e²e²Listening to children matters because they are the only people living their own lives. Adults can add perspective, but we can't declare a child's experience wrong, and children who are routinely overruled learn to distrust themselves.
Listening to children matters because they are the only people living their own lives. Adults can add perspective, but we can't declare a child's experience wrong, and a child who is overruled for years learns to distrust what they feel.
Respecting children does not mean handing them an adult's authority. It means treating what they tell us as real information. This is an opinion piece from one parent, not clinical advice.
Founding families
Founding Families: the first 10. €9 a month, or €90 a year, instead of €15. Your rate stays for as long as you stay. Use what helps now. Ignore what doesn't. No obligation to give feedback or take part in research. If you tell me what's working or missing, I'll listen. Your records are yours. You can export them any time.
Cancel any time.
Join as a founding familyYour email is used only for E Squared updates.
For home-educating families raising a 2e child: gifted and neurodivergent at once, often PDA, autistic, ADHD or AuDHD.
Adultism is prejudice or discrimination against young people because of their age (Dictionary.com). Most of us have never named it, because we grew up inside it.
The assumption runs quietly through ordinary days. The adult knows better because the adult is older. A child who objects is corrected, interrupted or overruled, usually before they've finished the sentence.
Experience does make adults useful. It doesn't make us right about someone else's inner life.
Protection is a different thing. An adult stopping a four-year-old running onto a road is not adultism. Assuming the four-year-old's opinion on how tired they are is worth less than ours is.
The same behaviour gets read differently depending on who does it.
None of this means every adult is treated well, or that every child's refusal can be accommodated. Sometimes the answer has to be no. The problem is that we reach for a different explanation for the same behaviour depending on the age of the person.
They know when they are uncomfortable, overwhelmed, bored, frightened or interested. They are the only people with access to that information.
What they often lack is the vocabulary. A child who says "I don't like it there" may be describing a fluorescent light, a person, a smell or a feeling they have no word for yet. The fact that they can't explain it doesn't make it untrue.
Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says children have the right to give their views freely on matters that affect them, and that adults should take those views seriously (UNICEF's children's version, full text from the UN Human Rights Office). The UN committee that monitors the Convention advises governments to presume a child can form views, rather than making the child prove it first (Department of Justice Canada).
Curiosity is the practical version of that. "Tell me more about that" beats a verdict.
Most of us were raised to respect adults because they were adults. Respect was expected to flow one way, and obedience was how it was measured.
I ask myself four questions. Do I listen to the end before I correct? Do I explain why, or just say it? Do I apologise when I've got it wrong? Can a child disagree with me and still be safe?
Authority and respect aren't opposites. A parent can make the final call and still have been fair, honest and open to being wrong. Respect that depends on obedience is only obedience.
A child says school is boring, overwhelming, frightening or impossible. Adults often hear a motivation or resilience problem, and the effort goes into changing the child's behaviour rather than looking at the environment.
The causes vary and I wouldn't assume they're the same for every child. Sensory overload, social exhaustion, work that is far too easy or far too hard, anxiety and a loss of any say in the day can each look like "won't".
Many autistic children, children with a PDA (pathological demand avoidance) profile and twice-exceptional (2e) children describe school in these terms. PDA isn't a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5 or ICD-11, so I describe it as a profile many families recognise. I've written about what boredom at school can mean, why twice exceptional kids hate school and PDA and school refusal.
Hearing an objection and investigating it are different. Investigating asks when it happens, what's in the room and what changes it. Listening also doesn't mean abandoning education or adult responsibility. It means finding a way to meet a child's educational needs that takes their experience seriously.
We say we want confident, independent children who know their own minds. Then we spend years telling them their preferences, tiredness and objections don't count.
A child can't learn to trust their own signals in a house where the signals are always wrong. What to wear, whether they're hungry and whether they've had enough of a crowded room belong to them. A real choice helps: a genuine option, with no hidden right answer.
Children still need guidance, limits and protection. A child can be strikingly insightful about their own interests and still need a lot of support with organisation, emotions or safety. That pattern is common in gifted and 2e children, though it isn't universal and I wouldn't generalise from it.
Equal worth is not identical responsibility. Both things are true at once.
I try asking "What's making this difficult?" before I insist.
Not every refusal is defiance. Not every unusual interest needs redirecting. Not every complaint of boredom needs fixing, and not every disagreement is disrespect.
I'm not suggesting the answer is always yes. The limit stays when it's about safety. What changes is that the child has been heard before the limit is set, which usually makes cooperation more likely, not less.
I get this wrong regularly. When I notice, I say so, and that is part of the practice.
Society describes childhood as preparation. We measure children against the adults they'll be, the exams they'll sit and the work they'll do.
But a child's happiness, friendships, interests and safety matter now, not after they've been converted into something productive. Their worth isn't conditional on grades, obedience or maturity.
Children are not adults yet. But they are already people.
E Squared is built on the idea that children have their own interests, capabilities and ways of learning. For families learning outside conventional school, it helps a parent notice and write down the learning that is already happening in ordinary days, without asking a child to perform it on demand.
If that is useful, see how it works. See Learning Differently.