A Thousand Thoughts

It’s hard to be child-led. In parenting, education, or in any other scenario, child-led learning isn’t checking out, giving up, or lack of care. It’s anything but that die-hard pejorative term of the eighties, ‘permissive parenting’.

The deepest challenge of a child-led, child-loving-and-raising life on an average day is that it confronts my own preferences, agendas and rigidity. Power lies in my hands simply due to my age, size, and position in the relationship with my child. I can insist on something with no objectively more important reasons than those of my three year old, and onlookers will praise me for my firm boundaries and leadership.

It’s dishonest in every way. It’s disrespectful, and dehumanising. This is the easy option, and frankly, it really enrages me.

The hard option is recognising when my own conscious or subconscious interests conflict with my child’s, and then choosing to be curious about that, rather than riding roughshod over what is playing out in front of me. When my child shows me (often without words) that they are not comfortable being in an environment or situation or around a particular person, and I feel resistance to accommodating that, then really what is showing up is either my disappointment at missing out on something, or my discomfort in being observed (and maybe judged) by others for doing something different. For not just complying.

In both scenarios, being child-led means making a decision that best serves the young, sensitive, developing mind and body for whom I am responsible, and being willing, even if disappointed or anxious, to set aside my adult interests in that moment. It means that I ask myself the question ‘what’s going on here?’ rather than perpetuate an unchallenged power dynamic through automatically defaulting to ‘because I said so’.

So maybe I end up playing with my child in the sand of a long jump pit, rather than being by the creek where I wanted to be, and it’s just the two of us, and I don’t get to talk to someone I really like talking to. Maybe what my child really needs to do is difficult, and inconvenient for me, and hard work, and I just don’t want to do that. And maybe I can take that, because I’m an adult, my kid’s adult, and despite my own multitude of issues and challenges, I have a whole lot of agency and power that my small child doesn’t yet have.

(I firmly believe that every child and human deserves this level of respect, it just so happens that our exploration and embodiment of autonomy and self-discovery occurs as neurodivergent people, where this kind of being is absolutely essential and there is *no other way* for us to live and be okay.)

Hilary

A Thousand Thoughts

Blog www.athousandthoughts.net

[Photo ID: viewed from a distance and from behind, a small child in a dress and gumboots running through a big puddle in a green and beautiful rainy park. The sky is cloudy and there is a background of tall, dark green trees.]

• Originally published on Facebook in conjunction with PDA Our Way. Words are my own.