CHAPTER FOUR: "Children can't consent."

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Chapter Four

“But children can’t consent.”

The idea that children are either not capable of, or simply shouldn’t be allowed to, consent is pervasive and insidious.

It goes something like this:

Children can’t really consent. They don’t have the ability, they’re not developmentally read to, their brains are still maturing, they don’t have all the information. They don’t know what they don’t know, they just don’t fully understand the long-term repercussions. They have no impulse control.

There is no one way to consent, and consent isn’t always the main thing

In the same way that I don’t agree with the idea children can’t consent, I also don’t necessarily want to assume that all children can and must always consent to all things, must always make autonomous decisions.

I don’t believe there is one right answer here. There are grey areas not just for children, but for all people.

My child might not want to go grocery shopping but we’re going to find a way to make it happen, because we need food. They might not autonomously and enthusiastically consent, but they might also recognise we need food, and we will collaborate to find a solution.

So when we make a case for children’s right and ability to consent, we don’t always mean they should be making independent, unsupported decisions!

Consent, for many children, looks like participation. It isn’t always a yes or a no, it’s often simply being heard and respected and seen as a full person.

In some cases it is a way for children to preserve their sense of wholeness, which I define as a felt sense of autonomy, sovereignty and ownership over themselves. To feel uncolonised, un-invaded, like they know where they begin and end.

In many cases, though, consent is a way for children to be valued, equal members of our families, groups, public spaces. It is about collaboration, mutuality and connection.

While consent isn’t always the main thing, in all cases children can and should be able to practice it.

Consent and responsibility can coexist

Being consent-based doesn’t erase our responsibility of care, or the need for ethical leadership – whether we are parents, carers or members of community that hold specific responsibilities.

When I talked with Sophie Christophy, she spoke to the importance of “collective responsibility” in families, and also about the responsibilities that parents and carers hold because they are parents and carers. She spoke to how those with responsibility need to be able exercise their role, which is to keep everyone safe and well, whilst being conscious of the risk of the impact of adultist biases in our judgement.

Providing leadership is not necessarily power over, Christophy says; it is possible to be in our personal power to fulfil our roles within our family and community. I’ll talk more about what Sophie calls “fixed parts” and how these help everyone to live together, and how this is guided by your family’s values and culture.

Children can consent

Research indicates that it’s debatable whether there actually is a lower age limit to the ways children make themselves understood, to the ways they consent.

One way we might have to assess whether a child is able to consent or not, is the Gillick Competency Scale. This is usually used when a child or young person under the age of 16, wishes to get medical treatment without their parents’ knowledge or consent, or get treatment their parents disagree with. The scale is used to assess whether the child is capable of making this decision independently. The Gillick Competency Scale is consulted by professionals in other scenarios, such as if the child wishes to seek accommodation independent of their parents, or seeking therapeutic support without their parents’ knowledge.

The court case that set a precedent for Gillick Competency is an interesting one, because it was in fact an example of a parent, Victoria Gillick, taking her local health authority in the UK to court in order to prevent her medical staff from giving contraceptive advice or treatment to young people under 16. Her claims were initially dismissed, and the dismissal was ultimately upheld by the House of Lords. The final ruling stated that age could not be a determining factor in the ability to give “true consent”, because the more important factors were the child’s ability “to make a reasonable assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the treatment proposed.”

This case is often used as precedent in the UK, to determine whether a child is able to give consent, and when it is appropriate to curb parental rights. The Gillick Competency is the final ruling in 1985 by the House of Lords, which also states that, "parental right yields to the child's right to make his own decisions when he reaches a sufficient understanding and intelligence to be capable of making up his own mind on the matter requiring decision."

The United States is much less nuanced about this and the legal age of consent to medical treatment in most states is 18. The parental rights movement in the US is strong, and so I wouldn’t look to the US for guidance around children’s rights (especially as they are one of only two countries that have not ratified the UNCRC.)

Perhaps it’s not that children can’t consent, it’s that we’re not paying attention

If we turn to the research, we find that some research indicates that babies and toddlers have multiple non-verbal ways of making themselves understood, and that these ways are just as valid as an older child’s spoken opinion.

In many ways, babies and toddlers can and do consent. I remember Leo protesting very loudly any time I tried to change his nappy. It was absolutely clear to anyone watching, that he did not consent. I still changed him - but I also figured I could collaborate with him to make it more bearable, by giving him something to hold, singing to him, making him laugh while I did it, all the while explaining why a dirty nappy needed to be change and recognising it was unpleasant for him. I could make it so that he trusted me to care for him even though some parts were unpleasant.

Priscilla Alderson’s research on medical consent and children, indicates that some doctors have encountered patients as young as 18 months who are able to broadly understand procedures, and patients as young as 3 years with a good grasp of their diagnosis and treatment.

Consent to medical procedures is obviously very different to being able to consent to a myriad of daily things, but it can be useful to set a broad understanding of the ability of children to consent to big decisions that are life-altering or important.

We are socialised to miss many non-verbal cues, and to assume that children aren’t able to fully understand situations and make decisions. We see consent as a two-way exchange when actually, for most things, it arises as part of a relationship.

We are also socialised to automatically make decisions FOR children, and to see decision-making as bilateral, rather than collaborative. It never even occurs to many of us that consent can happen as a collaborative agreement; and that a pitfall of group decision-making is often that the loudest or most influential voice (in this case the adult) prevails.

In her research, Alderson notes how trust is key in understanding because it is a two-way process between the medical staff, and the patients. Understanding “is a mutual process in the minds of the child and the informer.. it grows or withers through the relationship between them.” I love this so much!

It’s an acknowledgment that informed consent and understanding of topics is rooted in relationship and trust. The broader the definition of ‘understanding’, the more likely are we to believe our children can be informed. The more narrow, the more likely we believe only experts or professionals can truly be informed.

If we see sharing information less like transmission, and more like a 2-way process, then we might also be open up to the idea that children deserve to be informed, deserve to create their own understanding through being informed, more than they deserve to be protected.

Assuming that informing them of hard things is equivalent to not protecting them, Alderson points out, also means that we assume children are empty vessels without a thought until an adult introduces one to them, rather than complex people who might be having thoughts about the topic already, and who will incorporate new information and integrate it, and participate in an exchange.

I come back to these principles every time something hard happens in the news: many of us assume our children are oblivious, and unable to handle big ideas or hard truths. But in reality, our children probably know more than we think they do, and are more capable of judging the extent of what they need to know than we think. They are also equally capable of forming their own ideas based on what they hear and are exposed to - they are not empty cups, but full participants in making sense of the world around them. They deserve to have enough information to build their own unique understandings.

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Also, our understanding and research of children is biased

Many of the studies around children and their abilities are inherently biased: for one, they are adult-led and adult-run and the results are interpreted through an adult lens. Many of the studies around children’s ability to participate in decision-making are carried out in Global Minority countries, and/or in controlled situations such as schools or labs. There needs to be more research around how children make decisions within their homes and communities, and in other places they actually inhabit - this is such a massive gap in our understanding of consent-based decision-making.

Liz Brooker’s research has looked at how much more fluid and complex children’s understanding of power dynamics, roles and culture is than they are often given credit for; a 4-year old’s conversations at home are found to be much more complex, compared to those in more formal spaces such as kindergarten. I’m sure any parent can attest to this! My children have amazing, deep insights and conversations are some of the most powerful vehicles for learning and shaping ideas in our home.

Brooker’s research has also challenged assumptions adults make when researching children, and the need for more research with, rather than on, children. Antonella Ivernizzi has looked at the ways children who hold great responsibility in their community, either because they hold specific roles, or they are valuable wage-earners, are often deferred to by their parents and adult members of the community. Once the power differentials shift, adults will more readily accept children’s decisions-making abilities, even though the ability to make decisions itself hasn’t changed.

In his book Give Children the Vote, John Wall explains that age limits on voting are counterproductive and problematic, and what should matter more is whether the child wants to vote. If a child wants to vote, then they will have a degree of understanding around voting, he argues. Wall also explains that if we worked on building a society where it was assumed that children could make big decisions, then we would also be creating systems and structures that rest on this assumption. Rather than placing children at the margins of society, and disempowering them, they would be right there with us - informed, aware, and in possession of their own autonomy.

Some of the research on children who hold more responsibility within their families, such as Ivernizzi’s, bears this out.

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There are things that can’t be measured

One more point, is that children sometimes see things we don’t. Sometimes they have a greater intuitive sense of what is right for them. Sometimes they have other, more abstract, information that perhaps us adults don’t have or cannot grasp. Often they can think outside of our strict constructs, and sometimes they see things more clearly.

We have been taught this is not the case because a Western culture rooted in rational thought and science, has set out to position itself as superior, and because systems like patriarchy, adultism and white supremacy have positioned one set of people as wielding power and influence over another - in this case, adults over children.

But this is a fundamentally colonial viewpoint. Scholar and writer Linda Tuwhai Smith refers to the child’s wisdom as an assumed, existing thing in some Indigenous cultures. Tuwhai Smith speaks about the many ways young people and children have of knowing things, and how “reclaiming a voice in this context has also been about reclaiming, reconnecting and reordering those ways of knowing which were submerged, hidden or driven underground.”

I spoke to unschooler and writer Ieishah McClelland Lange on my podcast about embodied learning and Indigenous ways of knowing, and she talked about the way we have essentially dis-embodied knowledge, and how there are ways of knowing things that cannot be measured, pinned down, explained.

Our children know this too. They may have a different way of understanding informed consent. They may have unique, unknowable ways of understanding their own lives and their roles within them.

This is not me trying to say that when my son tells me he doesn’t need to brush his teeth, he has superior insight into this particular topic and must be deferred to. In this case, my insight on teeth-brushing, as well as our trusted dentist’s, is really valuable.

I simply mean to open up possibilities that we often ignore or leave unexplored – possibilities that our children have unique gifts, unique ways of seeing the world. And that we need to have a degree of discernment to recognise when hearing and honouring our children’s ways of knowing and understanding is as valid as putting forward our own experience and understanding.

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Consent is speaking up for justice

On a wider scale, the right to sovereignty and consent can be children’s “essential defenses against violent oppression, inequality, injustice and abuse of power,” Priscilla Alderson notes.

Children are capable of defending themselves in these ways - we need to respect their instinctive cues, because so often, it is adults they need to defend themselves from.

I think we still do need to understand that most decisions around consent are made as agreements, in relationship with one another, and that autonomy rights need to be seen in the context of living in a respectful community. Perhaps we need to be open to our children’s consent existing in the context of communally-made decisions, and in the context of the close, loving relationship we have with our child.

Blanket statements like “children can’t consent” only serve to continue to perpetuate myths and assumptions around children’s capabilities, and solidify adult power over children and our right to make decisions for them.

This is an utterly unhelpful way to view children, and consent-basedness, and I will push back on it as long as I live.

When we tell children they cannot consent, we are ultimately telling them we do not trust them to know themselves. I’ll talk more about trust later on, but I’m putting this here for now.

But what about maturity? Children’s brain development? Isn’t that science?

A lot of the conversations about consent link back to this idea of maturity. A child needs to be mature enough to receive the information and understand it, and to be able to weigh the pros and cons of a situation and make an informed decision.

All of these words – understand, weigh, informed – are so loaded and fundamentally so subjective.

And one that is even more loaded is maturity.

How do we know when a child is mature enough to consent?

Isn’t it science that children’s brains are under-developed, and that therefore they are less capable of certain things than adults? And surely science can’t be wrong? That is why we, the parents, exist! To make decisions FOR them. Our brains are fully developed and make all the right decisions. We understand consequences, we have impulse control, and we have more experience.

The answer to this is, yes and no.

(Also, I should point out that adults with “more developed” brains make arguably worse decisions than children, often with much more serious repercussions. So often, this hard truth is left out of the conversation.)

First off, without even having read a book or consulted a paper, we can say that no matter what someone’s brain is going through, all humans are born with the right to make autonomous decisions.

That, right off the bat, is the first and perhaps foremost reason children should have a say in all decisions about their lives. It is about ethics, not science. Regardless of what we might believe about their brains and bodies, they are people too. This right is also enshrined in the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child.

But back to the brain development issue. What people are claiming here is that we should base decisions around learning, parenting, schooling, and health predominantly on what we know (or think we know) about child development and developmental stages.

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Deconstructing child development

Child development is, of course, a construct. It’s not actually the truth about children as a group. It’s a framework that Western developmental psychology has constructed, to understand how children grow and learn and exist in the world.

I am not going to diminish this accomplishment. It is a helpful framework in MANY ways (remember I said this!). Perhaps even in most ways. Constructs often are helpful! This one helps professionals and parents figure out if intervention is needed, it helps us understand and empathise with things we may be viewing from an adult lens, such as meltdowns or struggles with reading. It is infinitely helpful!

But like all constructs, it can also be biased, not the full picture, unhelpful, and even harmful – especially when we take this construct to mean ‘the truth about all children.’

Gail Sloan Cannella, a researcher, academic and early childhood educator, writes about how the language of child development comes from a very specific cultural and political context, and yet is now taken to apply to all children everywhere. It is “assumed that the language of child development represents Truth and benefits all children, from whatever culture, socioeconomic background, or historical period,” she says. But in fact, like all constructs, the idea of child development contains a million assumptions and is not at all a universal truth.

We are always in-the-making

One assumption is the idea of progress. This is an idea that pervades our culture, especially in Western, industrialized countries, to the point we don’t even question it. We assume that we are always works in progress and that we should always be progressing, getting better, getting more efficient. It assumes we should be able to measure said progress.

Basically we end up seeing progress as the normal state of affairs, and anything other than progress as stagnation or failure. The norm is to always get better by societal measures, and anything other than that is an issue. This idea of progress as inevitable is embedded in the ways we raise and educate children. Children always have to be improving. Upward progress or lack thereof is perhaps one of the biggest measures of whether a child is ‘thriving,’ or ‘underachieving.’

I remember doctors telling me my daughter was ‘failing to thrive’ as an infant, because her weight wasn’t conforming to the curve it was supposed to follow. How demoralising is that phrase? It incorporates everything about raising a child that good mothers are supposed to prevent. I was failing, and so was my child.

And sure, many lives are saved by having a curve. But what we gain comes with the painting of all babies with one brush. My baby was not the average baby (is there even an average baby?); therefore, she was a failing baby.

The idea of progress is everywhere: we equate progress in our culture with gaining knowledge in scientific matters, getting ‘better and better’ technology, more ‘advanced’ systems - it is so embedded we cannot even stop to consider whether some of this progress might actually have harmed us. Might actually not be progress at all - but decline, devastation, disruption.

Progress has been used to label some groups and some cultures and some societies as ‘ahead’ and some as ‘behind’ or ‘less developed.’ And to label some groups of people as less than, as other. Including children. It justifies our constant monitoring and surveillance of children, to check they are ‘developing right.’ As if there were only one right way to develop and grow.

Researcher and activist Erica Burman writes about the ways that the over-reliance on child development and an idea that our children will progress in an orderly, linear way is an adult way to maintain control over children. We have created whole institutions and industries around “the complex disorder of individual development,” she says.

The invention of progress

Cannella places the birth of this idea in Enlightenment philosophy in the West, the further solidifying of it at the beginning of industrialization in the US and Europe (to explain and justify industrial growth), and in Darwin’s Origin of the Species (evolution as progress). More recently, it was picked up and adopted by the field of developmental psychology; progress then started to look linear, to have a predetermined direction and specific stages, and an underpinning in science and reason.

It also served to maintain European belief in racial superiority - the idea of development is essentially a justification for colonisation.

It bears remembering that this idea of brain development was also applied to women, and to people from non-European cultures, at several points in time. It led to IQ testing, which we now know to be biased and inaccurate.

Child development is basically a science that is intensely politically and culturally motivated. It is not the absolute truth on how children grow - it’s only an illusion of truth.

There are several other points to this: much of the research around child development has been carried out in WEIRD countries. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. This acronym was coined in a paper by Joseph Henrich, and while this acronym has its detractors and is far from perfect, it was essentially used to describe white, Western countries as being an evolutionary anomaly. As Carol Black explains in her Ted Talk, “these societies not only were not representative of humanity as a whole, they were by many measures at one extreme of the bell curve of human variation,” with the United States being at the extreme end of an already extreme spectrum.

This means that the child development research is based overwhelmingly on a small proportion of the global population, and one that claims to represent humanity as a whole but is actually entirely not representative of it. Additionally, brain development and neuroscience was initially constructed as a separation of mind and body - and we know now that that too, is a Western construct.

Child development universalises one group of people and that in itself is a problem, because children are conceived of differently depending on where they are born in the world, and which culture they grow up in. There is no one universal, globalised childhood! Expectations of growth, of role in community, of abilities and much more, vary hugely from culture to culture, from community to community.

No one brain

In a similar way, there is no universal human brain. Neuroscientist Chantel Prat talks about how when we make generalisations about brains, we end up with a one-size-fits-all model that actually fits nobody. Or, we end up with a binary that can also be misleading, because often variation is wider within each group than between them.

This applies to child development too - children’s brains are as varied and unique and different as all human brains! The average child brain at a given age, might actually end up representing no child’s actual brain!

So if we’re talking about how adult brains are all so different and there is no ‘typical’ brain, we should also be saying this of children.

Claiming that brain development is a reason we should make decisions for our children is actually a way we control our children. What we are saying, really, is that our brains are superior, because they are ‘more developed.’

The reality though, is that my brain is different to my 10-year-old’s brain - and THAT’S IT. It’s different! It’s different to his brain in similar ways to the way my brain is different to my father’s brain. The adult-child binary is really unhelpful because it places an arbitrary division where one doesn’t actually exist.

My father is older than I am, and yet we don’t talk about older people’s brains as ‘more developed,’ simply because they’ve been on the imaginary progress trajectory for longer. We also don’t talk about my 42-year old brain being more developed or somehow more capable than a 90-year old’s brain. In fact, my brain might actually be more similar to my 9-year old’s brain than it is to the brain of my same-age friend.

The problem is that we need to recognise we have constructed this narrative of development only where children are concerned. But really, what we are talking about is change. All brains change, and are shaped by a myriad of factors including but not limited to time spent on earth.

It is ethically problematic to use people’s brain make-up to justify overriding their personhood.

We will never arrive

A difference is not a deficit – many marginalized communities know this well.

There is no hierarchy of human beings, and no hierarchy of brains and bodies. But - for some reason, children aren’t included when we talk like this. Because we’ve convinced ourselves that their different brains and bodies are in fact not only radically different, but INFERIOR brains and bodies. Brains and bodies that haven’t quite reached an arbitrary idea of maturity.

Difference will mean that perhaps a 5-year old will need more co-regulation around their emotions than I do (which is not to say they will need more than ALL 42-year olds - I’ve seen plenty of middle-aged people have meltdowns!). Difference might also mean that my 12 year old will spot injustice and fight for it more than her grandmother might. Difference is just that - difference.

Cannella writes about how ideas about human development and progress create a narrative where humans are always deficient, never complete, never arrived. We will never become; are always becoming. Our children are the most incomplete of all humans. And she says this: “Perhaps this belief in the child as becoming actually keeps us from knowing him/her as a human being living with us in the present.”

Our children are humans living alongside us right now, and worthy of making their own decisions, with us by their sides.

This does NOT mean we should ignore all developmental psychology. We can pay attention to neuroscience and child development ideas AND also step away from them when they start to feel like the only narrative. We can do both – we do not have to choose one over the other.

When these constructs start to feel like they are sanctioning the domination of one group by another, we can step back and recognise this. Because they are not the only truth about brains and growth and children - they are not reason enough for us to claim we know best, and ignore children’s voices.

They are not a justification for social control under the guise of protecting children, or claiming children can’t consent.

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Children are people

Children are people is perhaps the single biggest reframe to commit to the ‘why’ of consent.

We all deserve a sense of autonomy and agency over our bodies, minds, our big and small decisions, and our spirits. So do children.

Adults have always attempted to shape conceptions of children, which in turn has influenced the way children are treated. Figuring out where our own conception of childhood comes from, and what ideas and experiences have influenced it, might help us untangle ourselves from our unconscious adultism (the structural discrimination of children; I’ll talk more about this in my chapter on power).

Philosopher John Locke saw the child as a blank slate – ready to learn directly from adults and reproduce our culture. This view sees the child as malleable, and fundamentally incapable and at the mercy of adults. Does this sound old-fashioned and like no one would buy into it nowadays? I agree, but sadly this construction of childhood is the one many adults, parents, educators and policymakers believe in and live by. It’s the easier way.

Seeing children as “ready to learn” everything we adults decide they should learn not only legitimizes the ways in which we treat them and teach them, but makes relating to them a much more simple paradigm of authority figures (adults) and willing, if not always inferior, humans (children). Our modern idea of ‘preparing children for the workforce’ is also easier to justify through this conception: it is assumed that childhood is a preparation for adulthood, nothing more and nothing less. As such, children will learn what they need to be a successful worker and law-abiding member of society, without questioning whether this is really what their role should be.

A perspective that is arguably just as adultist is the one of the child as nature. This is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view of the child, where the child is seen as inherently innocent and in need of saving, sheltering and protecting. Childhood itself is seen as a time of innocence that needs protecting from the harsh realities of the world.

Both of these perspectives can be harmful, if we become married to them and ignore actual children’s voices. Children are not ours to mould and shape into the people we want them to be, or the people we wish we had become. Equally, children are not inherently good and in need of protection from the evils of reality. Children are humans – they are not born with a determined morality, although they are born with a potential to do the right thing, a potential for love and compassion and courage. This isn’t necessarily nurtured by shielding them.

A more common view nowadays is the one of the child as scientist. This is Jean Piaget’s view. The child is an active participant in their own development, and they tend to develop in a linear fashion, gaining skills at approximately the same time, and then moving on to more challenging skills, sort of like making their way up a staircase, step by step. This view is consistent with a Western view of child development as an ascending scale of sorts, like the one I wrote about earlier.

I challenge all of these views, and espouse a different one that is much more in line with philosophies like Reggio Emilia, and writers and researchers who centre children’s rights and personhood: children are co-constructors of knowledge, identity and culture. There is no universal child, and childhood is characterised by multiplicity, uncertainty and relational exchange.

Where does consent fit?

Consent-based-ness sees children as fully formed humans for the phase of life they are in. It subverts the idea of child development as “progress”, and steps fully outside of the mainstream parenting paradigm, calling out the power dynamics within the adult-child relationship, and centering partnership and mutuality.

Our conception of children as full people is crucial, because when we believe and embody it we no longer ask ourselves why they might have a right to consent, or if they should be able to consent. We know they do and can, because they are people.

Priscilla Alderson writes this, and it rings true to me: “Autonomy rights enshrine equal respect for the worth and dignity of every person, for her unique and essential knowledge about her own best interests, and for defence of her inviolable physical and mental integrity against assault.”

Thinking about consent and consent-based relationships and decision-making, is how we preserve our own and our children’s “physical and mental integrity,” AND centre relationships that move away from a confrontational, defense-based model.

Now that we are firm on what consent-based-ness is, why it matters, and that children are capable of it - I’m going to go deeper into what building environments where consent can be freely expressed, has looked like for me.

Thanks for reading - this was a long chapter so well done for getting to the end of it!

As always, i’d love to hear your shares and comments.

Fran x

References:

Alderson, P. (2008). Trends in research about children, childhood and youth. The Politics of Childhoods Real and Imagined. Routledge: London

Alderson, P. (2010). Younger Children’s individual participation in ‘all matters affecting thechild.’ A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation. Perspectives from Theory and Practice. Percy-Smith, B. & Thomas, N. Eds. Routledge: Abingdon.

Black, C. (2015) Alternatives to Schooling. View it here.

Burman, E. (2007). Deconstructing developmental psychology.

Department of Health (2003). Consent guides for healthcare professionals.

Department of Health and Social Care (2009) Reference guide to consent for examination or treatment (second edition). London: Department of Health and Social Care.

Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority and Department of Health and Social Security [1984] Q.B. 581. As cited in Children’s Legal Centre (1985) Landmark decision for children’s rights. Childright, 22: 11-18.

Henrich, J., Heine, S.J. & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioural and Brain Sciences.

Hudson, K. (2012). Practitioners’ Views on Involving Young Children in Decision Making : Challenges for the Children’s Rights Agenda. Australasian journal of early childhood, 37:2, pp. 4–9.

Invernizzi, A. (2008). Everyday lives of working children and notions of citizenship. Children and Citizenship. Invernizzi A. & Williams, J. Eds. London: Sage.

Prat, C. (2022). The Neuroscience of you.

Quennerstedt, A. (2016). Young children’s enactment of human rights in early childhood education. International Journal of Early Years Education, 24:1, pp. 5-18.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2021) "Colonizing knowledges." Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Wall, J. (2022) Give Children the Vote. Bloomsbury: London