At its core, Pro-Child Politics is a call for adults to represent and steward the best interests of children in the realm of politics, culture, and economics—not find themselves beholden to childish wish lists and self-focused desires, regardless of the person’s age. While I would happily opine about various conservative thought experiments, including JD Vance’s idea of giving parents additional “votes” to cast for each child they have. Or Ross Douthat and Lyman Stone’s paedobaptist-inspired proposal to make the voting age zero. Still, neither approach solves the problem Faust identifies: namely, self-centered adult decision-making. 

When Jesse Hunter entered the Minnesota voting precinct in 2006, he, like most voters that day, was compelled by civic duty and the issues he cared about most. Unlike his fellow citizens, however, Jesse was still a minor. 

“They [polling officials] examined my driver’s license and asked for my Social Security number,” Jesse told the National Youth Rights Association, “but they never seemed to notice that I wrote ‘1989’ as the year of my birth. I voted, and walked out euphoric, bearing an ‘I Voted’ sticker upon my forehead.” Jesse is not alone. 

With national debt ballooning, homeownership increasingly out of reach, an “America Second” foreign policy, and attacks on the family and faith, it is no surprise that many young people feel unrepresented by their political leaders. Indeed, Katy Faust’s most recent book, Pro-Child Politics: Why Every Cultural, Economic, and National Issue is a Matter of Justice for Children, is the first step toward a serious consideration of what it looks like to “challenge the selfish quo by centering children in all cultural and political conversations.” 

The president of Them Before Us—a conservative child’s rights organization—and author of Them Before Us and Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, Faust’s Pro-Child Politics addresses 19 of the most pressing political issues of our day. While Faust herself writes the chapter on the family, she invites subject area experts to write each additional chapter. 

Broken into three sections, Pro-Child Politics covers Cultural Issues (Life, Masculinity, Femininity, Family, Race, Gender Ideology, Pornography), Economic Issues (Economy, Taxes, Debt, Energy, ESG and DEI), and National Issues (Religious Liberty, Education, Digital Technology, the Environment, Foreign Policy, Policing, and Border Security and Immigration). This list may feel overwhelming at first glance, but each chapter provides an engaging and easily digestible primer on the given topic. 

Each chapter opens with a compelling story about a child, or children, who were harmed because of bad cultural practices or policies. From there, chapters are broken into five sections: “Big Lies” about a given issue, “How These Lies Harm Children,” “The Truth About” a given issue, “How These Truths Protect Children,” and “Child Protection in Action.” I found myself nodding emphatically as I read “Family,” “Femininity,” “Digital Technology,” and “Border Security and Immigration”—issues that overlap most closely with my own work—and taking copious notes on other chapters. 

Many Christians, for example, have the right sentiment when it comes to their political views, but often lack the necessary data or knowledge to rightly understand a given issue. Indeed, no Christian should succumb to the ploys of “toxic empathy” or identity politics. As Pro-Child Politics illustrates, misguided compassion can be just as dangerous as outright hostility when it comes to the well-being of children, and the nation. 

In the introduction, Faust makes the case for why the well-being of children must come first in politics. Much like the biblical example of Hezekiah, whose own children appear to pay the price for his prideful prayer, Faust argues that, 

When we prioritize adult desires and agendas, we force children to shoulder a load that we adults are unwilling to bear. When adults refuse to do hard things, we transfer the responsibility to our children and grandchildren, allowing their problems to multiply exponentially. Preference for our immediate comfort has made it much harder for the next generation to deal with debt, national security, open borders, economics untethered to fiscal reality, distorted human identity, and invasive technologies. By shirking the responsibility of addressing problems when they were smaller, we adults become the perpetrators of grave intergenerational injustices.

Indeed, Faust goes on to discuss how we are far from the platonic ideal of justice—“giving others what they are due”—when it comes to our treatment of children. Far too often, adults go so far as to take from children: their innocence, financial security, a close relationship with their married father and mother, equal opportunity, and even the chance to be born. 

Pro-Child Politics in Action: the Environment, Digital Technology, and Debt

In his chapter on the environment, for example, Chris Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, discusses the anti-human climate agenda that “finds its roots more in ideology and emotion than in science and reason.” One way, he argues, that the modern environmentalism movement harms young children is by its non-intervention approach to wildlife management that has resulted in higher numbers of wildfires and smoke poisoning. 

As Barnard notes, “one study finds that as many as 7.4 million children in the U.S. are affected by wildfire smoke annually; it accounts for 20 percent of particulate matter pollution they are exposed to.” The resulting low air quality, asthma, lost homes and days at school, and other respiratory diseases are preventable harms that disproportionately affect children. And the problem is only getting worse, as “wildfire occurrences have increased 223 percent since 1983.” 

It should come as little surprise that the modern environmental movement, which places the so-called well-being of the planet before that of children, also corresponds with population control measures such as widespread abortion and the promotion of a child-free lifestyle.

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