Family Proclamations: “Won’t Someone Think of the Children,” with Adam Benforado

About the Guest

Adam Benforado is a professor of law at the Drexel University Kline School of Law and the New York Times best-selling author of A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. His research, teaching, and advocacy is focused on children’s rights and criminal justice. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, he served as a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and an attorney at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous scholarly articles. His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Slate, and The Atlantic. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.

Transcript

ADAM BENFORADO: If you're an architect, if you're a plumber, if you are a judge on an immigration court, I want you to think about what your job would look like if you put children first. The reason to do this is because this is good for all of us. It's not just good for kids. It's good for people who don't even like children at all. This is the best path forward as a society, because we all pay the costs of that inattention and those harms that come to kids.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Adam Benforado and he's calling for a revolution in the way we all think about childhood. Which is gonna sound a little weird if you think kids today have it easier than ever.

And it's true. I mean, they have some luxuries I couldn't even dream of as a kid—like I had to wait until Saturday morning to watch my favorite cartoons. Even then, I had to make the difficult choice between Muppet Babies or Ninja Turtles because they were on at the same time on a different channel. As a parent, Adam Benforado says he cheers for many improvements, but as a professor of law at Drexel University, he says the way children are treated by the courts in the US, economic limits they face, their lack of voting power, their poor access to health care, things like this make kids as vulnerable in America as they've been in 100 years. He wants that to change, not just because it would be better for kids. He says it would be better for everyone. But could the world's major challenges with health, climate change, and public safety really be easier to address by changing the way we treat kids? Adam Benforado says yes, that's why he wrote the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, and he's here to talk about it right now.

There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

Lifelong Interest in Children’s Rights - 2:15

BLAIR HODGES: Adam Benforado, welcome to Family Proclamations.

ADAM BENFORADO: Great to be with you.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, A Minor Revolution. And this is about children's rights. I wondered what got you interested in focusing on the legal rights of children. Your background is in law. So talk a little bit about why the rights of children became your focus.

ADAM BENFORADO: So I think for me this is really a lifelong project. I think the seeds of this really come from my own childhood. I was really lucky to be born into a family with two really loving, supportive parents who spent a lot of time encouraging me and helping me be independent.

But I think all around me, throughout my childhood, I saw a lot of abuse and, honestly, subjugation of children. And it really bothered me, starting when I was in elementary school, seeing the way kids were treated as, you know, not second-class citizens but as just, like, non-entities, I mean, not even like human beings.

I think I was also aware of broader forces. I think I was really aware of the impact of wealth. I had a 1,200 square foot house and in my early elementary years I felt like the rich kid. And then I went to a kind of wealthy neighborhood in fourth grade where one of my friend's fathers got a limousine for the fourth-grade birthday party. And suddenly, I was like, “Oh my gosh! Actually my parents have like a beat-up VW Beetle.” And I'm like, “I'm not wealthy, like, I'm actually kind of worried about what my friends might think of my wealth, my family's wealth.”

I think I was someone who really thought that I should vote when I was like in sixth grade. I didn't understand, you know, maybe I don't know as much as this other person. But I did know about the world. I have things I care about. Why shouldn't I have a say? I have a say in a whole bunch of other areas of my life. My parents listened when we were discussing things like what we should have for dinner, or whatever.

I think it was those interactions and observations which informed my sense of and desire to write about some of the injustices I saw. And I think that carried me to law school, and certainly informed the questions I was interested in looking into, and certainly the way I taught. And in terms of coming to children's rights, the type of legal scholars usually sort of fall into these two camps of either being like general human rights—people who kind of focus over time on children's rights—or they are like practitioners who are working in the child welfare system, and then they come in with this particular angle.

And it’s funny because honestly, I was writing about all these different topics—like I started out writing about the role of corporations in society, and I teach criminal law. And in each of these subjects I look at things through the lens of children. So I'm very interested in, you know, how corporations manipulate kids to use them as weapons against their parents. I'm very interested in criminal law on juvenile justice issues—

BLAIR HODGES: Are you talking about breakfast cereal commercials and toy commercials? [laughter]

ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, yes. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Like how stores put all the candy and toys right by the checkout so you have to pass through there with your kids.

ADAM BENFORADO: Oh, yeah. And that's something now, as a father—I think the cool thing about this project is, the seeds of this project started when I was a kid, but now I'm seeing it from a different perspective. I have two kids and, I tell you, right before I was writing this book, I had this experience with my daughter in Whole Foods. It’s one of these times when we’ve got to go to the grocery store, there's no food, and my daughter looks up in front of the egg aisle, and there's this giant giraffe that costs $100, you know? And my daughter just breaks down, like lying on the ground, sobbing. And I'm like, “What are you doing?”

BLAIR HODGES: It’s pretty genius really.

ADAM BENFORADO: And here's the kicker, one of the Amazon shoppers passing through comes up, looks at me, and goes, “Spoiled.” She shakes her head. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is a set up! This is just like this giant trap.” And what's brilliant about it is that no parents are gonna buy the hundred-dollar giraffe. You're coming in for eggs. But you know, what you might do to stop the embarrassment is buy the ten-dollar little plushie, stuffed animal, just to get out of that awkward social situation.

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. I wonder, do you remember an example—you mentioned when you were in elementary school you saw children being treated not even as citizens at all. Do you remember anything in particular that stood out to you? You said you wanted to vote in sixth grade, as an example. Is there anything else like, “Wow, why are we kids being treated like this?”

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I mean, I thought about it in many circumstances. In elementary school, learning that my good friend's father spanked him and being like, my friend is really, he's a really smart, really nice person. We're no different. And he messes up in little, tiny ways. But everyone messes up. Adults mess up all the time and no one hits them.

And then moving on from that to becoming a law professor and being like, wow, not suddenly being like, “Oh, this all makes sense.” But actually, wait a second, it’s criminal law that you can't hit a prisoner. Like someone who's a murderer or rapist, it's prohibited under the Constitution from formally beating people as a punishment. And yet the legal minds, the geniuses, who are on our courts have said, “It's actually okay, it's constitutionally permissible. Kids are different.” And I think the answer to that today is because we don't see kids the way we see adults. We don't see them as full citizens.

And I think there were a lot of moments like that. I think the bullying that I saw in junior high school, you know, again, that's what kids do. But what was so frustrating to me was the treating of this by adults, you know. The gym teacher, the math teacher, who saw the same terrible abuse. Like the kids who face this must carry those scars to this day. And doing nothing. There were all these instances where kids end up protected from things they don't need protecting from, where they can actually be empowered. And then actually, on the flip side, exposed to real harms that we could do something about, you know? There were adults who could easily have done things and didn't.

And I think that all of those little observations, I kind of filed them back in my mind.

And moments of censorship. So, you know, I remember a moment from Junior year—I got into this Governor's School down in Virginia, went away for a month, and it was like, the first time in my life that I was feeling like getting treated as an adult. Like it was all independent. They had college professors teaching this stuff. And you know what? I did all the reading, I read all the poetry. I did all the history. I did it all because I was like, “This is interesting, and I want to be engaged in these conversations.”

And I felt this whole month, treated as an adult. And then at the final little party thing—and over the course of the term, there were people at Governor's School who were musicians, and I played in rock bands. So I formed this little band called “Beans and Franks” and we wrote some songs. And I'm about to go up to perform. The band gets to perform at the last thing, and the head of Governor’s School comes up to me and is like, “Okay, I'm gonna need to review the lyrics.”

And I was like, “What?” Like, I'm 17 years old, like, I've been listening to—Everyone here has heard everything already. Like, you’ve been treating me like an adult for a month. And now you want to review the lyrics? What? And I thought through like, there aren't even any offensive lyrics. But okay, I'll go through this song that I've written. And there was one line, which I think it was something like—again, it’s embarrassing to even say, it was just stupid—It was like, “Smooth like a rubber, bounce it back to your mother.” [laughter] And he's like, “No, no. You cannot do that.” And honestly, as a 17-year-old boy I wrote a few songs with more offensive lyrics. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you were like, “We were going easy on y'all here.”

ADAM BENFORADO: Yes! I was like, “Hey, I've actually cleaned this up for the Governor's School performance.” And it was like, you can't perform this. I just was like, how do you expect me to be prepared to be a member of society? I'm going off to college in a year, and it soured everything else. It was like all the other stuff. You want to control me. You're happy when I'm getting A’s in my classes and doing what you say. But as soon as I show some real independence, that's when you're like, “No, you're nothing. I'm the decider.”

And it’s interesting, I teach this course called The Rights of Children, and actually have my students think back to moments from their childhood. And what I have observed, which is so interesting, is how fresh these incidents are. Like a student, who was now 27 years old, writing about that moment at the eighth-grade dance, where she was going into a strict Catholic school, and they had always had the same dress code. The girls got to wear off the shoulder dresses and the new principal changed it but she organized a petition and had all the teachers sign it, and the principal wouldn't even meet with them. Wouldn't even meet. And she's carried that to law school. She's writing about it just as if it happened yesterday.

And I think it's these things that all of us carry, we sort of often kind of later justify it as a rite of passage that everyone should go through as opposed to, “No, that's wrong. And I'm going to change that for the next generation. I want them to experience something different than what I experienced.” As opposed to, “Yeah, it's just part of the experience. You're brutalized and then you get to brutalize when you're an adult, and so it’s fair.”

America’s Child Welfare Movement 100 Years Ago - 12:39

BLAIR HODGES: To get to this point where dress codes and things are the main concern, you actually take us back in time to talk about some of the reforms that happened a century ago. Your book starts back in 1906. There's this Spokane Press article. Here's a quote from it. It says, “When your children are swinging in the hammock, or playing at the park, stop and give a thought to the pale-faced factory boys and girls of the metropolis.”

They're painting this picture of child labor and distinguishing between more privileged kids and kids that are basically laborers at this time. What was happening at the turn of the century, what was the child's rights movement like back then?

ADAM BENFORADO: So I wanted to open the book with this broader historical context in part because this was this miraculous moment a little over a hundred years ago where, coming out of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Americans—and these are really everyday Americans, across the country—came together and said we need to do something about the plight of children. And we need to do something, not simply because this is unfair to kids, but because we are setting ourselves up for failure as a nation. So when we fail to invest in the education of, you know, five to 15-year-olds, that's setting us up to fail in the decades ahead.

So people came together—reformers who were often kind of lumped together as this child saver progressive movement, came together to demand changes: building of better public schools, mandatory public education, pushing for health and even things like drug safety measures, building playgrounds, investing in and creating an entirely new juvenile justice system based on rehabilitation rather than punishment.

I chose to go back and just pick up kind of a random paper from 1906 to show just how much this energy was pushing into every area of life. So this is a little four-page paper from Washington State. And literally every page has like three different articles about child-focused reforms. And I think what was miraculous was just how much was done.

By 1912 President Taft had created the first federal agency focused on the whole child, this Children's Bureau. And the idea, I think, coming out of this was, certainly in the decades ahead, we are going to see this bright new age for children across the country. And unfortunately, I think what we have seen over the course of the 20th century and then into the last couple of decades, is not simply kind of slowing to a trudge, but in some cases, even backtracking on some things.

So you started with this example of child labor, this excerpt from this article. Well, what have we seen over just the last couple of months? Exposés in the New York Times about young people working in terrible labor conditions. Working the overnight shifts, just as those kids were laboring in 1906. And the reasons that are given to justify it are just the same as were given in 1906: “It’s an economic necessity, coming out of the pandemic, we've had changes in the job market. We actually need to roll back job protections in our state. Businesses can't compete unless we let 15-year-olds continue to work.”

BLAIR HODGES: Or like, “families need the money, like this is actually good for families.” Instead of looking at how when people aren't being paid living wages, “Oh, let's make their children work.”

ADAM BENFORADO: It’s something that I think, you know, we see a little bit in fiction even. I'm halfway through a new book called Demon Copperhead—really great if any listeners are looking for a new summer read—but it traces actually kind of the effects of the child welfare system, but also the fact that kids are picking tobacco in our fields.

One of the historical examples that's in this 1906 newspaper is the plight of kids rolling cigarettes in factories in New York City. Okay, well, they may not be doing that in New York City anymore. But down in North Carolina, kids today are picking tobacco in a hundred-degree heat. And they're getting nicotine poisoning, just like kids did a hundred years ago. And often it's the most vulnerable kids. It's migrant kids. It's kids whose parents are desperate for cash. And we're turning our back on them.

In a way, unfortunately, I think this is a real indictment of the status quo. I think we're turning our backs more than people did 120 years ago. I think the child labor movement was going in the right direction. There was a lot of work that they ultimately, you know—

Some of these child labor laws from a hundred years ago, there were exemptions for farm workers. But they were making a lot of progress. Here? Look at the last couple of months. We're backtracking. In a lot of areas we’re repealing labor protections, virtually.

BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk about some of the reasons you think that's happening as we go. Just to set the table as we get into some of the rights you're arguing for, I want to point out that your book is not making philosophical arguments, you're arguing about pragmatic benefits.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that probably sets this book, and I think my approach, apart from some other rights scholars and rights advocates is I'm not simply arguing that this is a good thing to do for kids, right? It's not “natural rights.” I think that's usually where people start is like, even if there were no benefit to the rest of us, this is the good thing to do. That's how we tend to think about rights. And I absolutely believe that is true for children.

But I think that's never going to get us where we want to be. I think we need to make the strong case for why actually putting children first benefits all of us. And that's because so many social problems are best addressed if you focus on interventions, rehab, in childhood.

Ultimately, as a society, you always have to pay for things like crime, underemployment, poor health. The question is simply: Are you going to pay pennies on those preventative early interventions? Or are you going to pay many dollars on the backend when problems have already metastasized and hardened? It's a choice.

Again, do you want to pay for school lunches for all kids? Or do you want to have kids who can't pay attention in school and don't graduate, and then you have a labor force who is underperforming and underemployed? You're gonna have to pay for that triple bypass. There’s no free option.

And so really, this is also I think, an answer to those critics who are worried that somehow this is a zero-sum game—that if you invest in kids, somehow you harm older Americans. No! When you invest in kids, you have healthier old people, you have old people who actually have more in their retirement account so they can take care of themselves. So what is the best pathway for us as a society? Invest in kids. I think that's the core takeaway for the book.

Isolated Parenting - 20:09

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And I want people to see that, because this isn't a book for parents, per se, this is a book for all people. And the other point is, everyone's been a child, whether you end up having kids later on, we've all been children, we've all experienced that. And the way children are raised in our society affects everybody, not just parents. And so this isn't a book about parenting.

ADAM BENFORADO: That’s a great point. And I think, unfortunately, kids and kid’s issues and children's rights in this country, have been framed only as a parent's issue. And that's part of that story, that historical story of like, what happened to those early child savers, those early progressives? And one of the answers is over the course of the 20th century, we lost this vision of investing in and empowering kids as a societal endeavor and it shifted to this idea that, “No, raising up kids is solely the work of individual parents.”

BLAIR HODGES: It's “Don't Tread on Me” parenting.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. It’s atomized. So what has happened over the course of the 20th century, this was coming from popular culture. But I think it was also coming from our elite institutions. The Supreme Court is coming out with really these groundbreaking opinions, saying parents are ultimately in possession of a fundamental right to decide the destinies of their children in all of the important matters, whether that's religion, whether that's schooling, whether that's medical care.

And one of the consequences of that is this incredible weight which is placed on all parents’ shoulders. Now, it's entirely up to you whether your kid sinks or swims. You actually have to be the ultimate decider on everything. You're the one who's asked to decide, now, is my kid going to learn about race history? Not the school. The school isn't going to teach them about these defining historical moments, because they're scared, they don't want the protests and the pushback. And the textbooks are being removed, these references of well, “We’ve got to leave out the Holocaust. Slavery, let's take that out. We'll leave this, take that. We're not taking a position. It's just up to individual parents to make these decisions.”

So suddenly, parents, you have to be a historian. Well, suddenly, you actually have to decide on medical care, too. Don't just take the vaccine schedule from the doctor. No, you do your own research. Oh, you want to protect your kid from, you know, lead and asbestos? Well, you do the research.

I will tell you as a parent, it is exhausting. It explains one of the reasons why parent burnout and unhappiness is so high in this country, as opposed to some of the studies that have been done comparatively, parents who have nothing, who face incredible odds in Africa, are much, much, much happier as parents. Why? Because it's a collective endeavor. They don't have to do everything. They're not alone in these struggles. And unfortunately, I think that's the rub of the whole parents’ rights movement is, okay, you get to decide, but being a parent, raising kids is so hard. You face so much.

The Early Years: A Right to Attachment - 23:34

BLAIR HODGES: And there's less and less social support. We’ll talk about this in a later part of the interview about early childhood and the “Right to Investment.” But let's start with “The Right to Attachment.” So in the book you've laid out these particular rights for kids, and you kind of rolled them out according to developmental stages of where children are at. You're following the best research on childhood development.

In the first years, the “right to attachment” is what you highlight in here. And one of the things some of these earlier child advocates had wrong was the idea that parents shouldn't baby their babies, that they shouldn't coddle them, they should maintain a kind of detachment from them.

And then there was this fascinating monkey experiment listeners might have heard of, I think I heard about it as an undergraduate, where they had these monkeys and they had a mother that was like, just this wire cage that would give them milk. And then also a monkey that was like covered in fabric and it was comfortable. And then the baby monkeys would go to the milk mom and eat, but then they would always go back to the comfortable mom, and that's who they would bond with. So the argument became secure bonds, warm bonds, loving experiences, more nurturing-type experiences are important. And you had a big scientific shift here away from this detached parenting style to close parenting, and you're arguing for more of that for kids.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and I argue, hey, this research has continued and now is incredibly robust on the value of early attachment with a primary caregiver. It's actually been supplemented by work even showing intergenerational effects, in the context of these monkeys. If you engage in that early deprivation, it actually can have intergenerational effects on the future monkey offspring.

Now, I think we look at the state of the research and then we look at what society has done in response. Well, what society has done in response is work in incredible ways, severing the bonds and failing to support bonds that I think we could really seriously strengthen.

What are some examples of that? Well, we're the only wealthy, advanced nation who does not have paid mandatory supported care leave for the parents and adoptive parents of young kids. And again, as I said, that sets us up for failure as a nation. But so many parents go back to work after just a couple of days at home with their kids. And that doesn't make economic sense. More often the argument is, you know, “Economically we can't have businesses giving people six months off.” And everywhere else in the world, they say, “We can't not do that. It's economically stupid not to do that. We're going to just pay more money on the backend if we do that.”

Now, I think we obviously can make a lot of progress by really simple guarantees to new parents in terms of care leave. But I think we also have to think about some of the ways we really sever bonds carelessly. One of the biggest ones, I think, is our criminal justice system. Millions of kids have or have had a parent locked up during their childhoods, and that has horrible repercussions downline. Often it's not locked up in prison, it's actually pretrial in jail.

What happens to a mom accused of, you know, some theft or a drug crime, when she's waiting trial? Well, trials in the United States take a long time. Bail might be $1,000 or $2,000. For a poor parent, they may not have that. So what happens as a result of that? A single mom is taken out—those three kids are put into foster care. We all pay for that. We pay for locking up the mom pretrial. We pay for those kids going into the foster system. And we pay the lifelong costs of our non-functional child welfare system as well. So we do it there.

We do it at the border. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy over the last few years about child separation policies. But we also do it with our child welfare system when it comes to poverty. So how do we deal with parental poverty? Do we help parents? No, what we do is, we take kids away from their parents. A police officer is called, a child welfare worker is called, goes into a house and finds no food in the refrigerator—

BLAIR HODGES: An empty fridge, yeah.

ADAM BENFORADO: Finds roaches, finds peeling lead paint. What do we do? Do we get that mother into good, stable housing? Do we give her money for food? Do we feed the kids at school?

No, what we do is we say, “You're a bad mom, you failed. You're an abomination.” And we take the kids away and often put them in worse circumstances. And if we were guided by that research, that robust set of research on the value of attachment, we would make very, very different choices. We would say, “You know what? This isn't about the mom, ultimately.” And I say this to audiences when I talk, look, sometimes folks are filled with anger at parents who have, in their view, failed to meet their responsibilities. That's an area where I think I'm going to disagree with all the people in which I see these as situational constraints on parents, but let's actually set that to the side. If you want to hate that mom, and think that she's a bad person, go ahead and do that.

Let's focus on the kids though. Because we need to do what's best for those kids. Right? And I will tell you, taking kids away from parents who love them, and are poor, is setting us up for failure as a nation. And I think that if we can get into that mindset whenever there's anger at the parents like, “Why should we pay for public school breakfasts and lunches? It's these parents, these deadbeat parents that we're incentivizing.” It's like, hey, there's a kid who is not eating lunch. Focus on the kid. Leave the parents aside. You want to vilify the parents? Okay. I think that's the wrong approach. But let's at least agree that the kid should eat a healthy meal every day.

Early Childhood: The Right to Investment - 29:46

BLAIR HODGES: This is where it connects to the next chapter on early childhood, “The Right to Investment,” and you're arguing that children deserve a right to investment in good schools, in their quality of health care, in the housing they have available to them, in mentorship.

You introduce us in this chapter to Harold, this is a Black man from Philadelphia, and what his story suggests about the right to investment. He's an interesting example because he's someone the system did sort of invest in. But as you know, they would put him in particular programs, help him get schooling and things, but as a Black man, he witnessed this and saw himself sort of, as he kind of won the lottery.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, he describes himself as a unicorn.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, a ton of other Black kids didn't get these kinds of investments. And so he's like, wait a minute, the system is doing this on an individual level, a kind of band-aid solution, but not changing the overall system. Harold had mixed feelings about how he was invested in.

ADAM BENFORADO: I think this was one of the most powerful interviews I did. It was just eye opening, in some ways for both of us in this conversation. But he remarked early on about this defining moment in his childhood where his parents, they’d just gotten kicked out of their house, and they were basically are homeless. And they're in downtown Philadelphia, where I currently live, standing on a street corner. He's six years old. He’s just trying to figure out like, what are they going to do? Like, where are they gonna sleep, get food, all this stuff. They're on a street corner.

And he said he just saw a white guy with his briefcase and like, everything about it was just so perfect. There's the Rolex and everything, that perfect suit and all this stuff. And he said, this was the first moment when he was like, “How is it that we're in the same city on the same day, and my family has nothing? And this person has everything? How is that?”

I think there was this innocence and also profound insight in that moment of like, wait a sec, all of us walk by this all the time. We’re the country with the most billionaires in the world. And we also have, like, one in six or seven kids living below the poverty line. Like that's like 11 million kids. We have, like 700 billionaires. And our Fortune 500 Companies made something like $16 trillion in revenue. We have like 11 million kids living in poverty. And again, that's not simply a moral abomination. That's setting us up for economic and social failure in the years ahead.

And I think, as you point out, one of the really fascinating things about Harold's account of his life is that he was being held up as he moved through childhood as a success story, right? So the local news wanted to do a profile, and it's like, this is great. The kid from the ghetto has made it out against the odds. And he was like, “You are telling a story about your own failure, because there was me, but then there were all of my classmates, who you neglected.” He struggled with this, honestly. It's like, “Why me?”

BLAIR HODGES: It's a survivor's guilt.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, it was. It was very much a sense of like, “Wait, why me, though?” Like, why is it that we only invest in the diamonds in the rough?

And we even see this, I think, in some academic work on inequality, is this idea of like, we need to figure out the diamonds in the rough. And I think my argument, certainly Harold's insight is, no, we need to help all children, not just the ones who end up at Harvard, or Wharton, or who end up being inventors. All of these kids could benefit from our investment.

But we see that both in early childhood and we see that at the end, even some of the debates about—you know, we can talk about this later—but student loan forgiveness and all that. We need to invest in kids also who do not go to college. And I think even liberals get really worked up about like, “Hey, we need to pay for college.” Well, some people aren't going to go to college. And we really heavily subsidize, even without any actions by Biden, we really heavily subsidize people going to college. We do virtually nothing for kids who aren't. And that sets us up, again, for failure as a nation.

Late Childhood - The Right to Community - 34:15

BLAIR HODGES: It's a rising tide lifts all boats kind of approach, right? So again, in this chapter, “Right to Investment,” you're looking at ways early education can be better invested in, health care opportunities, housing, as I mentioned. So those are just some of the areas you talk about in “Right to Investment.”

Let's look at the next chapter on late childhood. And this is where you talk about “A Right to Community.” We've touched on this a little bit already. This is where you really emphasize the parental rights movement and what that's done.

You introduce us to an extreme example here of how dedication to parental rights can lead to trauma and abuse. This is an Amish family who basically gifted their children to this predatory abuser. And as parents, they could just make these kinds of decisions that put their children at extreme risk. You talk about how this is similar to, or connected to homeschooling—not that you're condemning homeschooling. But you're connecting it to these other issues where parents have control over their children's relationships, over how their education is, how their healthcare and medical care is. And parents get the final say in a lot of these things. Tell us about how that connects to this “Right to Community.”

ADAM BENFORADO: I chose this example, ready to acknowledge it's an extreme example, of literally gifting your daughters to a predator and thinking that was actually a completely legitimate thing to do. And I argue that comes from our culture, which really treats children as property. And in some ways—again I like to trace history here, if you go back to ancient Roman republic, coming across into the early modern period in England, and then being brought over to the colonies, this consistent idea of kids belonging to their parents, and their labor belongs to their parents, and their bodies belong to their parents, and then tracing the effects of that.

BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the custody thing. You point out that the word “custody” is used for prisoners who are in custody, property as in custody, and custody of children. It's a property thing.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. And I think it's something that works out just fine for a lot of kids whose parents make good decisions and you know, it's fine, they often love you very much, they try to make good decisions.

The problem is if you don't have those good parents under the law in the United States, you honestly can be completely isolated from all of the advances in medical care, from all of the knowledge we have accrued over thousands of years, from all of the valuable social connections. Your parents really can keep you locked on their compound with no access to education, with no access to medicine, with no access to human contact, legally, in the United States.

And so the extreme example is to say, wait a second, those kids don't simply have rights as human beings, but we all will pay the consequences when those kids grow up with those depravations. We will pay the moral consequences; we will pay the economic and social consequences of that.

I argue we need to stop thinking about kids as belonging to their parents and more think about ways we can cultivate this sense of belonging. And that's not to say that parents don't have a role as, not gatekeepers, but sort of facilitators of these exchanges. I certainly do that a lot with my kids, talking to them about the information that they're receiving, protecting them from certain things, and certainly facilitating access to relationships and medical care. But I think the idea that this is all on parents’ shoulders is really bad for kids who face these depravations. And it's bad for all of us. I think when kids don't learn about the history of this country, I think that's bad for all of us.

Parental Rights and Children’s Voices - 38:25

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how this cuts across into medical care—when it comes to COVID, for example, vaccines. Some parents want to have the right to refuse vaccines for their children. And how that can be a health risk, or the right to refuse medical care for children is a big issue.

ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think one of the things that really surprises even some criminal law students is some of the legal regimes which have been instituted across the United States which actually protect parents who choose prayer over adopting the most basic medical care to treat preventable conditions. And the fact that actually, you know, in a number of states—I look at Idaho in particular. I mean, there are kids who are dying of things that we have known how to treat for decades, because their parents don't believe in it.

And again, we could have conversations about, you know, what if a 16-year-old kid wants to refuse medical care for a genuinely held religious belief? But that's not really the question. I mean, this is really when a 12-year-old is desperate to go to the doctor because she has a ruptured esophagus and her parents say no. Or a kid who has a broken arm and the bone’s poking out and the family doesn't take them to the emergency room to treat these easily addressed medical conditions.

And again, I think we have a reason to intervene for those kids, but I think we have a reason to intervene on behalf of all of us. It's not good for any of us when kids are suffering and carry the weight of these treatable childhood conditions later in life.

BLAIR HODGES: It's tricky, this chapter, because I think parental rights, as you point out, are sacrosanct across the political spectrum. This is an issue that conservatives and liberals and everybody in between is kind of united on, this idea that parents should make the choice and sort of be in charge of all these things.

ADAM BENFORADO: It’s really interesting. I think the Republican party has decided that parents’ rights may be their pathway back to the White House and capturing State Houses. There was certainly success with both in Virginia and in Florida with politicizing parents’ rights, and the response of a number of leading progressives, including political folks has been, “Okay, we need a matching liberal parents’ rights movement.” So if Republicans are saying parents have a right to know every single school book and read every sentence of every lesson plan and to protect their kids from learning about gay people or whatever, then liberals step up like, “No, I have a right to allow my kid to read this book. I have a right as a parent to have my kid learn in school that gay people exist or have a bathroom that anyone can use.”

And personally, I'm like, wait a second, progressives. As a parent, I share the concern when I learned about censorship in my school library, and I get upset too. But let's talk about kids’ rights. Like I want to talk about it and frame it around, hey, high school students, maybe they should have a say about what they're learning about the history of race in the United States.

I want to stop using kids as props, like you know when DeSantis comes out and signs a bill. That's the only time we actually see kids. And guess what? I want to hear from them. And I think that's the path forward for liberals is, like, let's actually involve kids in these questions.

You brought up one of the examples of the vaccines. And again, I think parents have a lot to weigh in here. What is frustrating though, the story I give is of this teenager who this is in the earlier days of the pandemic, who wants to get vaccinated because she just wants to be with her friends. She wants to be allowed to engage with this public life. And she's like, “Hey Mom, this is what I want.” And her mom's just like, “No.” It's like a 16-year-old kid who wants medical care. That, to me, it's like crazy that the kid has no voice in that situation.

And the same thing of like, why is it that a 17-year-old should have no say in the books they're reading in English class? That's not preparing them to be successful citizens.

And none of this is to say that parents shouldn't have rights. I think parents absolutely should have rights. It's just the kid should have rights too. And I think the conversation would be a lot more enriched; I think we'd make better decisions on a lot of these things about a lot of these things. It's not to say that there aren't dangerous things or there's not inappropriate material. I think there are inappropriate things. I think there are things that are really harmful to kids, and upsetting. I certainly was upset by some of the books and things that I read. But I think an approach that says the only people who have a valid opinion here are adults, is just the wrong approach.

BLAIR HODGES: So that's what you're trying to get readers to do is like think about how younger folks can be involved in this decision making and their voices can be heard.

ADAM BENFORADO: Right, be part of the community.

Early Adolescence: The Right to Be a Kid - 43:45

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next chapter: “The Right to Be a Kid.” This is framed around early adolescence. And this really zooms in on the criminal justice system, a passion of yours, and the ways childhood can be erased there.

You include the story of a man who was convicted of murder when he was a teenager, and how he was tried as an adult even though he was a teenager, despite what we know about brain development, about the ability of him to make decisions, or what it was like to be an adolescent and make that kind of decision. What did that story do for you in this chapter?

ADAM BENFORADO: My last book, Unfair, was about injustice in our criminal justice system and it focused on different biases and things that come into every stage of the normal criminal case. I was very familiar with wrongful convictions and sort of the injustice that can come from that. And this conversation I had with this now middle-aged man, I talked to him when he was in his forties, reflecting back. I think it really reveals a different type of injustice.

So this man, Ghani, is very forthright about the fact that he did the crime. He killed another boy when he was an adolescent. And yet I think the justice story doesn't stop there. What was so profoundly unjust about this was failing to understand what brought this young man to commit this atrocious act. And he readily acknowledges the harm that came from that and the failure to understand that people change. That, yeah, the person who is fifteen is not the same person as the person who is 45. And the harshness of giving up on someone and condemning someone for what they do, anything that they do, when they're fifteen.

This young man was given, in Pennsylvania, life without the possibility of parole. He was basically condemned—“You are going to live in a box until you die”—at age fifteen or sixteen. We are a country that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It's right there in the eighth amendment. And yet, we said to this young man—who basically was a prisoner of a drug gang locked in a crack house, dealing crack through the mail slot—“We've given up and we're gonna put you in a box, nine-by-seven box, until you die decades in the future.”

And it was only because the Supreme Court changed the legal landscape that he was eventually released, when the Supreme Court said actually someone who commits a crime before age eighteen cannot get a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. He was released decades later.

And what I want us to realize in this chapter is that children have a right to remain a kid, to enjoy that halo of childhood, even when they make terrible mistakes. And that's hard for us. But I think if you look at the data from what comes out of psychology and neuroscience, you start to see what adolescence is. It's a necessary step. But it's a challenging one. It's one where our brains are developed in certain ways, but not in others. And so we can make mistakes.

And what we need to do as a society is try to allow for those mistakes, that's part of growing up, in ways that are less devastating, to prevent young men from joining drug gangs and killing people, but also that mitigate the harm of treating one mistake—again, a very bad mistake—as a reason to condemn an individual for the rest of their life. And I go back to some of the mistakes I made, that luckily did not have life or death consequences.

Childhood and Racism - 47:44

BLAIR HODGES: Same. But you and me are both white guys, too. You talk about how that makes a difference—how racist this system often is, people being prosecuted as adults.

ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think about one of the smartest guys I know, I met him my first day at Harvard Law School, he grew up in Pennsylvania. And we were talking early in the first semester of law school about an experience he had. And, again, he was just the most charming, brilliant guy, went to Harvard undergrad. And he was coming home, I think it was Pottstown, one day from football practice, and he had all his football gear in a bag over his shoulder. And I think he'd already gotten in early at Harvard. He's running home because he's late. And he's the nicest guy. He's probably running home to get home early for, you know, dinner or something. Cops pull up, chase him down, throw him up against the chain link, because there's been a burglary. And in that moment, that could have been it. That could have been it.

That experience never, ever happened to me as a kid, and the simple answer is, I have white skin. Did I run with bags? Was I wearing hoodies? Yes, all of those things were true of me. We could go back to my poor fashion choices as a teenager. All those things are true, but that never happened to me. And that aligns with the research that shows how young Black kids do not enjoy that halo of childhood. They are “adultified” very early on, and that has consequences where, you know, misbehaving at school. White kids—

BLAIR HODGES: Are more likely to be suspended. More likely to have repercussions.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and then if it's a more serious thing, intervention of the police. And once you're into the police system, you get a lot harsher treatment.

And this is true of girls too, right? So we see, actually, it can be a real problem with girls who have been sexually trafficked. A white girl is treated as a victim. Black girls? Well, you're a prostitute. And that means how the police treat you, that means how even courts will treat you, and I think we need to really think hard about ways we can ensure all children are treated as kids.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about like these juvenile courts where kids are involved in the process.

ADAM BENFORADO: To me, that's one of the ways that we can move forward, is getting back to that early 20th century idea that, hey, kids are different, and we should really focus on rehabilitation and on diverting kids to a different system that's focused on kids are changeable, they make mistakes, they may need to have changes in their lives. And we can do that because kids are really malleable in this period. And I think that's one of the reasons I throw my support behind diversion programs and some of the cool new ideas to try to make interventions on kids whose lives are starting to go down paths that can lead to very serious consequences.

Late Adolescence: The Right to Be Heard - 50:43

BLAIR HODGES: In your “Right to Be Heard” chapter you talk about actual court systems where juveniles get to be part of the process, judging their peers. It's a real jury of their peers.

ADAM BENFORADO: In this next chapter the focus here—If the previous chapter was on ways that I think we “adultify” kids in circumstances and treat them as adults in circumstances where they're ill-prepared for that and we really need to protect them, this is a chapter about other ways in which we infantilize kids when they actually really have the ability to do a lot more than we give them credit.

And again, I am driven by the psychology neuroscience literature here. I think there's this really interesting thing. We tend to think about the brain as this balloon that kind of just gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of development. But what we now know is different areas of the brain mature at different rates. And that, actually, areas of the brain that focus more on the  old cognition moments develop much faster than those that are involved in that kind of control of impulses—

BLAIR HODGES: Assessing risk—

ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, risk, and dealing with peer pressure. Yeah, those are later developing things really into people's 20s. There's a really strong argument that we actually need to figure out ways to empower kids much earlier. So I focus, yes, on the ability of kids to serve as jurors, but I also focus on extending the right to vote to young people and allowing young people to run for office, serve on school boards. And I think this is supported, certainly, by the mind sciences research. But I also think it's likely to lead to much better outcomes for us as a society.

Sometimes when I talk to audiences about this, I have someone raise their hand and it's like, “Oh, well, this is going to distort the system, you're taking power away from adults.”

And I'm like, the current system is biased. We are making decisions which are too old-focus and too conservative. One of the things we know from the psychology of literature, is that sometimes as people get older, they make much more conservative decisions on things, they're too risk averse. And while risk aversion can be beneficial, under certain circumstances, it actually can be the most dangerous thing you can do, particularly when things are rapidly changing and you have new problems.

I often get the pushback when I talk about this, “Well, okay, maybe that's true that kids actually do have the capacity to deal with these things, but they don't have the life experience.” And I'm like, “What do you think are the most pressing issues today?”

Okay, well, it's like, you know, how to regulate social media, and trans rights, and racial justice, and climate change. I stop them like, okay, hold that thought. Let's think about the average 15-year-old. Okay, so social media. They are on TikTok. They know so much more than my octogenarian father-in-law.

Trans rights: my octogenarian father-in-law, he doesn't have any trans friends or gay friends. Racial justice: the youngest generation is the most diverse multicultural generation America has ever seen. Let's talk about climate change. Well, that 85-year-old is going to be long dead as the worst effects of climate change ravage the United States. That 15-year-old is going to be living through those floods and forest fires, and the civil unrest around the world that is coming down the pipeline and has no ability to choose the leaders who will make decisions today that will affect them for the rest of their life.

And I think, again, that's not democracy. Democracy is about people who have a stake in the decisions, political decisions, having a say in those decisions.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And so you talk about extending the franchise to young people, like at least local elections or school boards. And I don't find you to be an absolutist in the sense of saying, like, here's this fundamental right, they need to just have every, you know—You seem to be willing to negotiate and willing to talk about how this unfolds.

ADAM BENFORADO: I think there are many different pathways here. One of the things we're seeing around the world is lowering the voting age to sixteen. Over the last several decades we've had more and more countries—

BLAIR HODGES: It’s been proposed here, hasn't it? Didn't you say someone’s proposed it in the US?

ADAM BENFORADO: It’s been voted on in the House. We are seeing more municipalities, we have a handful now of municipalities where 16-year-olds can vote. But we have a number of countries—and these are like, you know, it's like Austria and Brazil. I mean, these are big countries.

BLAIR HODGES: I didn't know any of this until I read your book. I don't understand how I missed it. I listen to NPR. I'm an avid news reader. I don’t know how I missed it.

ADAM BENFORADO: It's a really interesting phenomenon. And I think what we've seen is all the horrors, the fears of like, this is going to destroy society, don't happen. And I think what we will see, in my opinion, as we extend this right, we're gonna see a lot more engagement. And I think this, in some ways, a solution out of some of the gridlock. I think bringing in new voices and new voters is a great way to actually move forward on some of these intractable problems we have.

I think young people can actually help us move away from this period of political polarization, in part because I think young people are more changeable and are less doctrinaire on a lot of these issues. I interviewed this young man who, because of a loophole in the law, ran for governor in Kansas. And what I think was just fascinating about talking to him was, he was running as a Republican. But one of the issues where he was just different was gun control. And that's because he was like, “Hey, I go to a public school. And this is something I'm really worried about, school shootings.”

BLAIR HODGES: And he's been through drills. Getting under his desk and stuff.

ADAM BENFORADO: He’s like, “I'm in favor of sensible gun control.” One of the people who interviewed him on TV was like, well, that doesn't align with the party. And he was like, “Yeah, I'm proud of that.” Old people running for office on the Republican platform would never say that. He would say that because he actually believes it.

And I think that's on the liberal side, too. I think there are issues where some young new Democrats may not toe the party line on something. And you know what? I personally am comfortable with that. I think we need to break out.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's why it won't happen, though. [laughs] Because the people that get to make the decision about letting it happen are gonna do the calculus of, will this help me politically, yes or no? And that's the question they'll ask in order to make it legal.

ADAM BENFORADO: I think young people have got to stop asking and start demanding. I wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple of weeks ago, where I said, it was after the latest gun shooting, and I was like, you know, it's great. The March for Lives folks, and all these folks out being politically active. But my argument is: stop marching to try to get adults to act on gun control or act on climate change and get out there marching for the right to vote.

The adults are not going to save you. You need to exercise that protest power to demand power. Because until you have power, those in power are not going to listen to you. And so, again, I think this is something—I'm optimistic. I think this is something where we're going to see a lot of changes in my lifetime. This is one of the areas I'm most excited about is lowering the voting age.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you have my hope. And, you know, I'd love to see it. But time will tell.

ADAM BENFORADO: We can talk more on the show in twenty years. [laughter]

On the Cusp of Adulthood: The Right to Start Fresh - 58:36

BLAIR HODGES:  Wow. Cool. All right. We're talking with Adam Benforado about the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All. And Adam also mentioned the book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. That's also a great one. Adam is a professor of law at the Drexel University Klein School of Law.

All right, let's talk about on the cusp of adulthood, this is “The Right to Start Fresh.” This chapter has a lot to say about how economic conditions are harder for younger folks today than they were even just a few decades ago. People are economically less well-off right now. The economy is looking harder, wages are stagnating, inflation is happening, college debt is ballooning.

But back in the 50s, or 60s, there might be a guy who could marry his partner and be the sole breadwinner and have kids and buy a house really early and do all these things. These opportunities aren't on the table anymore. So this chapter talks about trying to get younger people off on the right foot at this cusp of adulthood when it comes to job choice, when it comes to mobility, when it comes to inheritance.

ADAM BENFORADO: I think this really focuses on the popular perception that childhood maybe is tough because you belong to someone else, but once you become an adult suddenly the shackles are off, and you're free. The world is your oyster, and especially in America, you are the freest of the free.

BLAIR HODGES: You've got bootstraps, you can pull ‘em.

ADAM BENFORADO: Yep. Live where you want, control your destiny, do what you want, marry who you want. And what I look at is all of the ways we actually have locked young people in. We've already determined the trajectory of their life before they even get to that. And so I look at the ways how we capitalize, or fail to capitalize, people's professional development. We could make a decision as a society that, hey, you're a future worker in the United States of America and so we will pay for your training and your education until you are finished and you're ready to work. That's the bargain that we make. But instead, we say, no, no, no, no, you who have no money will self-finance your education, to the tune of $100,000, $150,000 and you will pay that off for the rest of your life. Maybe actually, you'll do it by joining the military and paying it off that way. But somehow, you're gonna start life in the red.

And actually, I had this moment, I think I cut it out of the book, but it was actually right before I went to law school. I finished undergrad, I got into law school, and I wasn't quite ready to go and I took a deferment for a year and I went over—my then girlfriend, her parents had bought this 16th century farmhouse outside of London. And I was like, “I'm gonna go and kind of work renovating this house.” And there were some professional builders who were also doing things that year. And I remember being out and I was cleaning off bricks to fix up this like rental with this guy. And we started talking. It's like, hey, so you're going to law school? Oh, you’re going to Harvard? And he was like, “So how much is that going to cost?” And I was like, “I don't even really know. I think it's like, you know, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.”

And he suddenly was like, “Adam, you cannot do this. Let me tell you, I'm 50 years old. Like, there's so many things that come up in life. People get sick, you know, you get someone pregnant. You can't start life in the red. That's madness.”

Honestly, I had gotten into law school. Everyone up to that moment had just been like, “This is the best thing. Everything's great. Of course, everyone goes into debt.” And that was the only person who was like, this is crazy, what a stupid system, because of the things life throws at you. And the truth is, he was speaking the truth. It is mad to put people down, you know, to have the weight of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to start out life. And it's particularly unfair, as I point out to do this, based on sort of the different economic situations people find themselves in.

One of the areas I focus on is not simply how we lock people in with that, but also how we lock them in geographically. Because coming out of college, you cannot take that job in San Francisco unless you already have existing family wealth. Why? Think about how much money you need. You need the money for the first and last month's rent and the security deposit. And that means you need like $8,000 starting out. A lot of young people who are from poor families, they can get the job, they went to the good college and can get the job, but they cannot move there. And that's really different, I think from previous generations.

It wasn't just a myth, the idea that you move where the opportunity was, that was a reality in America, right? You move where the jobs are. “Go West, young man.” People really did do that. But they cannot do that now. And again, that's bad for America. We need workers where the jobs are. We don't need workers stagnating in areas of the country where there are no jobs. We need them moving out to the Bay Area where the jobs are, that increases our GDP.

But they cannot do that, based on the choices, and a lot of those choices are things that seem to have nothing to do with young people. They seem to be things like zoning laws. Like okay, it makes sense that any new construction in the city needs to have parking. Well, what does that do that limits housing for those young people, and that means that they do not move there? And that keeps those houses for those older people, skyrocketing property values. But you think about, you know, some of the rules about licensing. So many jobs now, you know, it's like, farmer, hairdresser, you have to have special licenses. And again, that also prevents—

BLAIR HODGES: Which are state-dependent too, right?

ADAM BENFORADO: Yes. And geographic mobility, even things like, traditionally, law licenses. What is the main reason we have these state bars, I am very skeptical that it's to protect the public. I think it's to protect the monopoly lawyers have in each of these states to prevent new entrants into the market.

And I think that hurts all of us. And so I want to focus on ways we can make young people freer at the start of life. Let's stop with different legal regimes that lock in things for old people and think more about ways we can free up young people, because that's going to be best for us as a country.

BLAIR HODGES: You talked about inheritance and dead hand laws when it comes to that as well, the right of older folks to be able to lock in wealth in particular ways.

ADAM BENFORADO: So I give this example—I really love art and I'm lucky enough to live really near one of the most amazing art collections in the world, which is housed at the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia. It has an amazing post-Impressionist collection. And one of the funniest things is, or the amazing thing is, thousands of people now visit every year, and that might never have come to be had the law originally been followed.

So this guy Barnes, who made basically trillions of dollars in gonorrhea treatments around the turn of the century and bought up all this art, he stipulated in his will that this collection of art was going to be housed in his house out in Lower Merion. And that, you know, only a certain number of people could visit every week and all these rules. And that's how it would have been for all eternity if he had left enough money to preserve it in that way. But the fact of the matter is, he didn’t. He didn't leave enough money. And so to the court system, this amazing collection was moved to downtown Philadelphia. It was placed in this, in my opinion, much better space. And now thousands and thousands more Americans and people around the world get to see this groundbreaking work.

I think this is an area where we need to focus more on the benefits to living than the rights of the dead. And this is actually not a new notion. I have this wonderful quote from Thomas Jefferson in the book in which he said the same thing. And he was fighting down in Virginia, you know, hundreds of years ago, to end some of this dead hand control, to focus on making a country that was looking forward and looking out for the benefits of those who are walking on our streets today.

What’s Holding Us Back? - 01:07:58

BLAIR HODGES: It's a really important chapter. It's got a lot of big ideas, I think, about how we can reshape things to free up young people as they're kind of entering into adulthood.

Your last chapter talks about what's holding us back, what is preventing us from making these kinds of improvements or these kinds of changes. What forces do you see stopping us from putting kids first?

ADAM BENFORADO: I think the biggest thing, actually, is not animosity towards kids. It's actually just not noticing the ways in which our decisions negatively impact children.

I talk about this example from my own life. I mentioned that year that I spent working as a builder, and I certainly like renovating and doing that kind of work, and so I bought this rowhouse in downtown Philadelphia and noticed very early on that there was a weird looking lead service line in the basement and with what I knew about environmental contaminants, I called up Philadelphia Water and I said, “Hey, before I move in here with my two year old, I want to make sure that the water is okay.” Had the technician come out. I came down the basement, we looked at the pipes, and he said, “Hey, look, I'm gonna tell you here, it's gonna be fine. Because unlike Flint, here in Philadelphia, we treat our water.” And sure enough, we got the clean bill of health, no detectable lead in the system. I move in with my family.

My dad then sends me a note that says, “Hey, Adam, there's this new nonprofit that's actually collecting some data here and I know you already got your water tested, but just to be potentially helpful to them to get it…” and I said oh sure, I'll let them retest it. Get it retested. We go on vacation and come back. I have a letter from Dr. Mark Edwards, who was one of the individuals who was involved in identifying problems in Flint elsewhere in the United States, and it says, “You have a high lead level in your water.” And honestly my first response reading this was, this was sent to the wrong house and to check the name. Then, wait a second. I started to be like, how is this possible?

And I started to really look carefully at what was done and I discovered that these two different tests were very, very different. What the Philadelphia Water test did was it came in, you have to under EPA guidelines let the water stagnate in those pipes overnight. But what did the technician do? Well, he took the water directly when he came in, directly out of the tap, which was a non-lead, new tap when he collected the water. And then he let it cycle for ten minutes through the system. Which meant that he never actually tested the water sitting in the lead pipes in my house. He tested the water in the non-lead spout, and he tested what was out in the non-lead main. What did Dr. Mark Edwards test? He tested the water in the pipes.

When I had Philadelphia Water come back, they said, “Oh, this is interesting. Let's do a profile sample.” And I was like, “Well, what's a profile sample?” “Oh, we measured the pipes. And we actually look at that over time.” And what and what happened over time? Well, initially, there was no lead in the system, then once the water came from the lead service line and those copper pipes that had lead solder joints, the lead went up. And then when you got out to the main, there was no water.

And so I said, “Why would Philadelphia possibly test in this way?” You know, like, it's like you have a baby with a fever, you don't put the baby in the freezer for five minutes and then test it. I want to actually know what the problem is. And the answer is, if they find too much lead when they go out and test, they are subjected to forced remediation by the EPA. They actually have to fix the problem if they find lead.

And again, the people working in Philadelphia Water are not bad people. They are just in a mindset that they're not focused on what is most important, which is actually protecting the health of young kids. We know what happens when kids are exposed to heavy metals. And their response is, well, the EPA does not require us to test it in this particular way. And I think that's the problem, though. It's not like, “Well, we just follow the rules, we just go through the protocols.” Regardless of the impact, you need to actually be putting children first in everything that you do. And that's really the call of this book is, if you're an architect, if you're a plumber, if you are a judge on an immigration court, I want you to think about what your job would look like if you put children first in everything that you did.

What would the criminal justice system look like if we put kids first? Well, I think one of the things is we would rarely lock up the parents of young children. We'd almost never do it. We’d figure out other ways. If we're worried, if we want to make someone suffer in some way, we’d find some other way to make them suffer that didn't hurt kids too. I think if we were worried about this person engaging in bad behavior, we'd monitor or do something else, but we would not lock them up in cells away from their kids.

So I think that's really the call to action. And I would just hit back on something that we've talked a bunch about, but I think is really important. The reason to do this is because this is good for all of us. It's not just good for kids. It's good for people who don't even like children at all. This is the best path forward for us as a society because we all pay the costs of that inattention and those harms that come to kids.

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! - 01:13:53

BLAIR HODGES: That's Adam Benforado, professor of law at the Drexel University Klein School of Law. You can also check out his writing in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Slate, the Atlantic, and all sorts of other places. We're talking about the book A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.

Alright, Adam, let's wrap it up with regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is the part of the show where you get to talk about something you’d change about the book now that it's out, something that was most challenging about writing the book, or something that surprised you perhaps in the course of writing it that really just kind of shook you up. So you can choose to speak to one, two, or all three of those things.

ADAM BENFORADO: I definitely have some regrets. I think that the biggest regrets are kind of an inevitable part of how I work as a writer and a thinker, which is, I think and write too much. So I think the initial version of this book was twice as long as it ended up and that's because, you know, there is so much injustice that kids face. There are so many areas where I think we need to reform.

The reality though, as you know, this is a book that's meant for everyone. I chose Crown, which is a big trade press, part of Penguin Random House, focused especially on big idea books and social justice books. And one of the things I am aware of is that unless it's about World War II, someone is not going to pick up a book that's a thousand pages. And so I had to leave out so many really important, really entire chapters.

I think I had a part, off the top of my head, that I really loved about how we treat childhood as this endless competition. Every single thing, you know, you want to play chess, you want to play violin, you want to play tennis—everything is like a competition with winners and losers. It's all about if you're good then you move up to the more selective thing.

It's the same thing with like, learning. Learning is all about like, well, what are your grades, and let's test you and do all this stuff. And I think it creates a terrible mindset that's deeply harmful to kids. And I had this entire really interesting critique of our current approach. And that was just never gonna see the light of day. And that was hard.

I think also hard was, you know, some of the great conversations I had—I did a lot of interviews for this book. And I just couldn't include some of the voices of folks I talked to because the book would just be too many pages for people.

BLAIR HODGES: I can sympathize. In this interview, I wanted to talk about Wylie, that gay kid in the conservative state that wanted to protest and stuff, but like, you have to cut stuff because of time.

ADAM BENFORADO: You do. And that's just being realistic. So that was that's a regret. I think in terms of challenges, the biggest challenge was the timing in my own life of writing this book, I wrote a lot of this, did research, during the COVID pandemic. I had two little kids at home, my wife works. And, man, that was so hard.

I mean, my daughter is on Zoom, first grade, in the next room. I got a little toddler, my wife's upstairs seeing patients on Zoom and dealing with also living downtown. It was like the social justice, anti-racism stuff, we had 2020 protests on my street outside. And I would be just dealing with all this just frustration and sadness and worry. And I'd be like, okay, so I just put the kids to bed. And then it’s like, why don't you go write about the plight of children upstairs, and like, the wonderful future we're gonna give them and, man, that was just so hard.

I think the other thing that was hard was, I have a lot of experience writing, doing research, all the stuff. I hadn't ever really interviewed people. And that was really, really hard. I mean, it was the most rewarding. You talk about surprises. The surprises came from the interviews. These beautiful, poignant, hard moments came from talking to people, talking to actual children, but also talking to people looking back, reflecting on their childhoods. And I didn't know how to do that necessarily. I probably still don't know how to do that. But wow, that is a powerful thing.

And learning how to talk to someone about, you know, the hardest moment—we didn't talk about it, but one of the set of folks I talked to were two young people whose parents were locked up when they were three and six years old. Caught up in like a drug conspiracy and given long sentences. And talking to people about the most traumatic thing that happened to them, and still the repercussions are being felt today.

I'm a sensitive person. We all learn how to how to interview and how to do that. I think when I felt that I was tearing up, like, I'm going to tear up right along with the person I'm interviewing, and I think some people who take journalistic approaches, like they maintain that wall. And I think for me, I really felt for them. And I think I showed that on my face. And I think that allowed us, at least me, to kind of hear some things and get deeper into some of the issues that I talked about.

Writing books is hard and this is the hardest one, it’s the hardest project I've done, but it's also the one I care the most about. I think this is the thing that if I can make any progress in the world, this is the thing that matters the most.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm rooting for it, Adam. It's a great book. And it's made me rethink even ways that I interact with my kids. Ways that I think about my own childhood. Again, this is a book that people, whether they have kids or not, could really benefit from reading. So I just want to say thanks for writing it. It’s been a pleasure, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us on Family Proclamations about this book.

ADAM BENFORADO: It was a wonderful conversation. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it? Go to Apple podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.