In the second season of “Severance,” there’s an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains she’s a child “because of when I was born.”
Miss Huang’s 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 “child” – and whether one gets to claim childhood at all – has always depended on when and where a person is born.
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 Ariès famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today, simply did not exist in the past.
Using medieval art as one resource, Ariès 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, Ariès 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’s now considered a core component of parenthood.
While historians have debated many of Ariès’ 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. Ariès argued that children didn’t emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century.
The 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 today’s viewers of “Severance,” the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the show’s 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.
As a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think she’s closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds.
Today, the ideal childhood – access to play, care and a meaningful education – is 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 child care for their own children, while those who professionally care for others’ children – predominantly women of color and immigrants – receive 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 don’t want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires.
The show’s 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 character’s “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 don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work.
The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhood – with its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play and its demands for attention and care – increasingly untenable.
Plummeting global fertility rates around 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.
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 health care, affordable, healthy food and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administration’s 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, capitalism’s ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parent’s time, no teacher’s patience and no community’s 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 Huang’s 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 don’t yet know if she’s 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 America’s economic system allows to thrive.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut
Read more: How did public bathrooms get to be separated by sex in the first place? Why female bosses get different reactions than men when they criticize employees ‘Great resignation’? ‘Quiet quitting’? If you’re surprised by America’s anti-work movement, maybe you need to watch more movies
Anna Mae Duane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
