Childism can refer either to advocacy for empowering children as a subjugated group or to prejudice and/or discrimination against children or childlike qualities. [1] It can operate thus both as a positive term for a movement, like the term feminism, as well as a critical term to identify age-based prejudice and discrimination against children, like the term racism. The former can be connected with critical theories like feminism, [2] decolonialism, [3] and environmentalism. [4] The latter concept finds it critical equivalence in similar concepts [5] such as ageism discrimination against elderly people, [6] adultism adult power and adult norms [7] or patriarchy.
The concept is first described and explored in an article by Chester M. Pierce and Gail B. Allen in 1975. [8] It was used in time in the 1990s in literary theory by Peter Hunt to refer to "to read as children." [9] In the early 2000s, it was developed by John Wall into a positive term equivalent to feminism, such as in "Childhood Studies, Hermeneutics, and Theological Ethics" and extensively in Ethics in Light of Children [10] . An alternative treatment of childism as a negative phenomenon is found in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's last work, published posthumously, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. [11]
Childism has become a key theoretical lens for understanding law, rights, history, literature, societies, and much else. In its positive sense it is the focus of the Childism Institute, and international research organization based in Rutgers University, University of Stavengar, and Roskilde University.
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