EXPANDING CONSENT/Introduction

I'm publishing a book on here. It's free to read. This is the Introduction.

I’m sharing a book I wrote, one chapter every couple weeks.

It is titled Expanding Consent: Breaking cycles of domination in our homes and beyond.

It will be free to read, and if you are able to support me please consider sharing my work, or upgrading to a paid subscription.

I’m SO excited to be putting this out here on Substack, and I thought I would begin with a few notes about the book, and the reason why I’m sharing it on here.

A bit about why I’m doing it this way

I wrote this book over the summer and autumn of 2023, and it’s been sitting in my laptop for a few months, waiting to be delivered into the world.

I’ve thought of trying to find a publisher, and then after chatting with a couple of friends, I realised that actually I just wanted it to be out there.

What you should know about me is that I’ve always wanted to write a book, but that once I had punched it all out, I kind of lost momentum - I’d written a book! Why go through all the agony of getting formal recognition for it? I HAD ALREADY DONE IT!

If unschooling has taught me anything it’s that I don’t need institutional validation for my experience, thoughts and knowledge (those of you who know that I’m also a grad student, know that it also feels super contradictory to say this! But hey - we contain multitudes.)

When it came to a book that was born mostly from my lived experience and independent research, I wanted to retain ownership over my work and words and the ways they are delivered into the world.

I wanted to divest from perfectionism and embrace a done-over-perfect mentality.

We all have a right to put words out there without jumping through institutionlised hoops.

I write because I feel called to do so, because I love it, and because it is one of the ways I hope to contribute to social shifts and changes.

I also feel an enormous reponsibility to not gatekeep most of my writing, while also being aware that if my needs are not met I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this.

A few notes on the book

I asked my children whether they wanted me to use their real names, or to pick pseudonyms for themselves, and they chose the latter: in the book I refer to them as Phoebe and Leo.

For privacy, I have sometimes altered some of the specifics when telling stories about my children. I have tried to preserve the same meaning, while also honouring their right to their own stories by not sharing exact details, or slightly modifying them.

I wrote this book in one big burst over the summer of 2023, and have made minor edits since thanks to the feedback of several wonderful people who offered to read through.

As such, there is a lot missing, and a lot that I have had to skim over or not mention at all. And quite a bit that I later learned or changed my mind on, or could have added more nuance to.

In some ways, it’s a work in progress! I’m really looking forward to this format because it’ll feel a bit like readers are re-shaping and influencing the book as I go.

I am sharing the Introduction today, to get us all started.. I hope you enjoy it.

EXPANDING CONSENT

Breaking cycles of domination in our homes and beyond

(You can find this piece and all further chapters under BOOK: Expanding Consent on my newsletter home page. I will also share a full Bibliography on this page, rather than attach it to each post.)

Introduction

Thank you for choosing to read this book. I’m so glad you’re here.

Centering Consent

This book really began when I looked back at the 8 years spent in uncomfortable, often conflicted, relationship with my first child. It began when I decided to make it right the only way I could figure out how, and in the process discovered my own and my children’s beautiful, divergent, unique selves.

It began when my youngest child faced burnout. And when I realised I might die without having been and done all the things I assumed would just happen, but hadn’t.

It began with my commitment to reconnect with my children, to centre consent and non-coercion in our lives, to see them as whole beings, and to somehow piece myself back together in the process.

It began when I discovered language to reclaim the wholeness I had always possessed, and had lost track of.

It began when I let myself be radicalized in the process: when I recognised that the hyper-individualism and separateness I had been sold was an illusion, and that I had a responsibility to unflinchingly turn towards the systems that keep us isolated and burnt out.

And along the way, it occurred to me how children are thrust into this world and immediately experience a loss of consent. They are born whole, and yet from day one they get to decide nothing. They are fully dependent on the adults around them, forced to trust in them even when they are untrustworthy, to obey them even when they are wrong, and to believe their decisions are in their best interests even when they are not. Children internalise the version of love they are provided with, and adults don’t always know how to love.

Birth can be a beautiful, transformative experience, and also traumatic and dark – sometimes all of these, and more, at once. For a child, it is often the start of living within systems that dominate and exercise coercive power over them, that lay claim to the moulding of their bodies and spirits, that deny their experience of the world, that affect their very being in small and huge ways.

In some ways, birth is the plunging of children into a place that is characterised by the absence of one of their most crucial rights: the right to say yes, no, maybe; to have agency and autonomy; to make informed, free decisions; to be who they are, to pursue what they love, to exist in ways they feel called to exist; to understand we are all connected.

This book is also about that: reclaiming a child’s inherent humanity by centering consent both in relationship and inside of the systems we inhabit.

How I got to consent

I first got interested in consent while training as a Montessori guide. We are unschoolers now, which is a type of homeschooling where you centre autonomy, consent, connection and collective liberation.

But in 2015, when I started my Montessori guide training, my children were in school and pre-school respectively. The place where I first started forming ideas about consent was the nursery school I eventually did my student placement in.

I had always assumed that Montessori, and alternative pedagogy in general, were rooted in consent. That they had a conception of consent baked into the very fibre of them, to the extent that practicing them would be a way for that consent-based-ness to emerge.

I quickly realised that, in practice, this wasn’t true. Consent-based practice, on an everyday level, wasn’t explicitly embedded in the Montessori method itself, and there was no inherent commitment to consent-based practice in the classroom. I am sure there are Montessori classrooms and classrooms of all kinds that do centre consent. I also know that most schools and classrooms do not. And the one I found myself in was wonderful in so many ways, but there were no guidelines, policies or training around how to respect children’s autonomy.

Turns out that in our educational institutions and settings, and in life in general, we need to spell it out clearly in order for it to actually happen. Towards the end of my training, I wrote my final essay on consent in the early childhood classroom; that was the beginning of several years of learning, researching and practicing the ways we centre consent.

What to expect

Consent is for everybody. I came at it from my own experiences, and my family’s journey with the school system, unschooling, and living in partnership is what colours my view of consent.

You cannot separate all of this from my own body-mind and my own cultural background, and the ways I grew up witnessing trust and consent being routinely overridden – the two things are entwined like a DNA spiral, inextricably linked.

In this book I will talk about what consent is, why it matters and why we should all care. I will mention how neurodiversity and human diversity impacts our experience of it, and I will also talk about how it matters for everybody, regardless of who you are and what brain or body you’re in.

I will go on to talk about cultures of consent and why consent-based practice is only as good as the culture it lives in. I’ll write about what creating consent culture means, and what it might look like.

I’ll then write about different ways consent looks like in practice: I’ll talk about different ways it is expressed, and co-created, and the way consent is structural and systemic.

I’ll gather up all the pieces of this and place them within a wider picture of societal change.

All children

This book is a manifesto for consent, a love song to my children, and an account of how I am putting back the pieces of myself, one by one.

There is some theory and research, but fundamentally it is intensely personal: an account of how I arrived here, and how I’m figuring out how to do all this.

It is a journey from a hospital bed, holding my naked newborn to my chest, through the years of what I experienced as a struggle to get through the days, while also shaking my head at my unearned privilege and my perceived inability to “make the most of it”, through to the years of beginning to question so many of the narratives we uphold, to where I am now: sitting on my porch in the early Maine morning, writing this down like it has spilled out of me all in one piece. Waking up to my children, now 10 and 12, self-directed, whole people who know who they are.

It is predominantly an ode to my own self-worth, my family’s joy, my children’s wholeness, and to my belief in our ability to partner with young people everywhere.

It is my way to tell you: all of this is possible.

Not in an “if I did it, you can too!” way. It’s not easy, it’s not linear, and it won’t look one way only.

It is possible not because it works for me (it’s actually really really hard for me!).

It’s possible because it is what our children, and all people, deserve.

It is not our individual responsibility, either. It’s much bigger than us – it’s about the systems we inhabit, the institutions and societies we exist in and our own unique history, culture, and identity.

It is possible – but also, we need to do it together. We need one another. We need to re-learn how to live in community, and the place I begin is home.

I begin with the increasingly evident fact that, to paraphrase James Baldwin, all children are our children. And all children deserve to be loved, seen, and honoured for who they are.

The way I see it, everything expands outwards from how I treat the children in my life; how we, as a society, treat the children in our care.

It’s us, hi!

Thank you for reading. Up next.. Chapter 1!

You can catch up on all chapters on my Homepage, under the BOOK: Expanding Consent tab.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feel free to comment below!

Fran x