To Trust in Our Children

I’ve been reading Goodnight Mister Tom with one of my children lately, a book I read myself at school many moons ago. If you don’t know it, this 1981 novel by Michelle Magorian was a feature of my English 80s childhood, and was made into both a film and a play. It is set in a small rural village and tells the story of an young evacuee, William, and the relationship between him and the widower Tom who takes him in. If you haven’t read it, it’s a beautiful book.

But one of the things that really struck me on a re-read, now that I’m a parent myself, is that threaded throughout the story is this inherent trust in children to know what is best for them. To know what they need, and for the adults around them to accept the way they choose to cope, without judgement. There are expectations on children, of course, and they certainly get told off but there is also a faith in children that I don’t recognise in the way we tend to talk about children now.

Without giving anything away, there are a few moments where you expect adults might step in, might give some guidance or intervene. But they step back and allow the children to work it out, in their own way and in their own time. That’s so different to how we do things now. Both in our homes, where there is an expectation that we will oversee and supervise our children very closely - their play, their nutrition, their free time, their education. And in wider community, where a child doing anything out of the ordinary will immediately lead to the question of ‘where are their parents?’

When I first wrote my proposal for Parenting For Humans (my book about parenting as your whole, flawed, messy human self rather than the cookie cutter perfect parent many parenting books are aimed at!), the working title was ‘Hold them, Don’t Mould them’. This was inspired by a quote I opened the book with (and kept close by while I was writing it) from paediatrician and psychotherapist Donald Winnicott:

‘Some people seem to think of a child as clay in the hands of a potter. They start moulding the infant, and feeling responsible for the result. This is quite wrong.’

I maybe wouldn’t be quite as unequivocal as old Donald, because ‘wrong’ is a pretty strong word, but there is something about modern parenting and the environment in which it happens that has meant we feel responsible, in full, for all the outcomes of our children. No matter how we parent, this can result in a sort of bubbling anxiety that underpins so much of parenting life, that eternal question ‘Am I doing this right?’ But inadvertently, what this means for our children is that we can give them the message that they are doing it wrong. That without us overseeing, things will stop working.

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What would it mean to instead give them the message that we trust them to listen to their instincts and we’ll be there just to prevent disaster when needed?

Well, one thing it would mean is for us, as adults, to give up our ideas of what we desire for our children. And listen instead to what they want.