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In the second season of Severance, theres an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains shes a child because of when I was born.Miss Huangs deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series, which has broken viewership records for the streaming service, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century.As a scholar of childhood studies, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a childand whether one gets to claim childhood at allhas always depended on when and where a person is born.An age of innocence?Americans are deeply invested in the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, with kids protected by doting adults from the harsh realities of work and making ends meet.However, French historian Philippe Aris famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today, simply did not exist in the past.Using medieval art as one resource, Aris pointed out that children were often portrayed as miniature adults, without special attributes, such as plump features or silly behaviors, that might mark them as fundamentally different from their older counterparts.Looking at baptism records, Aris also discovered that many parents gave siblings the same name, and he explained this phenomenon by suggesting that devastatingly high child mortality rates prevented parents from investing the sort of love and affection in their children thats now considered a core component of parenthood.While historians have debated many of Ariss specific claims, his central insight remains powerful: Our modern understanding of childhood as a distinct life stage characterized by play, protection, and freedom from adult responsibilities is a relatively recent historical development. Aris argued that children didnt emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century.Kids at workThe belief that a child deserves a life free from the stress of the workplace came along still later.After all, if Miss Huang had been born in the 19th century, few people would question her presence in the workplace. The Industrial Revolution yielded accounts of children working 16-hour days and accorded no special protection because of their tender age and emotional vulnerability. Well into the 20th century, children younger than Miss Huang routinely worked in factories, mines, and other dangerous environments.To todays viewers of Severance, the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the shows fictional Lumon Industries feels jarring precisely because it violates the deeply held belief that children are occupants of a separate sphere, their innocence shielding them from the dog-eat-dog environs of competitive workplaces.Childhood under threatAs a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think shes closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds.Today, the ideal childhoodaccess to play, care, and a meaningful educationis increasingly under threat.As politicians and policymakers insist that children are the future, many of them refuse to support the intensive caregiving required to transform newborns into functioning adults. As philosopher Nancy Fraser has argued, capitalism relies on someone doing that work, while assigning it little to no monetized value.Child-rearing in the 21st century exists within a troubling paradox: Mothers provide unpaid childcare for their own children, while those who professionally care for others childrenpredominantly women of color and immigrantsreceive meager compensation for this essential work.In other words, economic elites and the politicians they support say they want to cultivate future workers. But they dont want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires.The shows name comes from a severance procedure that workers undergo to separate their work memories from their personal ones. It offers a darkly comic version of work-life balance, with Lumon office workers able to completely disconnect their work selves from their personalities off the clock. Each is distinct: A characters innie is the person they are at the job, and their outtie is who they are at home.I see this as an apt metaphor for how market capitalism seeks to separate the slow, patient work required to raise children and care for other loved ones from the cold-eyed pursuit of economic efficiency. Parents are expected to work as if they dont have children and raise children as if they dont work.The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhoodwith its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play, and its demands for attention and careincreasingly untenable.Capitalisms ideal childPlummeting global fertility rates around the world speak to this crisis in childcare, with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and China falling well below the birth rate required to replace the existing population.Even as Elon Musk frets about women choosing not to have children, he seems eager to restrict any government aid that would provide the time or resources that raising children requires.Accessible healthcare; affordable, healthy food; and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administrations quest for what it calls government efficiency is poised to shred safety net programs that help millions of low-income children.In the midst of this dilemma, Miss Huang offers a surreal solution to the problems children pose in 2025.She is, in many ways, capitalisms ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parents time, no teachers patience, and no communitys resources. Like other workers and executives at Lumon, she seems to have shed the inefficient entanglements of family, love, and play.In this light, Miss Huangs clever insistence that she is a child because of when I was born is darkly prophetic. In a world where every moment must be productive, where caregiving is systematically devalued, and where human relationships are subordinated to market logic, Miss Huang represents a future where childhood survives only as a date on a birth certificate. All the other attributes are economically impractical.Viewers dont yet know if shes severed. But at least from the perspective of the other workers in the show, Miss Huang works ceaselessly and, in doing so, proves that she is no child at all.Or rather, she is the only kind of child that Americas economic system allows to thrive.Anna Mae Duane is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
