Chapter Nine: Autonomy

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Chapter Nine

Autonomy

I wrote this chapter over a year ago, and after a friend looked over it for me, I made a note at the top that reads: Include some recent struggles around agency and autonomy.

So here I am, a year later, doing that and where do I begin? I have two children with a very strong drive for autonomy, and if I’m honest, it makes life interesting but not easy!

There is a common myth that struggles around freedom and autonomy increase as our children get older, and while I can’t speak to the teen years yet, I’m not sure this has been true for us for the simple fact that as my children change and develop, we can talk more about the ways freedom is inherently bounded, and they begin to understand that “doing whatever you want” is actually not it, or not the whole picture at least.

This past month, Phoebe was part of our community theatre’s summer musical - it was months of intense rehearsals, and a huge cast of people from age 4 to 70+. She has experienced the sort of commitment and responsibility that comes with autonomy and freedom - the way that owning your time often also means taking ownership when things get misplaced, or forgotten, or we fail to live up to our promises.

This has been so interesting to me, because I’ve realised that in some ways she has needed me less, but in some she has needed my support even more. She’s spent a lot of time away from home, and become increasingly independent; and, she has needed to depend on me more than usual for lifts, moral support when things got stressful, practical support in staying organised and ontop of things.

Autonomy, in other words, is not simply doing it all yourself, all of a sudden.

What is autonomy?

Autonomy is the vehicle for exerting ownership of our bodies, minds, and spirits, and in this context consent can be seen as the culture, the relational framework and the interactions that allow autonomy to express itself. Autonomy is our right to sovereignty, and to freedom from outside control and influence, and I use this definition of it here.

Living consensually means that we seek to preserve sovereignty over ourselves through autonomous actions, and we also see others as equally worthy sovereign beings. We express our needs and seek to get them met, and we recognise the needs of others and figure out how to create spaces to meet them.

We’ve laid a strong foundation already, by talking about the dance between power dynamics and self-worth; now we get to dive into the importance of autonomy in our sea, aka our culture of consent.

All of the elements of consent culture – self-consent, boundaries, power dynamics - bleed into one another – and that is how it is. In actual life, there are no firm lines between autonomy and boundaries, or between trust and self-worth. In the same way that I recognise subjects in schooling are arbitrary classifications, I also recognise that the words I have used here are to some extent, also constructions, also somewhat arbitrary.

You may use completely different words because this all has to make sense for you, in the end. Or you may decide that you don’t need the words, because you have an intuitive, embodied sense of what to do. Of what a culture or setting or home needs, for consent to flourish.

Both of those things, and more, are okay.

I like words, and they help me! But that is just me and I am in no way representative of humanity at large.

Why does autonomy matter in consent culture?

Autonomy is not bound by consent. It exists in and of itself and it can often express itself freely. But I find that understanding autonomy within a framework of consent is helpful because it places our individual autonomy in safe and boundaried relationship with others and that is where consent comes in.

Consent is relational, it happens between two or more people, or two or more beings, by definition. Consent doesn’t happen in isolation, it isn’t a concept that exists independently, within one person, except for perhaps in the case of self-consent.

Autonomy, on the other hand, does. In theory, we can be autonomous by ourselves. But in practice, most of us live in community – whether it’s a family, school, workplace or society and so we need to understand consent. It’s not enough to be champions of autonomy, because autonomy without consent is one-sided. It is unbounded, it is individualistic, it is reckless.

Autonomy is actually not one thing

Autonomy is not a universal concept, nor is it a fact or a truth – in fact, it’s a construct!

We love to talk about autonomy (and we often conflate it with freedom, a word I am being very careful not to use here) as if it’s an obvious human right – but that too, is something we’ve constructed. In Euro-Western cultures, autonomy has become very much tied up with individual freedom and independence. These are really deeply entrenched Anglo-American values, that have also seeped into the rest of the WEIRD world (Remember Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Developed? I mentioned this acronym in Chapter 4).

In other words, our society is not the norm. It is not representative of humanity as a whole. Not only that, but it is an outlier, in evolutionary terms, and in real terms. We are the global minority, yet we often act like we own the place. I grew up in Italy and I’m not sure I had a conception of autonomy or freedom that wasn’t also tied up with family, culture and society. It was only when I left my native city of Rome for the UK, that I began to realise how crucial these ideas (and really they are just ideas, not a reality!) of freedom and independence were in other societies, and how much they are promoted as ‘superior’ to cultures outside of the Anglo-American world.

Take independence: in Anglo-American countries, young people are expected to be independent as soon as they possibly can. I remember my British friends explaining how their parents had essentially kicked them out of their home at 18, and one of them explaining how they paid rent to their parents when they moved back home for a while. I don’t say this as a criticism – it is merely a cultural difference. But as an Italian, it was nothing short of shocking, because independence, at least for my generation, was not necessarily the goal.

And there is a reason for that. We live in a world, now more than ever, where we are all, intensely interdependent. And yet we talk about independence as if it’s not only the only right path for all humans, but also a reality.

We talk about unbounded freedom (and I am saying unbounded, because freedom itself is bounded but we tend to forget it) as if it’s the ultimate aim, when in fact some of us have been a little too free, which means others have not been free at all, for much of history.

None of us are an island. We never were, and we certainly are not now. I depend on my electricity and wifi working in order to write these words. I depend on my husband to share the care work in order for me to write, and we all depend on him as the main breadwinner. I depend on our local farmers to grow food so that I can feed my family. I depend on my local bookshop for my cherished audio books, and I also depend on Amazon (yes, Amazon) for some of the things I can’t get hold of when we’re living abroad. I could go on and on – but you get the idea. We are all more or less tightly or loosely woven together.

Perhaps there is no absolute autonomy

Autonomy is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the right or act of self-government.” Autonomy is the power or authority that allows a person to act or make decisions freely, without external influence or control. Like anything else, the lines between influence and self-governance will always be blurred. We may believe we are making a choice devoid of any outside influence, but in reality everything we believe, think, say, do and are is often filtered through societal assumptions.

We cannot get away from our own culture and the environment we were raised and live in – not entirely, anyway. Not only that, but not all influence is bad. It’s that interdependence piece again! We are all connected, we are all – to greater and lesser degrees – influenced. We are all made up of pieces of our past and present.

That said, for our family centering autonomy means creating an environment where my child feels they are in charge of their own lives - of their body, their thoughts and emotions, their spirit, their desires and their needs. When they do something, or make a choice, or express who they are, they feel that it comes from them, and not because they feel they have to, or because it will please someone, or from fear of being thought less of, or because that’s what everyone is doing or “how things are done.”

Autonomy is closely related to self-consent, and both are dependent on our young people feeling worthy just for being who they are. Feeling like they can make free choices that come from a place of knowing they deserve to be here, to be loved and cared for, regardless of what they do. Autonomy is their outward expression of self-consent, the way they show up as their authentic selves. Centering autonomy means we see them for who they are, AND we support their needs and desires to be who they want to be, to do what they love.

Mental, spiritual and emotional autonomy

In Chapter 2, I wrote about bodily autonomy, as well as mental, spiritual and emotional autonomy and why they all matter.

The chat around bodily autonomy often overrides the importance of mental and spiritual autonomy; in other words, the right our children have to think, believe, feel, dream, and learn whatever they wish, and the right they have to make all sorts of decisions knowing that there will be no repercussions whatsoever.

I don’t love the separation between bodily and mental autonomy, and I want to say that this, too, is probably a WEIRD construct: after all, even we WEIRD people talk about gut feelings in making decisions, in spite of having elevated the brain over the body in multiple ways that we are now beginning to recognise were misguided and frankly, just wrong. As with all binaries, mental and bodily autonomy bleed into one another and are in fact, perhaps just one, or many.

But the division is sometimes necessary because we seem to be getting closer to an acceptance of children’s right to bodily autonomy (which I’ll break down in much more details later on), but we are still umming and ahing when it comes to our children’s right to make other decisions that don’t land in the “bodily” realm: things like what, how and when to learn, which hobbies to pursue, where to live, who to be friends with, what to do in their spare time.

I write more about the specifics of autonomy in a later chapter, so sit tight!

Youth and unschooling advocate John Holt writes:

“Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own mind and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us.. attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted to even think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, of our experience, has no value.”

He is right, of course. We now know and understand that children have the ability to consent and that autonomy is not only a human right, but also crucial if we are to call what we create consent-based.

The definition of a consent-based choice takes autonomy as a baseline. It assumes we inhabit our own sense of autonomy and agency, and through it are able to exercise it in the form of decision-making and relationship.

We assume that sitting in our own autonomy also means we make decisions without fear of negative consequences of any kind, whether this is around our own bodies, around our beliefs, actions, identity, or any other aspect of being human.

But what if they don’t know what they don’t know?

I should mention that a big part of autonomy is access to the information. We often hear talk of ‘informed consent.’ Informed consent is really just consent, because it’s not really consent if we don’t have all the information, right?

So autonomy implies the ability to access the information our child believe is necessary to make consent-based decisions (note that this may be different to the information we retain is important). Often, we are the people between our children and that information. We will all make decisions around access based on our family or setting, but reflecting on whether our child’s autonomy is limited and controlled by us, and therefore they perhaps aren’t able to make certain decisions with all the information available to them, matters. To what extent can consent flourish in a culture that restricts access to information, people, resources?

Choice v. Autonomy

Supporting our children to be autonomous is, somehow, highly controversial. Adults have funny ideas of what autonomy actually looks like for children. I remember reading a parenting book when my own children were little that suggested we give children choices. For example, at lunchtime, the parent could ask whether they wanted peas or carrots with their pasta. Or when getting dressed in the morning, we could ask our child whether they’d like to wear their blue tshirt or their green one.

It makes sense to give choice. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. I did and I often still do. But this is not autonomy, and we need to own that.

Choice and autonomy are the difference between going to a restaurant and picking something off the menu, and creating your own menu. In the first scenario, the menu has been written by someone else. They’ve picked the dishes they will serve, and your job is to choose among the relatively limited options that you are given. This will be the reality of our lives a lot of the time, and that’s okay.

In the second scenario, you get to decide from scratch. This doesn’t mean you’ll be making dishes you’ve pulled out of thin air – you might use food blogs for inspiration, based your dishes on what’s in season and what makes sense in your culture and location, perhaps make small changes to something your grandma used to make, or your friend once told you about. And sure, you’ll still have some limitations – the food you can afford, availability, seasonality, the extent of your cooking skills – but overall you have much more control over what to make. You can pick the cuisine, the ingredients, how much seasoning, and pretty much every aspect from the chopping of ingredients to the final presentation. It can be daunting, and you may need scaffolding in the form of advice, help and support from someone you trust. But that is autonomy for you – you are in control, but still interdependent.

In a school or educational setting, choice is fundamentally adult-led, and autonomy is fundamentally child-led. And there seems to be a lot of confusion about this but the meal analogy works here too. In most schools, you may have more or less freedom to make choices. Often, there will be no choice. You have to take Maths classes, regardless. Sometimes there will be choices – you can choose one kind of project, or another kind; you can choose which topic to study first, and which to study later. In some schools, children get to make choices about curriculum. But still, all of these are choices, they are not autonomy. Choice in schooling happens within a framework that has already been decided upon by the adults in charge, or the education authority, or both. In most mainstream, and even many progressive schools, children don’t have true autonomy to trash the curriculum and create their own learning, on their own terms.

“A sense of control”

Bill Johnson and Ned Stixrud, authors of The Self-Driven Child, talk about the importance of “a sense of control,” and how loss of control has been linked to high stress in school-going children. This makes sense. Children don’t get much of a say about what to do with their lives on a daily basis, as well as often on a macro level. While a sense of control is an excellent starting point, it does not equal autonomy. It may feel like you get to make more choices, or you get to express your opinion on things. It may look like your parents laying out what needs to be done (chores, homework, afterschool activities), and then ‘allowing’ you to create your own time table. This is better than feeling out of control, for sure.

But it’s not autonomy. You are still picking from someone else’s list, rather than collaborating with others as equals to create a list that works. Perhaps your voice is being considered but are you able to make actual decisions? Are you ultimately in charge of your life, or are others still very much presenting you with options you are asked to pick from? Are you deciding what, where, how, and when to say, do or be things?

My freedom ends where yours begins

Boundaries, in a way, act as a balance to autonomy. Because we live in relationship, and because consent happens in relationship, my autonomy will end where yours begins. In other words, when our needs or desires clash, and we set a boundary to protect them, that is the place where one person’s autonomy ends and another person’s begins.

Protecting your child’s wholeness, does not mean chipping away at their siblings’ or at your own or at other people’s wholeness. In the same way that making space for our children to hold power doesn’t mean stripping ourselves of our own power, promoting autonomy does not mean trampling over other people’s boundaries.

Thanks for reading!! Next up.. Boundaries :) One of my very favourite topics!

ALSO: I’m re-activating paid subscriptions in September! Thank you all for your patience! I will be doing one long essay a month on a specific topic, and then one Day in the Life post with thoughts on our unschooling/partnership parenting journey and resources. Both posts will be partially free, and partly paywalled to make it all sustainable for me.

Thanks again for being here!

Fran x