispossessed, the children are far more in it than others’ (2017: 249). Anthropocene crises
intensify pre-existing, intersectional vulnerabilities, (also) shaped by being positioned as
“child”. In line with some children’s own assessments – e.g. that children are ‘already
carry[ing]' the ‘burden’ of the climate crisis and ‘will bear the burden of these harms far more
and far longer than [today’s] adults’ (Sacchi et al., 2019: §§3–4)6 – childhood studies have
recently framed such inequalities through the notion of inheritance. Children are said to
inherit ‘unliveable’ and ‘messy anthropogenic settler colonial worlds’ (Nxumalo, 2020: 542), as
well as ‘uncertain futures’ (Malone, 2017: 4). While the claim that ‘current environmental
crises’ are ‘being faced by children, and caused by adults’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al.,
2020b: 497) needs nuanced unpacking, generational ordering and hegemonic constructions
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of childhood have definitely modulated that bluntly referred to as the “Age of Man”.
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Given these decisive and divisive dimensions, attention to narrativization seems crucial.
Here, there is some disagreement among scholars. While Moore proposes to replace the
“Anthropocene” concept by “Capitalocene”, Yusoff holds that all ‘origin stories bury as much
as they reveal’ (2018: 58). This connects to a point by Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘the
stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of
becoming much Too Big’ and therefore ironically offers the “Chthulucene” as a ‘needed third
story’ (Haraway, 2016b: 50, 55). Although this may seem like verbal quibble, ‘it matters which
stories tell stories’ (Haraway, 2016b: 101). Conceptual creation – in childhood studies too, e.g.
of the “child-cene” (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020a) – can help counter business-as-
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usual agendas, such as already present in Crutzen and Stoermer’s notion that ‘[a]n exciting,
but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering
community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management’
(2000: 18). Assuming clear(ly catastrophic) trajectories and invoking a ‘task’ to be solved like
an ahistorical puzzle by elite researchers, these depictions rearticulate ‘the white man’s
burden’ (Yusoff, 2018: 27) and encourage techno-fixes (such as geo-engineering or financial
innovation) to a growth paradigm. Such scholarly critique also partly resonates with young
activists’ rejection of ‘the same bad ideas that got us into this mess’ (Thunberg, 2018). Instead
– while navigating technology will of course play a role – ‘multi-species politics of
emancipation’ seem necessary (Moore, 2017: 599).
But what do such respons-able engagements with present conditions amount to? As
Elizabeth Povinelli reminds us, pointing to ‘the fact that humans did not create this problem
[but r]ather, a specific mode of human society did’ will not yet yield a ‘clear social or political
solution’; complex incompatibilities between ways of life will remain which can only be
addressed through situated attention (Povinelli, 2016: 12–13). In any case, as the above
sketch should have shown, Anthropocene dynamics cannot be approached without referring
to the vexed discourse on the “human” and the concrete relationalities upheld by it.
Accordingly, Haraway has recently proposed to centre issues of ‘kinship’ in responding to
present conditions. Specifically, she has called to ‘make kin, not babies’. It is this momentous
proposal that the rest of the paper examines.7
Haraway’s non-natalism
Haraway has suggested that if what she calls the “Chthulucene” were to have but one slogan,
it should be ‘make kin, not babies’ (Haraway, 2016b: 102).8 Certainly, Haraway has long been
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known for condensing crucial feminist interventions in catchy slogans (‘Cyborgs for Earthly Help
Survival’, ’Run Fast, Bite Hard’, ‘only the god trick is forbidden' etc.). Linking epistemological
and political questions and straddling the humanities/sciences division, Haraway has
contributed to explorations of knowledges as situated, (gendered) projections in the study of
animals, and the porosity of human-machine/human-animal boundaries. After encouraging
feminists to think with the figure of the ‘Cyborg’, she has more recently turned to ‘companion
species’ and the world-making in cross-species encounters. Given this background, it is
unsurprising that Haraway has been one of the foremost critical voices in the
“Anthropocene” debate, by highlighting its neglect of the plantation system, questioning
human exceptionalist narrativizations, and co-creating concepts for ‘staying with the trouble’
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of current multispecies conditions, such as ‘compost’ or ‘sympoiesis’. It is in this context of a

call to ‘make-with’ other critters, too, that her new ‘dangerous’ (2018: 68) slogan is inscribed.
‘Make kin, not babies’ is a call that dominant modes of procreation and their oppressive
pronatalism give way to low birth rates. This slogan is ‘dangerous' not least because certain
strands of ‘anti-natalism’ are deeply connected to politics of the right. Haraway is attuned to
connections between considerations of so-called “(over)population” and racist and
imperialist state-making (2016b: 208–210); indeed, she even later offers 'make kin, not
population' as a variation of her current slogan. Explicitly, she acknowledges that, across
communities, sustaining offspring has differentiated relevance. But despite ‘the trouble with
the category of population’ (Haraway, 2018: 99), she stresses that we cannot ignore the
‘ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers’ (Haraway, 2016b: 208) – which will reach
‘a level of 11 billion by 2100 if we are lucky’ (6) – and should not cede this turf or term to the
right.
While related environmentalist concerns have also recently sparked a movement of climate-
related ‘birth strikes’,9 resistance to reproduction is not new. Apart from environmentalist
considerations, Haraway’s proposal to make kin, not babies also relates to a tradition of
queer and feminist struggles against naturalized heteronormative reproduction and its multi-
faced violence. This tradition involves feminist struggles against confining women to
(devalued) reproductive labour and more broadly against state-building pronatalism (see e.g.
Federici, 2012: 97, on the post-WWII ‘silent strike against procreation’). Likewise, queer
struggles have fought ‘reproductive futurism' and the governing figure of the ‘Child’ as the
eschatology of all politics (e.g. Edelman, 2005). Acknowledging how – far from being ‘natural’
– parenting, and specifically motherhood, always is technology-mediated, queer-feminists
have long entertained emancipatory technologies, e.g. concerning ectogenesis and surrogacy
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(Firestone, 2015 [1970]; Lewis, 2019). Help
Agreeing that ‘[k]in must mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or
genealogy’ (Haraway, 2018: 92), Haraway and others urge “kinnovation” (making family in
nonconventional ways; Haraway, 2016b: 208, adapting Lizzie Skurnick). For her part, Haraway
envisions deep, multi-species connections (including through genetic sharing) and creative
parenting and adoption practices. While offering some speculative and ironical fabulation
(especially ‘The Camille Stories’, 2016b: chp. 8, or the idea of ‘reproductive tokens’, 2018, p.
75–76), Haraway importantly does not predetermine what exactly practices of ‘making kin’
shall look like.10
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Still, this stays troubled terrain. Both environmentalist and feminist rejections of
reproductivism carry troubled legacies – of ecofascism and eugenic feminism, respectively –
which have proven problematic especially in their inter-articulations. As said, Haraway
anticipates such concerns – to the point where her ‘plea to “Make Kin, Not Babies”’ (Haraway,
2016b: 5–6; emphasis added) might come across as guilt-ridden (Lewis, 2017) – and tries to
sensitize her proposal. Especially, she traces how in current (re-)productive regimes and
across species, forced and prevented life are intimately connected (conceptualized by her as
a double birth/double death dynamic creating the ‘Born Ones’ and the ‘Disappeared’;
Haraway, 2018). Haraway is clearly aware of the craftings of quantifications and attaches
caveats to her non-natalist proposal, e.g. by disavowing all forms of coercive population
management.
Yet, some doubt whether these moves suffice. For one, despite Haraway’s caveats, her
continuation of “population” discourse is alarming. Rather than merely ‘troubled', the
concept is arguably ‘intolerable’ (Murphy, 2017: 137), i.e. impossible to recuperate, and
consequently critical feminism’s relinquishment of this terrain not an issue of oversight or
timidity but of sensitive awareness (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020: 478). After all, if ‘[r]ace is the
grammar and ghost of population’, “population” seems inextricably linked to imperialist
logics of quantification and coercive policies in the ‘economization of life’ (Murphy, 2017: 135;
see also Schultz, 2020). This ties in with the realization that sensitive feminist politics must
‘reject […] faulty, stubbornly persistent, and dangerous neo-Malthusian logics of
overpopulation’ (Ojeda et al., 2020: 327). It remains debatable whether current crises require
a drastic reduction in (human) numbers – indeed, whether numbers will rise to those cited by
Haraway is uncertain and rather than to numbers, concerns such as those about food
scarcity relate to structures of production and distribution (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020).
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Against this background and in absence of concrete proposals of how the number of 2–3
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billion people (envisioned by Haraway opposed to the predicted 11 billion people) could be
reached without eugenics, pleading to curb “population” seems outright irresponsible.
Related to these worries about the notion of “population”, Harawayian non-natalism seems
concerning for two further reasons. Firstly, Haraway explicates it in a way that pitches kin
against kind, odd-kin against biogenetic offspring. Yet, this ‘entrenches a divide between
nature and culture that has partially enabled the creation of the damaged world [Haraway
and others] seek to heal’ as well as it ‘problematically recreates a sense that some kin are
inherently valuable while others are not’ (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020: 481). Connectedly, the
proposal to “kinnovate” could serve to individualize responsibility rather than focussing on
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(infra)structures which determine the stratification and distribution of reproduction (Dow

and Lamoreaux, 2020). In this vein, some scholars have read Haraway’s proposal as the
abandonment of her earlier critical materialism, a development perceived either as
perplexing (Schultz, 2020) or continuous with tendencies emerging in her recent work (Lewis,
2017).
These are complex matters – involving exegesis, empirics, and historiography – which I have
no ambition to “settle” here. Indeed, Haraway and others continue to rework a critical non-
natalist position and the debate on ‘making kin’ is very much ongoing (Clarke and Haraway,
2018; Strathern et al., 2019). For the purposes of this paper, I want to side with the critics’
cautioning against a priority of non-biogenetic oddity, and depictions of kinship as
voluntarist. Still, I agree with Haraway – as do most critics – that thinking through
arrangements of kinship is decisive for current conditions. Even if massifying numbers are
not our concern, it seems clear – and indeed has been pointed out by feminists (of colour),
among others, for a long time – that some ways of relating on this planet are especially
violent and unsustainable. This includes both the dominance of patriarchal, possessive,
Anthropocentric models of kinship as well as the associated policing and erasure of practices
marked as “other”. Such kinship norms especially affect those positioned as children. Among
other (including agreeable and ambivalent) aspects, the model of “the Family” is connected to
domestic abuse, policing of child development (especially affecting disabled children),
oppressive heteronormativity (especially affecting trans children), lacking support for poor,
refugee, or multi-children families, and devaluations of peer relatings. In light of this, it
seems indeed imperative to ‘unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species’
(Haraway, 2016b: 102). Haraway’s work will remain pertinent for this endeavour, with its
potentials for challenging human exceptionalism and the dichotomy of double birth/double
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death through methods such as critical fabulation. But thinking-with Haraway also requires
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adding sensitivities to hers. And whatever one precisely makes of the former debate, I want
to suggest that one crucial sensitivity concerns issues of adultism, i.e., the centring of adult
perspectives and oppression of children.11
Making kin, not adultism

The slogan ‘make kin, not babies’ – while sidestepping the fraught marker of population in
‘make kin, not population’ – involves risks of its own. Connected to cautions of environmental
reproductive justice, attempts to rethink kinship in the “Anthropocene” must also be
decidedly childist – i.e., respond to the lived experiences of children for societal Privacy
reconstructions.12 Such considerations are often neglected even in (otherwise cautious)

critical studies interventions. Indeed, in activism and theory, ‘childhood continues to be one
of the last acceptable bastions of essentialism’ (Rachel Rosen in Spyrou et al., 2018: 423). This
might be because feminism and childism are sometimes framed in ‘antagonistic oppositions’
(Rosen and Twamley, 2018: 2). But despite the ‘difficult and, at times, fiercely territorial
relationship’ (2) between these projects, it bears notice that along with feminisms and queer
studies – and women as well as queer and trans people’s experiments with kinship beyond
the nuclear family – childhood studies have done much to debunk the ‘child construct’ and its
governmentalizing functions.
Additionally, however, childhood studies highlight that an exclusive focus on the “Child” and
its discursive function overlooks both the material embeddedness of and the oppression
inflicted upon those positioned as children in adultist societal orders (as Ellie Walton puts it
‘the materiality of the child […] slips through our scholarly cracks’; 2021: 333). Since these
material dimensions are, in turn, upheld by language, we need to actively avoid reproducing
adultism when talking about “babies” and other children. This involves resisting anti-child
rhetoric – whether rooted in queer studies or in environmentalism (e.g. the view that ‘having
children is the most destructive thing a person can do to the environment’; Mortimer, 2017).
While queer-feminists recall that societies are immensely far away from not cherishing
(certain, white, idealized) children, birthstrike tropes about children’s ecological footprint risk
further degrading children to abstract numbers associated with consumption decisions and
thereby contribute to tendencies of devaluing children as less-than-human or sidestepping
the interests of real children in family policy. “Green” non-natalism also risks reinforcing
(deeply intersectional) stigmas against certain children and their families by delimiting
appropriate ways of being or relating. This can especially affect those children who are
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already constructed as environmental scapegoats, as Black children often are (Nxumalo,
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2020: 538).
Notably, Haraway is acutely aware of the need for avoiding an anti-child non-natalism, urging
that ‘[t]he born ones deserve real pro-baby, pro-child worlding’ (Haraway, 2018: 96). She
shows herself to be deeply concerned with the plight experienced by children in worlds
which, despite child-idealizing rhetoric, only care for children highly selectively, and highlights
how the corollary of nation-building and heteronormative natalist pressure is the
disappearance of children who are deemed of not the ‘“right kind”’ (2018: 95–96).13
Elsewhere, Haraway proposes ‘making kin as a way of being really, truly prochild—making
babies rare and precious—as opposed to the crazy [sic] pronatalist but actually antichild
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world in which we live’ (Haraway, 2016c). However, while helpful for calling attention to the
starkly differentiated ways children are being valued, such formulations do not suffice to
counter adultism.
In fact, the thought that ‘babies should be rare, nurtured, and precious’ (Haraway, 2016b:
208) echoes two dangerous dimensions of the naturalized Adult/Child division. Firstly, the
passivation of children. In Haraway’s formulations, children predominantly appear only as kin
being made – whether designed and birthed or nurtured and protected. This framing is
continuous with a long-standing disregard of how children are not pre-social, inactive
becomings, but indeed partake in world-makings. While childhood studies’ might have
overemphasized ‘the agentic child’ (its ‘darling figure’) at the risk of reproducing neoliberal
conceptions of autonomy and understating material oppressions (Rosen et al., 2019: 4),
reverting to passivation is by no means preferable. The second and connected risk of implicit
adultism concerns assigning children, once again, to an abstracted “Nature”. That nature and
childhood are constructed in powerful conjunctions has long been analysed (Taylor, 2011).
This is crucial to debates specifically concerned with the “Anthropocene” since relegating
children to Nature (alternately Cheap or Precious) reiterates a “Western” (but globalized)
conception of childhood highly connected to Anthropocene dynamics which ‘make natures
legible to capital’ (Moore, 2018: 246).14
Thus, rather than affirming the category of the child (“pro-child”), critical theory needs to
question its workings. Just like feminist rather than “pro-woman” stances are called for, we
should seek childist, not “pro-child” ones. Trying to integrate those “excluded” from a
supposedly safe category of childhood does not suffice given that the very category of
childhood is tied up with the ‘grammar of race’ and connected by homology to settler
colonial logics, as Toby Rollo highlights (2016, 2018; see also Barajas, 2021). An anti-adultistPDF
stance is not achieved by merely self-bestowing a “pro-child” label. It requires questioning Help
one’s own adultism and the potential discursive effects of one’s framings. Most crucially, it
involves going beyond hegemonic adult-imagination about the appropriate place of children
and babies in post-“Anthropocene” worlds. As Haraway reminds us, it matters which stories
tell stories; the next section seeks to offer some hints at childist stories. (Haraway’s
emphases on debunking the logics of ‘growth’ will of course stay pertinent here and resonate
with some recent thought in childhood studies; e.g. Stockton, 2009.)
Towards childist kinship

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Along with anti-racist and anti-colonialist sensibilities, anti-adultism is central to reinvision

kinship practices in the “Anthropocene”. How can such a commitment be positively
substantialized? In this final section, I suggest two connected routes: firstly, to learn from old
and young conceptual debates in childhood studies; secondly, to follow childhood studies’
attention to the lived experience of children.
Lessons from childhood studies
Emerging in rejection of dominant socialization and developmental psychology notions of

children as incomplete and pre-social becomings, childhood studies have unique insights to
offer in recontextualizing contemporary practices of kinship. The attempt to ‘Abolish the
Family’ (e.g. Lewis, 2019; Weeks, 2021) – i.e. the long-term endeavour of destabilizing the
(white, bourgeois) normativity of reproduction privatized in coupledom and "bio-genetic"
lineage (an endeavour sensitive to the dialectics of and libidinal attachments to the
institutions of this norm) – can be informed by theorizing explicitly concerned with
childhoods. As Leena Alanen pointed out already in 1988, given their mutual reliance, the
‘triangularity of childhood, the family and socialization’ can only be tackled together (Alanen,
1988: 54). In the wake of Alanen, childhood studies have led the way in theorizing the
intersectional workings of generational ordering regulating the relatings and kinships
between children and adults.
While engagements by scholars of childhood in various areas provide impulses on cracks in

these orders (e.g., normative engagements with multi-parenting; Gheaus, 2019), a core
contribution by childhood studies has been to highlight the (historical, global) multiplicity of
childhoods. Through its contextualization of the currently hegemonic child-construct
(building on historical analyses such as Philippe Ariès’s and anthropological explorations of
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kinship), childhood studies have shed light on extant diversity in ways of being young (and
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old). While hegemonic notions about childhood may seem inevitable, “deviant” ways of
being-a-child-in-relation have always existed (although much is omitted in the archive). Thus,
instead of seeking “innovations”, sometimes it can perhaps suffice to recognize that what
today are often considered queer childhoods and families abound(ed) in various spacetimes.
Of course, just as childhood studies does not offer homogenous takes on these issues (e.g.,
adult privilege has often been neglected even here; Barajas, 2021), perspectives on
nonnormative adult-child relationships are not exclusive to this field. For example, Alexis
Gumbs, writing within Black Studies, explores how m/othering – a queer practice vis-à-vis
antinatalist targeting – can ‘transform […] the parenting relationship from a property
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relationship to a partnership in practice’ and enable ‘non-dominating relationships with our

children’ (Gumbs, 2016). What I am suggesting, then, is merely that there are fruitful and yet
underexplored links to be forged to childhood studies theorizations here, for instance on
how to resist generational ordering through intergenerational solidarity.15 Engagements with
kinship can specifically learn from conceptualizations of children’s agency, long central to
childhood studies. Importantly, recent positions (e.g. Abebe, 2019) can help overcome
neoliberal assumptions of agency as creative, autonomous choice, also implicit in notions of
making kin or kinnovating. Finally, childhood studies’ methods can be insightful – after all, the
field builds on an impetus to take children’s worldings seriously in their own right and
continues to advance practices for this (e.g. ethnomethodology). Shifting Haraway’s
suggestion to ‘make kin not babies’ and in line with ideas of letting children teach adults
(Biswas, 2021), in closing, then, I want to tentatively call to witness babies (and older children)
make kin.16
Lived experiences of kinship: Multispecies childhoods

In addition to destabilizations of adultism and the conceptual explorations of childhood
studies, reinvisioning of kinship can benefit from tuning into children’s practices. In
entertaining the present-future of kin-making, we can listen to children’s own views on what
childhood can mean (see e.g. Cassidy et al., 2017) or children’s own analyses of the
oppressions they face (e.g. in the family). For reflection on how to ‘unravel the ties of both
genealogy and kin’, it also helps to extend our focus beyond (idealized) Western childhoods
by considering how in many places children engage in paid work, head households (Abebe,
2019) or uphold networks of care (e.g. ProNATs, 2020) – care work which ‘is often either
overlooked or pathologized’ (Barajas, 2021: 32). Pursuing Moore’s quest for multi-species
alliances – especially ones more immediately available than the genetic fusions envisionedPDF
by
Haraway – we can also turn to already existing practices by children. I want to zoom into Help
some of these in the remainder.17
By learning-with the joint becomings of children and rabbits in Australia, Affrica Taylor
outlines some ways of responding to the “Anthropocene” already occurring in the ‘small and
seemingly insignificant events’ in children’s lives (Taylor, 2020: 354). Thereby, Taylor’s work is
situated in a larger body of recent work addressing ‘multispecies childhoods’, i.e., the
entanglements between human children and more-than-human animals.18 Research has
illuminated how children and dogs can become companions in precarious city settings, how
children employ mimicry to explore embodiedness with other animals, and how intimate,
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non-innocent practices of care emerge in these encounters. In midst of all the trouble, such
practices can arguably (sometimes) enable ‘non-hierarchical relations of difference’ to
emerge (Hohti and Tammi, 2019: 177).
While such more-than-human encounters may seem age-independent, Taylor (in a different
paper) goes further in invoking the ‘non-divisive relations that many young children already
have with the world’ (Taylor, 2017: 1458–1459), thus suggesting that children’s practices are
specifically positioned. This is a hazardous move. As Sjögren (2020) highlights, discussions of
children in the “Anthropocene” risk essentialising children as ‘Extraordinary’, e.g. as
unimplicated in relations of power or as in original touch with nature. In invoking ‘non-
divisive relations’ which set (many) children’s world-relatings apart from those of adults,
Taylor seemingly comes close to reproducing the mutually stabilizing essentializations of
childhood and nature which she herself has helped deconstruct (see Taylor, 2011).
Still, I believe there is an important point in Taylor’s emphasis on the potential of children’s
practices for shifting relationalities. After all, it is possible to attempt a regrouping of
childhood and nature(s) that avoids Rousseauian essentializations (Hohti and Tammi, 2019:
171–173). Importantly, such a regrouping must acknowledge the contingency of intimacies
between children and what Yusoff theorizes as the inhuman(e). Rather than “a priori” or
“natural”, any heightened intimacy stems from a hybridity of discursive and material factors.
These factors are inseparable from the (adultist) violence involved in the relegation of
children to a separate (natural) sphere.
With these reminders in mind, one can appreciate the thought that children are often well
positioned to ‘operat[e] outside of the hyper-separating logics of rational Man’s foundational
human-animal divide’ (Taylor, 2020: 348). This is precisely because (many) ‘children are less
likely to have learned the “rules” of the “Man versus Nature” game’ (Taylor, 2020: 345). Again,
PDF
I would be careful not to formulate this in a blanket way (some children, especially outside Help
of
white “protected” contexts, have to learn many such rules early and violently) or suggest that
the ‘appropriate subject of the Anthropocene is the child’ (Sjögren, 2020: 7), a vision arguably
connected to the reiteration of population logics in the commercial dream of changing the
world by “investing in girls” (Murphy, 2017, part 3). But beyond questions of essential identity,
the fact is that some children’s conceptualizations and practices are generatively unruly,
irreverent to valuations underscoring “Anthropocene” (kinship) logics. Indeed, this is a
thought articulated by child activists themselves, e.g. when XR Kids (2021) urge: ‘Do not
underestimate our generation and our age group. Being between 8-12 years old means that
we have not yet been fully influenced by the broken system […]’. Relatedly, Taylor outlines
Privacy
how the Australian rabbit-becoming children are already ‘getting on with the job of inheriting
and cohabiting damaged worlds without recourse to human heroicism and dominion’
(Taylor, 2020: 340). Adults can learn from such practices for modes of kinship which
disidentify with heteronormative, Anthropocentric, and humanist conceptions.19
Once more, this childist point must be accompanied by caution to acknowledge children’s
non-innocence as well as their diverse material embeddedness. We need to beware of
stories that homogenise across children – e.g., by neglecting how some children are expulsed
from the category of childhood and its associated opportunities for multispecies play, or
how, in line with voluntarist accounts of “kin-making”, children are often pictured as
exclusively creative and disruptive (Cook, 2018). Sensitive ways of ‘deep hanging out’
(Somerville and Powell, 2019) with children and practices of ‘speculative fabulation’ – not just
about hypothetical Camilles but with actual children – are needed for ‘changing the story’ of
kinship in the “Anthropocene”.
Concluding remarks
Adressing the crises of the “Anthropocene” requires, as Haraway has stressed, questioning
hegemonic kinship practices. Connected to sensitivities around individualizing responsibility
or reproducing eugenic population discourse, an indispensable companion for rethinking
kinship practices is childism. For one, cautions against adultist (linguistic) violence are
needed. Also, turning to theoretical debates in childhood studies and the lived experiences of
children can help thinking through ways of relating in destructed worlds, especially across
species. Haraway’s work has already prompted stimulating reflections on “Anthropocene”
kinship (including in childhood studies) and will remain crucial for unpacking extractivism,
human exceptionalism, and the logics of growth. Still, some of the questions Haraway raises
PDF
– especially on the possibility of a non-natalism that is not anti-child – can benefit from Help
childist answers, or reframings. Instead of romanticizing lip service to being “pro-child”,

Harawayian thought on kinship could just use a dose of childism.
This is a call then both for the debate on kinship to engage childist insights; and for
childhood studies scholars to continue to confidently engage the issue of kinship in the
current “cene”. Many questions remain: What can adults learn from children for tackling the
infrastructures of reproduction and questions of “numbers”? What can they also learn about
unmaking certain relations or about ‘cuts in relationality’ (Colebrook, 2019)? How can
multispecies childhoods be approached in a way that is not anachronous but considers
Privacy
current technological mediations? What does intergenerational solidarity mean in

reproductive matters? How can we better connect childhood studies and critical gerontology
as well as queer and disability studies on these questions? For the moment, however, let us
do without the ‘make kin, not babies’. I agree with Haraway that present conditions require
many slogans and submit the following: ‘Make Kin With Babies’, ‘Let Children Make (You) Kin’,
and ‘Kids for Kinder Reproduction’. Perhaps, rather than abandoning ‘Kind’ for ‘Kin’,
Haraway’s ‘Children of Compost’ can find real companion in a ‘Kind of Kin’.20
Acknowledgments
Kind thanks for support, comments, and discussions to Tanu Biswas, Agneska Bloch,
Benedikt Kuhn, and Leon Schlüter, as well as, hardly negligible in the present context, my
family. I also want to thank Ragnhild Berge, the other editors, and two anonymous reviewers
at Childhood.
Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
ORCID iD PDF
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Nikolas Mattheis 
Footnotes
1. ‘Repsonse-ability’ is understood with Haraway as a ‘capacity to respond’ (2016b: 78) –
especially ‘to worldy urgencies with one another’ (7). This is thus a sensitivity far removed
from ableist occupations with bodily and cognitive functioning.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
Privacy
2. This agenda (e.g. Wall 2019) relates to other attempts of ‘reimagining childhood studies’
(see e.g. Spyrou et al., (2019). Note that the term ‘childism’ has had various and conflicting
usages (cf. Rollo 2016: n.2).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
3. See also Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. (2020b: 499). Some caveats attach to this
acknowledgement. For one, the publicity surrounding Greta Thunberg and (Western parts of)
“Fridays for Future” raises intricate questions about uptake. While often depicted as a new
(white, Western) “voice”, children’s political activism has a long and diverse history (see e.g.,
Rodgers 2020). Also, the figure of the heroic but harmless (girl) saviour, only ever available to
some children, looms large (see Taft 2020).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
4.
Of course, this is not to suggest a dichotomy between critical, “post-human” inquiry and
unpolitical natural sciences. These are not homogenous “blocks” (as evidenced for instance
by controversies within the AWG).
And arguably many scientists are sensitive to differential responsibilities and the effects of
narrativization, while lingering humanism has been especially strong in some “critical”
narrativizations, displacing ‘Earth history’ with ‘world history’; see Chakrabarty (2018).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
5. For an overview of peer-reviewed articles addressing the “Anthropocene” in early

PDF
childhood education, see Sjögren (2020). In addition, at least one full-length book treatment
(Malone, 2017) and sections in anthologies (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020; Malone Help
et
al., 2020) are devoted to the Anthropocene-childhood-nexus.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
6. The framing of child activists that the ‘climate crisis is a children’s rights crisis’ (§13) is also
in line with previous scholarly engagements (see e.g. Gibbons 2014).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
Privacy
7. Despite its limitations, I acknowledge with Haraway that ‘we will continue to need the term
Anthropocene’ (2016b: 47). I continue to use it here given that as an established referent, it
connects strands of inquiry (including in childhood studies). Yet, to highlight its troubledness,
I put it in quotation marks in the following. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for pushing
me on this issue.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
8. This slogan has received some (limited) uptake within childhood studies too (see e.g.
Taylor, 2020: 343–344). Little, however, has the slogan been engaged on a more conceptual
level, which I try to do here. The concept of kinship has also been centred in children’s
literature studies recently (Gubar, 2016). However, unlike the present paper, the suggestion
of a ‘kinship model of childhood’ is mainly concerned with the ‘elemental similarity’ (300)
between children and adults as a guiding principle for approaching texts and it does not
directly engage the “Anthropocene”.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
9. For a brief characterization of the diversely motivated birth-strikers, see Schultz (2020: 27–
28). Indeed, the question of whether procreation can be justified also resonates across
testimonies by child activists, e.g., when Iris Duquesne states ‘I don’t want to have kids if
they’re going to live in a world like that’ (characterized by the repercussions of climate
change) (Sacchi et al., 2019; A.3).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
10. And certainly, rather than taking them at face value, engaging Haraway’s “proposals” PDF
requires heeding her characteristic use of irony; of course, the slogan ‘Making Kin, Not Help
Babies’ itself is a provocation that continues her feminist ‘blasphemy’ present since the
Cyborg Manifesto. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
11. Of course, such sensitivities are not detached from the cautions discussed previously.
The ways in which Black children and their mothers are targeted in regimes of reproductive
stratification (e.g., as “unruly scapegoats” and “welfare queens”) draw attention to the
intersectionality of adultism, racism, and queerphobia, which are mediated through
chrononormativity and population discourse as well as concepts such as “innocence” (see
Privacy
Walton, 2021).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
12. Helen Hester’s ‘xenofeminist’ interrogation of Haraway’s proposal has only come to my
attention when this paper had already been accepted for publication. Anticipating some
points I elaborate here, Hester (2018) emphasizes that the ‘rallying cry not to make babies’
needs to be qualified (58) – in a way that is responsive to ‘actually existing children’ (61) – and
that new variations of Haraway’s slogan seem called for (65).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
13. The atrocities of ‘missing fetuses and babies’ have been a long-standing concern in
Haraway’s writing on reproductive freedom/technology and human numbers (e.g., 1997, 51),
which is attentive to the highly selective sacralization of ‘the embryo, baby, and fetus’ (62).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
14. Notably, sometimes, Haraway is attuned to such symbolic displacements, as when she
writes as in the Companion Species Manifesto: ‘To regard a dog as a furry child, even
metaphorically, demeans dogs and children —and sets up children to be bitten and dogs to
be killed.’ (2016a: 128). Unfortunately, such sensitivity is largely absent in her recent work on
kin-making (a rare exception being the acknowledgement of the simultaneous positioning of
‘black kids’ and pigeons as “feral”; Haraway, 2016b, 24–25).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
PDF
15. Fortunately, such ‘generous encounters’, for instance in the borderland between
Help
feminisms and the politics of childhood, continue to emerge (e.g., Rosen and Twamley, 2018).
GO TO FOOTNOTE
16. For previous emphases on ‘witnessing’, see various contributions in Cutter-Mackenzie-

Knowles et al. (2020a), especially Nxumalo (2020), who deploys the term (in connection with
testifying) particularly vis-a-vis anti-blackness.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
Privacy
17. It could be said that germs of such attention are contained in Haraway’s work (e.g., in
telling the relation between her dog Cayenne and her godson Mark in the Companion Species
Manifesto, 2016b, 40–42, or in attending to encounters between ‘black kids’ and pigeons, as
well as to hypothetical symbiont children’s and actual Mazahua children’s performances in
Staying with the Trouble; see 2016a, 132–138, 2016b, 24–25, 226). While these scenes remain
relatively marginal, are not explicitly informed by childhood studies, and often contain an
emphasis on children’s learning and adults judging (e.g. 2016b, 146), such nascent
inclinations further explain the compatibility of Haraway’s work with childhood(nature)
studies.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
18. For this term, an overview of connected works, and cautions against rushing to more-
than human epistemologies, see Hohti and Tammi (2019). Fikile Nxumalo (2020, 10) also
points out that childhood studies’ recent “ontological turn” to destabilize Nature/Culture
dichotomies ‘is not new to [various] Indigenous teachings’.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
19. Importantly, such contestations need not only concern the Human-Animal divide. Fikile
Nxumalo (2017) for instance surveys small openings in the division between Life and Nonlife
which Povinelli and Yusoff theorize.
GO TO FOOTNOTE
20. I am here drawing on resonances with the German language, where ‘Kind’ means ‘Child’.
PDF
GO TO FOOTNOTE
Help
ORCID iD
Nikolas Mattheis 
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18/01/2023 10:01 Making kin, not babies?

Towards childist kinship in the “Anthropocene” - Nikolas Mattheis, 2022

Impact Factor: 1.802

encourage childhood studies to deepen an emerging engagement of kinship in the

of current multispecies conditions, such as ‘compost’ or ‘sympoiesis’. It is in this context of a

(infra)structures which determine the stratification and distribution of reproduction (Dow

Making kin, not adultism

reconstructions.12 Such considerations are often neglected even in (otherwise cautious)

Towards childist kinship

Along with anti-racist and anti-colonialist sensibilities, anti-adultism is central to reinvision

Lessons from childhood studies

Emerging in rejection of dominant socialization and developmental psychology notions of

While engagements by scholars of childhood in various areas provide impulses on cracks in

relationship to a partnership in practice’ and enable ‘non-dominating relationships with our

Lived experiences of kinship: Multispecies childhoods

some of these in the remainder.17

childist answers, or reframings. Instead of romanticizing lip service to being “pro-child”,

current technological mediations? What does intergenerational solidarity mean in

Declaration of conflicting interests

5. For an overview of peer-reviewed articles addressing the “Anthropocene” in early

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Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles A, Malone K, Hacking EB (eds), (2020a) Research Handbook on

Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles A, Malone K, Whitehouse H (2020b) Childhoodnature and the

Gheaus A (2019) More co-parents, fewer children: multiparenting and sustainable

Gubar M (2016) The hermeneutics of recuperation: what a kinship-model approach to

Haraway DJ (2016a) Manifestly Haraway. Minnesapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hester H (2018) Xenofeminism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Malone K, Tesar M, Arndt S (2020) Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies. Singapore:

Nxumalo F (2017) Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances.

ProNATs (2020) Solidarity economy. Available at:

Sjögren H (2020) A review of research on the Anthropocene in early childhood education.

Taylor A (2011) Reconceptualizing the ‘nature’ of childhood. Childhood 18(4): 420–433.

XR Kids (2021) Instagram photos and videos. Available at:

Minnesota Press. Help

Emerging scholars of Childhood Studies

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