Chapter Eleven: Trust kids
From my book, Expanding Consent.
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Chapter Eleven
Trust Kids
“To trust children is to anchor ourselves to a moral foundation, a place from which a freer world can grow, as long as we’re willing to help it along.”
Idzie Desmarais
What if we believed that children were born with innate wisdom?
What if we believed that we didn’t know best, just different?
What if we woke up one morning, and the adult world could see clearly that children are whole, fully-formed people – worthy of many of the same rights as adults, worthy of protection AND respect.
What if we believed they were worthy of being spoken to in full sentences, not questions we already know the answer to, worthy of being asked about who they are and what they care about - not about what we want them to be and what we care about.
Worthy of being seen and accepted exactly as they are NOW, not as we hope they will be some day.
Worthy of inhabiting public spaces - because “public” includes children, too.
Worthy of not being judged. Because judgment so often comes from the cobwebby crevices of ourselves we despise - and when we see inklings of that in a child, we pounce. I’ve done it.
Worthy of making their own decisions – because we trust that we can be partners, not owners.
What if we believed young people had their own gifts to bring to the table – gifts we don’t fully understand anymore, because we are adults. Gifts that can’t be measured or rationalized or explained.
What if we consulted with children on decisions that involve them because they are the experts on being them. And also in decisions that involve us all because they are part of “us all.”
What if we saw all children’s bodies as good? If we finally admitted their bodies belong to them alone?
What if we saw children’s behavior as a battle cry, an appeal to be heard, a form of resistance. What if we saw the way they armor up for the world, and instead of praising it, buckled down and built a world where they could leave their armor at the door.
What if we recognized we didn’t have to dominate our own children - not at home, not at school, not anywhere.
What if we let our guard down - like, just permanently. And assumed the best of our young people, always.
Trust children
If we are metaphorical fish, and consent culture is the ocean we swim in, trust is the oxygen we need to survive. Without trust, our environment cannot sustain life. It might look like sea water, for all intents and purposes, but would be missing the very air we breath.
Trusting our children is hard. It is counter-cultural, and it goes against everything we have been taught. As John Holt writes, “Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.””
We struggle to trust our children because we ourselves were raised to believe we could not be trusted.
It is a cycle that is hard to break: we grow up feeling fundamentally untrustworthy, and project this lack of trust onto our children, and the cycle continues on.
Initially, I did not trust my children. And I’ll be honest - it’s still a work in progress, a fake-it-til-you-make-it thing.
At one point, I found out one of my children sneaking things from school into their school bag. I realised they feared my judgment and feared what I’d do if I found out. They feared what I’d think of them. They needed my help - not my judgment.
In the early years of his life, I didn’t understand my son’s extreme behavior and saw it as a sign he was willfully being difficult. I didn’t understand that if he could have done differently, he would have.
I couldn’t see what was right in front of me – that my children wanted to be seen and loved for who they were. They wanted me to know that they were good, and always doing their best. They wanted me to trust them.
Trusting ourselves
I didn’t trust my children because I didn’t know how to trust myself. I didn’t even know I was supposed to trust myself!
My body had betrayed me in more ways than one - or so I believed. My narrative about myself was that every day was a concerted effort to stay on the right side of well, whatever well meant. For years I told myself that I had emotions and intuitions I was unable to access, and that I didn’t recognise. I had been so fortunate, so privileged, and yet I couldn’t explain why life was such a struggle.
In the WEIRD world (remember, this stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Developed - imagine me saying all these words in air quotes!), we raise children with the belief, passed on through generations, that they are manipulating us. That they need discipline, and structure, and all sorts of arbitrary things like feeding schedules and educational toys that beep. We tell each other and ourselves that they children are easily influenced and corruptible, that they don’t possess an inner sense of wrong or right, that we must instill all sorts of things in them: curiosity, love of learning, good habits. We convince ourselves that we know best. That they cannot be trusted.
We arrive at adulthood with a big sigh of relief, like “Finally! Now I can make all my own decisions!” and quickly realise we are still bound by our own distrust, by disconnection, by societal norms. While as children we long to break free, as adults we take on the status quo and become enforcers of it.
We cross a societally contructed line between childhood and adulthood, and suddenly find ourselves siding with other adults, and all manner of adult-led institutions, against children. The switch is often not sudden, actually: as children grow into tweens and then teens, they are slowly internalizing adultism and in their turn enforcing it on those younger than them.
Our children grow up to become adults who are disconnected to their own sense of self, because they’re been told they are incomplete, incapable, too small, too immature, not to be trusted. As they grow, the cycle continues. It’s a cycle that can seems hard to break.
The original site of oppression
“Childhood is, therefore, the original site – ground zero – of all systems of domination,” writes Toby Rollo in an essay titled Childing the World, “All forms of domination are pre-figured, in both form and content, by the domination of the child.”
All the tools of oppression that are used to keep other groups down, might be seen to have begun at home, in the ways we see children, the ways we mistrust them, the ways we control them.
That is why consent needs to start in the relationship between adult and child. And why trust is such a crucial piece of crafting an environment and spaces where our children feel free, seen and heard.
Can children be trusted to have autonomy?
Fundamentally, I believe that children are very capable of understanding a situation, and coming up with a way forward. It’s just that often, the way forward may not be the sort of outcome or compromise the adult was looking for.
And I think we need to be honest about that. Giving children a real say in things will probably mean they will choose to do things we may not be okay with. This can be confronting for us, because we were probably raised differently to this and would expect children to always defer to adults.
It can also be confronting because we may have strong feeling about things, such as compassion, collaboration, and equity – and we don’t feel we can dive into a place where everything is relative, and anything goes.
I think there can be a middle way. For starters, it would be helpful if we adults found a way to consider that our way may not be the only way. It would also help if we learned to express our own needs ways that were less critical and judgmental; less about controlling our children, and more about helping them realize that we are all interdependent. That we can’t all do whatever we want, because we live in a family, community, society. I don’t think these two things – recognising many things can be true at once, and maintaining a sense of togetherness – are mutually exclusive.
Trust & Learning
Learning and education is a huge battleground in terms of adult reluctance to trust children and young people. All of the messaging we’re exposed to is along the lines of: children won’t learn if you don’t make them, they won’t do the work if you don’t either reward or bribe them, they won’t be kind if you don’t threaten to punish, and so on.
When we frame things like this, we tend to stay focused not on who children are, but on whether their behavior proves they can in fact be trusted.
For me, the more crucial aspect of this is that our children deserve to be treated with the same respect we give ourselves and other humans in our lives, regardless of the decisions they make.
I feel strongly that my children need to be given as much ownership over their lives as we can possibly work with as a family. And by lives, I mean every aspect of their life.
For us, this means the freedom to be self-directed in their learning and living. It means laying it out there for them, a bit like this:
You are in charge of your learning, you get to decide what to learn, when to learn, how to learn; I will be here, supporting, guiding and advising when you need me to. I may have to step in at times, but I will always do this respectfully, with consideration for your feelings and opinions. As long as you live with your family, we will require the same respect from you as the respect we give you. But ultimately, your life belongs to you! You get to try, fail and try again. You get to decide where you’re going to go with it. Nothing you do or don’t do will ever change our love for you, but it might have consequences for the trajectory of your life.
Crucially, for us, it hasn’t been the case of putting it out there and then wiping our hands of it and walking away. That would be way too simplistic and easy, and I’m not sure it would work well for anyone! Autonomy, for us, is also intricately bound with togetherness. Self-direction is counter-balanced by consent-based-ness.
Everyone’s lives and education and interests are a constant conversation in our home, because they are entwined – we talk about what feels right and how we know it feels right, what we love about things and what we don’t, how sometimes we need to do things we don’t love so much, and how often we do things because it’s what we feel is expected of us, everyone else is doing them, or whatever. We talk about beliefs, values, differences and emotions. We are all involved in each other’s growth.
I cheer my children on when they get through a new level of Zelda; they empathise with me when I write 2000 words and then forget to save them, wiping out a whole mornings’ work.
Recently, I was on a panel about self-directed education. Speaking in public is something I get really nervous about, and actively avoid. My children know this, and I voiced how tempted I was to cancel - they reminded me of the same things we always talk about: the importance of facing fears, that the only way out is sometimes through, and that the more I practice the easier it will feel.
It’s been amazing to watch our children take their life, learning and education on as their responsibility, to know that we trust them to figure it out, and that they trust us to be there alongside them. They have both grown and learned so much from being put in charge of their own lives, as much as has been possible.
Phoebe has embraced the things she loves and experimented with some new things, and made a conscious decision to find a way to enjoy things she believes might be useful for her in future, but which she’s not crazy about right now. She has become vocal about not wanting to pursue an adult agenda, and I love that.
Leo has found the freedom and regulation he was always looking for. He thrives in an environment that is low in demands and restrictions, where he doesn’t feel controlled by us or external things. It took us so long to realise this – and so long to trust that he was telling us what he needed.
As a toddler, he would meltdown, screaming and kicking like he was being tortured, if any of us pressed the buttons on the elevator before him, or opened a door before him. When I started him on solid foods he immediately grabbed the spoon out of my hand and never let me spoon feed him again. He refused to wear clothes at home, and refused to wear appropriate clothing outdoors. Even what we perceived as the smallest loss of autonomy on his part – a sudden change of plan, losing at anything, stopping before he was ready, his sister buckling her car seat before him – would send him into a spiral of violence and extreme dysregulation.
Our growing trust in him, and his ability to be autonomous, has been such a gift for him and for us, too.
Deconstructing needs
If we can deconstruct assumptions we have about children, it might explain our society’s lack of trust in children and childhood, and our over-reliance on Western constructs to explain children to us, and teach us how to parent them.
Let me just get this out the way and say that we all have needs, and the best person to know about our needs is in fact, ourselves. I believe this goes for our children too. Babies will cry if they’re hungry or dysregulated or tired. Their cries don’t tell us “I need a nap schedule!” or “I need socialization!” They tell us simply that they are tired, or need us to co-regulate, in that moment. Those are their needs, stripped of our socially imposed constructions.
We have developed a narrative of needs that sees the child as a very special type of human who has very specific needs. I think it is a useful construct when the adults are seeking to nurture and protect, but it can become a dangerous one when it legitimises adult control and coercion in the name of needs. It can become dangerous when it exists outside of a relationship of trust.
We are not building a culture that centers consent if we have already decided what our child needs, and how they will get that need met.
But what about the early years, and “sensitive periods” and attachment and early childhood experiences? Surely all of those things are crucial. Surely there are inherent needs there.
And yes, there are. The first few years of life matter, of course they do. So does every other year after that! Attachment matters. But it is not uniformly the same for all children, in all places, in all cultures. Attachment theory, too, is a Western construct popularized by John Bowlby, and then Mary Ainsworth, and has come under a lot of scrutiny more recently due to its tendency to make universal claims that are really rooted in a specific Western idea of the nuclear family and the mother as main caregiver.
There is no uniform narrative of needs and it’s ridiculous to pretend there is.
Early childhood researcher Gaile Sloane Cannella writes that the discourse of needs is often used to hide behind the fact that there is actually a whole lot of disagreement about what humans needs, and “it is used to construct a form of natural authority used to support personal, political and power agendas.”
Listen – I didn’t begin intentionally building connection with my children until they were 5 and 8 years old. I’m not saying the early years were a disaster – but I am saying there was a lot of repair to be done. There still is.
I believe that our narrative of needs and of the crucial importance of the early years can be empowering, AND can also be used to control mothers and shame us. Not all of us are able or present or aware in those early years.
The truth is our brains are always changing, pruning and re-wiring. And while the early years are crucial in terms of building new connections, and strengthening the connections that are most relevant, the brain is always doing this, only not at the same speed throughout our lives. In fact, the middle school years have also been found to be one of the most active moments of brain development
We are never not growing. It is never too late. And while there are windows of development that do matter, there are also exceptions to this. Some children don’t begin speaking until 5 years old, but grow up to be Albert Einstein. Some children learn to read fluently at 12, and become extremely literate. Our conversation around needs lacks nuance, grey areas and frankly, true participation on the part of our children.
When schooling fails us
Education now, for many people, looks like schooling! Most of us got our education in schools, and we see no other way to do this. Most of us consider ourselves educated, because of schooling. Those of us who feel we have gaps or are uneducated, often see this as a lack of schooling.
In the “banking model of education”, described by Paulo Freire, children are not fully-formed, complex and worthy of rights. Instead, children are adults-in-the-making. They are empty cups ready to be filled by adult knowledge. Teaching is viewed as the transference of information, virtually intact, from a more knowledgeable person (the adult) to a not-quite-human person (the child, but also historically women, people of colour, and other marginalised people).
Historically, education was in fact mostly concerned with adults and adult society, not with children. Education and then schooling, were about reducing child labour, and also training future members of society for their assigned roles. It was never about children’s personhood, children’s experiences. Children weren’t seen, and still aren’t seen, as worthy in their own right. As holders of needs, desires and rights. As full humans with their own inner sense of purpose, their own ideas about the future, their own inner compass and instinctive abilities to make meaning.
It is the way we see and conceive of children that continues to influence the ways we think of education, and the ways we put education into practice. We simply don’t believe children are “born persons”, in the words of British educator Charlotte Mason. We see them as less than, other, not capable of autonomy and agency.
As a result of seeing children as empty vessels, or not fully formed, of seeing them as future adults, we assume children need us to mould and shape them. They need education. They need schooling. They need us to impose that upon them, no matter how gently this is done, in order for them to grow into competent adults who can contribute to society in the ways we require them to.
Stripped to its barest basics, a school is a place where young people are made to gather, and where they are taught a bunch of stuff that adults decided they needed to learn. These two elements – the gathering, and the teaching – no matter how fun they are made to look, and how much flowery language they are couched into, can only happen when at least some of the children are forced into doing them. There is simply no way all children will desire to gather in the same place every single day, for free, and work on the same things, again for free. Would you?
In practice, when we step back and look at school as an institution, and schooling as a principle, we see that it is conceived of, run and implemented in a top-down manner by a pretty inflexible hierarchy of adults. We see that young people are not the co-constructors of their education on a daily basis. We see that consent is overridden, regularly. We see that tools of coercion, such as rewards, ranking, bribes and punishments, are routinely utilised.
We see there is an overarching agenda in the form of curricula, and that no matter how much “choice” young people are given in the implementation of said curriculum, the bottom line is: you need to follow the curriculum, you need to pass the final assessments.
We see that school is rooted in coercion and compliance, not consent. Children must go. They must do the assigned work. They cannot refuse.
It is a violation of children’s right to self-preservation, to wholeness, to their right to live and learn with family and community, and to culturally-specific ways of passing down knowledge and values.
No matter how child-centred or child-led or progressive your school claims to be, it probably does all of this and more.
The options outside of schooling are extremely limited, and inaccessible to many.
Consent-based & self-directed education
I don’t believe there is one right way to be in relationship with our children, or to educate our children. I recognise that schooling is what we have right now – and many of us need it, in all its imperfect messiness.
But it would be remiss of me not to share the ways that framing consent-based-ness within self-direction, has made sense for me.
Self-directed education, is essentially a way of living and learning that comes from “self-chosen activities and life experiences,” according to the definition by the Alliance of Self-Directed Education website (ASDE). Self-directed education, which is sometimes synonymous with unschooling, puts living and learning in the child or young person’s hands: they get to decide the where, what, why, when and how of learning.
Self-directed education is different to child-centredness in that at the root of self-direction is an assumption of the person’s autonomy to seek out learning and experiences wherever and however works for them.
Is it a construct? Of course it is. But it is one that allows for a lot of autonomy and agency. It is one that might work well for people who struggle within our dominant paradigm of parenting and educating.
Sophie Christophy is the first person to create spaces that are both explicitly consent-based and self-directed. Christophy’s consent-based, self-directed settings for young people embrace the following principles: Self-direction, Consent-based, Education positive, Shared decisionmaking, Risk management and Conflict navigation, Children’s rights, Social and Environmental justice.
Christophy believes all of these principles underlie consent-based-ness, and that it is not that without each and every one of them. She sees consent as a counterbalance to self-direction. Where self-direction can lean towards individualism and license, consent centres us in relationship, trust and community.
Consent-based, self-directed living feels like this, to me:
I trust that my child will grow and develop the way that is right for them. I trust they will learn alongside me. I trust they will tell me what they need, when they need it (whether this is verbally or non-verbally – children have a right to silence and privacy too, like the rest of us!). I trust they will wield their power wisely. I trust that I will rest within my own power and autonomy, and try my best not to dominate or wield it without good reason. I trust they will hold me accountable when I do, and that I can do the same for them too.
I trust they will follow their interests, wonder and curiosity. I trust they won’t be contained within society’s constructed boundaries of what is desirable and what is not. I trust they will hold themselves accountable to their values.
And also, I trust that I will know when something is wrong, and when I need to intervene. I trust that I am on my own path even if it isn’t immediately apparent. I trust in our sense of connection and togetherness. I trust that releasing control over others, and myself, leads to autonomy and empowerment. I trust my children.
What if you’re not willing to go on trust alone?
This might be controversial, but I think this too, is okay. There have been times when I simply haven’t been able to go on trust alone. I have needed evidence, I’ve needed to understand something intellectually. Or, I’ve recognised that on a particular issue, I have more knowledge and experience and although my child will participate in decision-making, they may not get to do exactly as they wish.
This is why building a culture of consent doesn’t depend on trust alone, either. Our metaphorical sea can have varying degrees of trust, but trust alone won’t help consent thrive. We need all the other elements that we’ve looked at: an understanding of power, boundaries, self-consent, Unconditional Positive Regard, non-judgment, and autonomy.
All of those are needed, to a greater or lesser extent.
You don’t have to go on trust alone.
Next, we’ll look at the element that in some ways, ties all of these features of our sea of consent, together: partnership.
Thanks for reading lovely people!!
Next up.. the last part of the Wheel of Consent! Partnership & Mutuality, where everything comes together (in my opinion!).
I hope you are all having a wonderful week, or as good a week as possible!
(A pic from my week, below, and references.)
Fran x
References:
Rollo, T. Childing the World in Bergman, C. (2023). Trust Kids! Find it here: https://www.academia.edu/52011088/Childing_the_World
Mason, Charlotte (2017). A Philosophy of Education. Living Book Press.
Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin.
So good. Grateful you put this down in words for us.
love this -- amen to all of it