The following piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, which I edited in collaboration with Kim Wilson. Our book explores the ways in which parenting, caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine. In this cataclysmic moment of looming fascism, we have much to learn from people who are putting a politics of care into practice. We hope We Grow the World Together will be a useful tool in building communities where we take care of all our people, and leave no one behind. The book’s contributors include Dorothy Roberts, Mariame Kaba, Erika Ray, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Dylan Rodriguez, Harsha Walia, Nadine Naber, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, and many others. You can buy the book here!

“So,” says the cashier at 7-Eleven, squinting at my three-year-old child K.’s “A Is for Abolition” shirt as they wait patiently in their stroller for a small carton of Goldfish crackers. “What is abolition?”

Gripping my hand, K. pauses, thinks. They’ve overheard me expound on this theme. I wonder nervously which aspects of it might be graspable by a three-year-old. Now that they have the floor, will they reveal something humiliating about my personal life in the middle of 7-Eleven?

Finally, K. draws a deep breath, and their eyes smile above their lime-green mask. “It’s a PARTY!” they say.

“Well, actually…,” I say.

“It’s an imagination party! It’s about imaginationing things,” K. explains. “And it’s a party. With ice cream cake that you have to keep in its cold home.”

K. calls the freezer a “cold home.” They are convinced that it’s filled with invisible dancing snowpeople and magical penguins and a freezing but happy horse. Also, in a way, they are right.

Those of us who want to abolish prisons and policing recognize the power of imagination. We know that we must conjure new ways of being, acting, talking, daring and growing in order to build toward future liberation — and practice it in the present tense, too. Abolitionist author and organizer Mariame Kaba invites us to “begin our abolitionist journey not with the question, ‘What do we have now and how can we make it better?’” but instead with, “‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?’ If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.”

Yet sometimes it feels impossible to call forth the imagination. Capitalism squashes it. The pressure of our lives bludgeons it. Norms and supremacies smash it. As Kaba notes, “oppression puts a ceiling on our imagination.” And as Critical Resistance cofounder Rachel Herzing puts it, a lack of creativity is a “primary stumbling block” in moving beyond prisons.

In these moments of seeming impossibility, it can help to remember that there is a vast group of people in our society who regularly live in their imaginations, unabashedly and vocally: toddlers.

What if we adults could open ourselves to a bit of the imaginative power of young children to strive for creative ways of building a fundamentally different world?

Young kids create the worlds they want to live in (even as they whimper and throw tantrums), imagining wild and wacky scenarios into existence in a matter of seconds. (Just yesterday, K. explained: “I can’t go to bed, Mama! There’s a shooting star in the bedroom.”)

My 3-year-old (white, middle-class) child certainly does not have all the answers to abolishing the prison industrial complex and creating a just world. They don’t even know what the prison industrial complex is. But their merry explanation of abolition does point toward a core truth: The wide-open imagination most vividly displayed by young children is key to societal transformation.

Psychologists Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths have studied why youth lean more heavily on creativity than adults do, writing of “a tension between two kinds of thinking: what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation.” They note, “When we face a new problem, we adults usually exploit the knowledge about the world we have acquired so far. We try to quickly find a pretty good solution that is close to the solutions we already have. On the other hand, exploration — trying something new — may lead us to a more unusual idea, a less obvious solution, a new piece of knowledge.”

In other words, young children — people who aren’t quite as acquainted with the status quo — are less likely to come up with status quo answers. Gopnik and Griffiths say that exploration may mean sometimes veering into “solutions” that utterly fail, as toddlers’ (and teenagers’) strategies often do. But at what cost are we adults avoiding such failures?

Prison abolitionist and liberatory harm reductionist Shira Hassan (whose interview is featured in this book) says her “favorite thing is to talk about mistakes,” because in order to develop new transformative practices that disrupt the status quo while creating liberatory ways of confronting harm, we are going to have to make a lot of mistakes along the way — and use their lessons as we search for better paths forward.

Childhood and adolescence, Gopnik and Griffiths write, “give us time to explore before we have to face the stern and earnest realities of grown-up life. . . . And that may help each new generation change the world.”

But those of us committed to radically changing the world might push ourselves to ask a further question: Why does that “time to explore” have to end? Mightn’t the “stern and earnest realities of grown-up life” be a little less stern and earnest if we didn’t assume that, as adults, we must relinquish our magical penguins and shooting stars? What would it look like for us to take toddlers’ imaginations seriously, and resist the pull of the “exploitation” framework of living life as a grown-up, in a society rife with exploitative, death-dealing systems?

Our “earnest realities” are oppressive, racist, classist, cisheteropatriarchal, sexist and ableist, and are quickly destroying the Earth. And so the work of trying something new — of exploration, toddler style — is a skill we all must work to re-access.

What if we adults could open ourselves to a bit of the imaginative power of young children — delve into the wonder of a time........

© Truthout