Dear Families,
Navigating Power in our Relationships with Children
“To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”
~June Jordan, Old Stories: New Lives
Each year our teachers explore a question that is central to the work we do with young children, in order to push their thinking forward and ensure that their relationships with children remain vital and active, not formulaic or rote. This year, the teachers are discussing the role of power in our interactions with children. Their question is: When are children seeking power and control, and when are adults seeking power and control?
This question, on many levels, goes to the heart of the developmental experience as well as the progressive model of education. At every stage of development, we are engaged in a process of trying to understand how much control we have over the world around us and the people in our lives, where the limits of our powers are, and how much power we wish to have. Our emotional stability, throughout life, is rooted in finding a balance between feeling we have some control and comfortably letting go of that which we cannot control.
As children develop new skills and increasingly sophisticated thought processes, they are often excited to discover that this growth leads them to have greater control, because their skills and ideas expand their choices and their range of freedom. At the same time, it can feel overwhelming and scary for children to gain additional power, as they wonder how far the reach of their power is and whether they will still be cared for by others. Children push boundaries in these moments of developmental tension, both to determine how much they can take charge of by themselves and to ensure that the scaffolding is still stable, and we are still present for them. Attachment theorist John Bowlby said, “Life is best organized as a series of daring adventures from a secure base.” We need to be permitted to test our wings and explore the boundaries of our capacity, but we also need to know that we will be welcomed back to a safe place, where the world feels a little smaller and our power a little more limited, so that we may catch our breath.
Much of the relationship between adults and children, whether teachers or parents, is governed by this constant dance, as we give children the trust and the opportunity to expand their reach and feel the empowering sensation of true agency, while also reminding them that they don’t need to worry about the whole of the world just yet. We want them to feel our sincere belief in their capacity to be fully active, engaged, and competent, while reminding them that their job at any given time is only to be two, or three, or four-years-old.
This dance is not always graceful! In fact, much of the time it is quite fraught. Children often seek out the limits of their own power and affirm the safety of their boundaries by pushing as hard as possible against us.
We as the adults are often fearful, particularly when children are testing new skills, that their wings may still be too delicate and they may not be able to navigate safely without us. It can also be, understandably, exasperating and exhausting to be constantly tested and pushed. There is no way to make the right judgement in each moment, as we attempt to gauge what our constantly changing children can manage on their own, and to keep our cool when we know that their most frustrating behaviors might be a way of asking for more freedom or a way of asking for reassurance and support.
The importance and the very real challenge of helping our children to feel both empowered and secure necessitates that we, as teachers and as parents, remain constantly mindful of and engaged in understanding this dance, as well as supportive of each other when we worry that we’ve stumbled.
We hope you will join us on Thursday, February 13th from 5:45-7:00 p.m. to learn about the teacher’s exploration of the question of power in our relationships with children at school, and to share your own experiences of navigating power with your child at home.
Please RSVP here. We look forward to seeing you there and learning together!
Shabbat shalom,
Alicia