{"id":226510,"date":"2025-03-14T07:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T11:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=226510"},"modified":"2025-03-05T12:30:47","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T17:30:47","slug":"the-child-boss-in-severance-reveals-a-devastating-truth-about-work-and-child-rearing-in-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/03\/the-child-boss-in-severance-reveals-a-devastating-truth-about-work-and-child-rearing-in-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"The Child Boss in \u2018Severance\u2019 Reveals a Devastating Truth About Work and Child-Rearing in the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the second season of \u201cSeverance<\/a>,\u201d there\u2019s an unexpected character: a child supervisor named\u00a0Miss Huang<\/a>, played by actress Sarah Bock, who matter-of-factly explains she\u2019s a child \u201cbecause of when I was born.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Huang\u2019s deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series,\u00a0which has broken viewership records for the streaming service<\/a>, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

As a scholar of childhood studies<\/a>, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a \u201cchild\u201d \u2013 and whether one gets to claim childhood at all \u2013 has always depended on when and where a person is born.<\/p>\n

An age of innocence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Americans are deeply invested\u00a0in the idea of childhood<\/a>\u00a0as a time of innocence, with kids protected by doting adults from the harsh realities of work and making ends meet.<\/p>\n

However, French historian Philippe Ari\u00e8s famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today,\u00a0simply did not exist<\/a>\u00a0in the past.<\/p>\n

Using medieval art as one resource, Ari\u00e8s pointed out that children were often\u00a0portrayed<\/a>\u00a0as\u00a0miniature adults<\/a>, without special attributes, such as plump features or silly behaviors, that might mark them as fundamentally different from their older counterparts.<\/p>\n

Looking at baptism records, Ari\u00e8s 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 that\u2019s now considered a core component of parenthood.<\/p>\n

While historians have debated<\/a>\u00a0many of Ari\u00e8s\u2019 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. Ari\u00e8s argued that children didn\u2019t emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century.<\/p>\n

Kids at work<\/strong><\/p>\n

The belief that a child deserves a life free from the stress of the workplace came along still later.<\/p>\n

After all, if Miss Huang had been born in the 19th century,\u00a0few people would question her presence in the workplace<\/a>. The Industrial Revolution\u00a0yielded accounts<\/a>\u00a0of 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\u00a0worked in factories<\/a>,\u00a0mines<\/a>\u00a0and other dangerous environments.<\/p>\n

To today\u2019s viewers of \u201cSeverance,\u201d the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the show\u2019s fictional Lumon Industries feels jarring precisely because it violates the deeply held belief that children are occupants of a separate sphere,\u00a0their innocence<\/a>\u00a0shielding them from the dog-eat-dog environs<\/a>\u00a0of competitive workplaces.<\/p>\n

Childhood under threat<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think she\u2019s closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds.<\/p>\n

Today, the ideal childhood \u2013 access to\u00a0play<\/a>,\u00a0care<\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0meaningful education<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 is increasingly under threat.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Nancy Fraser has argued<\/a>,\u00a0capitalism relies<\/a>\u00a0on someone doing that work, while assigning it little to no monetized value.<\/p>\n

Child-rearing in the 21st century exists within a troubling paradox: Mothers provide unpaid child care for their own children, while those who professionally care for others\u2019 children \u2013\u00a0predominantly women of color and immigrants<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 receive meager compensation for this essential work.<\/p>\n

In other words, economic elites and the politicians they support say they want to cultivate future workers. But they don\u2019t want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s name comes from a \u201cseverance\u201d 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 character\u2019s \u201cinnie\u201d is the person they are at the job, and their \u201couttie\u201d is who they are at home.<\/p>\n

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 don\u2019t have children and raise children as if they don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhood \u2013 with its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play and its demands for attention and care \u2013 increasingly untenable.<\/p>\n

Capitalism\u2019s ideal child<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plummeting global fertility rates<\/a>\u00a0around the world speak to this crisis in child care, with the U.S., Europe, South Korea and China falling well below the birth rate required to replace the existing population.<\/p>\n

Even as\u00a0Elon Musk frets<\/a>\u00a0about women choosing not to have children,\u00a0he seems eager to restrict<\/a>\u00a0any government aid that would provide the time or resources that raising children requires.<\/p>\n

Accessible health care<\/a>,\u00a0affordable, healthy food<\/a>\u00a0and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administration\u2019s quest for what it calls \u201cgovernment efficiency\u201d is poised to\u00a0shred safety net programs<\/a>\u00a0that help millions of low-income\u00a0children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the midst of this dilemma, Miss Huang offers a surreal solution to the problems children pose in 2025.<\/p>\n

She is, in many ways, capitalism\u2019s ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parent\u2019s time, no teacher\u2019s patience and no community\u2019s resources. Like other workers and executives at Lumon, she seems to have shed the inefficient entanglements of family, love and play.<\/p>\n

In this light, Miss Huang\u2019s clever insistence that she is a child \u201cbecause of when I was born\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Viewers don\u2019t yet know if she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Or rather, she is the only kind of child that America\u2019s economic system allows to thrive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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