teaching children to harbor boundaries is really amazing. if anything, working as a child educator has allowed me to analyze how adults routinely enter into power struggles with children over their very clear expressions of personal limits.

The issue is that too many educators- including parents- perceive children’s “no” as a reflection of the inadequacy of their education instead of an invitation to understand how their egos regulate their own perceptions of authority. Children expressing their “no” safely

is vital to understanding how they build self-confidence. It is our jobs as educators, to help them explore their emotional autonomy with discernment and for that, we need to learn how to detach.

One child at my job has deep abandonment trauma and deals with it by going into anger tantrums when she feels like a boundary I share is triggering her sense of control and personal integrity. One thing I realized is that children with attachment trauma tend to react

in ways that can be perceived as un-controllable when in fact they are merely in a “fight or flight zone”. She spend 10 mins screaming “no” and during that time I was acknowledging how she was feeling all while giving her the space to tell me when she was ready to talk.

I had to accept that entering into a power struggle and forcing her to do what I perceived was right (even though it was) would only teach her that I had the power to override her desire to express herself with no regards to the validity of how she felt.

Mostly it was at that moment that I released the desire to control the situation because children crying does impact people emotionally: children know that so detachment is key since it helps center children’s emotional experience over adults comfort.

In fact, normative education centers adult’s comfort over children’s personal integrity because we model behavioral patterns that prioritize time efficiency + productivity.

Educators want quick fix methodologies so of course, using abusive tactics like “shouting”, “punishing”, “ignoring” allow them to preserve a sense of power even if that means overriding a child’s development capacity at a given time.

And that’s a problem: we model behavior that teaches kids to be avoidant. Children go into the world knowing that they will be punished for who they are because adults don’t take the time to give them feedback about how they co-create their emotional perceptions of one another.

Instead of valuing the fact that children know how they feel, we project what we think children should prioritize, which is how adults perceive them and how that conditions how they are treated. We teach children to have little to no say on how they need to be loved

Because we make love a transactional experience that os governed by how well a child can perform “moral soundness” and not a transformative action that opens up a whole scope of possibility for the child’s emotional, spiritual and physical evolution.

The gag is we take children’s emotional experiences personally instead of using them as feedback to respond to their needs + desires in ways that are in alignment with how we would want to be treated respectfully as human beings.

We mistake respect for respectability and that’s the problem. People really are competing with children for authority and it’s wild that so many of them can’t see the problem: children are at our mercy and completely dependent on us to survive

why would you condition their survival on how much they internalize your own expectations and are capable of performing them? why would you want your child to become anything other than who they are?

I figured that people are still dealing with their childhood issues and that’s not fair at all. I hate that children are collateral damage for people working out their unresolved emotional matter because that is the boundary abuse happens.

Kids don’t have a clear perception of what is good or bad: so adults spending their time trying to figure out if they are good or bad parents is such a waste. It’s always about how openly we can negotiate our value systems to children & it’s really about pedagogical resilience

Pedagogical resilience is about accepting that sometimes you have no idea what a child needs and that it is your responsibility to do the necessary research + analysis to learn more about how children express both their love + trauma language.

In the end, our jobs as educators, is to help children find confidence in their own voices. When a child has a confidence, the unraveling of their power is organic. When a child feels empowered: they are so much more receptive to their world and the people who they co-exist wth