Childism, home education, and the politics of treating children as people

Childism, adult power, home education, politics, and why children deserve respect before they become adults.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way society talks about children.

We say they are precious. We say they are the future. We say they matter more than anything. Then we complain when they exist too loudly in public. We tell them to sit still, be quiet, fit in, stop questioning, stop needing so much, stop taking up space. We praise children when they are easy for adults to manage. We worry when they are not. This is where the idea of childism becomes important.

Childism is the discrimination of children. It is the belief, often hidden in plain sight, that adults matter more, know more, deserve more control, and have the right to make decisions over children simply because they are adults. Sarah Ockwell-Smith describes childism as the discrimination of children. It is the way children are treated in ways we would never accept if the person being treated that way were an adult. She gives examples around physical punishment, school isolation, consent, privacy, voting, childcare, and the underfunding of education and services that directly affect children.

Once you see it, it is hard to unsee.

When children become useful to adult society

There is a sharp contradiction at the heart of adult attitudes to children. Society needs children. Not necessarily as they are right now; noisy, curious, dependent, emotional, playful, inconvenient and gloriously unfinished. But as future employees, bill-payers, voters, buyers, and polite participants in the adult world. Future adults who will keep the economic wheels turning.

Dominant Western systems need children to grow into adults who feed the economy, follow the rules, and keep existing systems running. Yet for the first part of their lives, children are often treated as a problem to be managed rather than people to be respected.

That feels grim to say. It also feels hard to deny. Children are often spoken about as investments. Outcomes. Future contributors. Economic units in waiting. We hear this in education policy all the time. Children must be “school ready”. Then “work ready”. They must develop “resilience”, usually meaning the ability to tolerate unfairness without making too much fuss. They must learn discipline, routine, compliance, punctuality and productivity.

Rarely do we ask whether childhood itself has value outside preparation for adult usefulness. Rarely do we ask whether children have a right to be respected now, before they can earn money, pass exams, hold a job, pay rent, vote, or explain themselves in language adults approve of.

Home education asks a different question

Home educating does not automatically free us from childism. It can still reproduce the same adult control, pressure, comparison and fear found elsewhere. But it can give us room to ask better questions.

• What if education is not mainly about producing workers?
• What if children are not unfinished adults, but whole people at a different stage of life?
• What if play is not a break from learning, but one of the most serious and intelligent things children do?
• What if resistance is not always “bad behaviour”, but sometimes a child’s clear response to a world that keeps asking them to betray themselves?

This is one of the reasons many families step away from school. Not because they reject learning. Not because they want children to do nothing. But because they can see how much of childhood gets swallowed by systems that prize obedience, performance and measurable output. Home ed can make space for something quieter and more human.

• A child who needs to move can move.
• A child who needs time can have time.
• A child who asks awkward questions can be taken seriously.
• A child who is overwhelmed does not have to be treated as wilful.
• A child who learns through play, conversation, obsession, making, reading, wandering, watching, building, gaming, caring for animals, or lying upside down on the sofa thinking about space can still be learning.

That matters.

I have always treated my sons as equals

In my own family, I have always tried to treat my sons as equals. Not the same as adults in every practical sense. Of course children need guidance, care, boundaries and protection. But equal in worth. Equal in dignity. Equal in their right to be heard.

I have spoken to them about politics. About power. About the systems we live inside. Perhaps too much at times. Perhaps I have made them aware, earlier than some people would think wise, of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and the way society often expects us to grow up, work, pay taxes, consume, keep quiet, and keep the economic wheels turning.

There is always a parental wobble there. Have I burdened them? Have I made them too aware? Would it have been kinder to let them believe the world was simpler for longer? Maybe.

But I also know children are not blank little creatures floating outside society until adults decide to explain it to them. They are already living inside these systems. They notice unfairness. They notice hypocrisy. They notice who gets listened to, who gets dismissed, who gets punished, who gets protected, who has money, who has power, who is expected to shrink.

Children often see the cracks very clearly. Adults are the ones who have learned to walk around them.

So I have tried to be honest. Not hopeless. Not heavy for the sake of it. But honest. Because I do not want my children to grow up thinking that obedience is the same as goodness. I do not want them to believe that success means fitting neatly into a system that harms people. I do not want them to confuse authority with wisdom.

I want them to know they are allowed to question. They are allowed to notice. They are allowed to say, “This does not make sense.” They are allowed to care about justice before they are old enough to vote.

The fear of children who question

A child who questions things can be deeply unsettling. Not because the child is wrong, but because the question exposes something.

• Why do adults get to shout, but children must not?
• Why is school compulsory for most children, but respect within school is not always guaranteed?
• Why are children expected to prepare for adulthood, while adults so often dismiss what children say about childhood?
• Why are young people told to care about the future, then ignored when they speak about climate, war, poverty, inequality, education or mental health?
• Why are children called dramatic when they are distressed by things many adults have simply learned to numb themselves to?

Children can be inconvenient truth-tellers. They have not always learned which subjects are meant to be avoided. They have not always learned to protect adult comfort. That is often what adults call rude. But sometimes it is clarity.

Play as resistance

Play does not behave neatly. It wanders, invents, repeats, resists schedules, and often produces nothing an adult can measure. That alone makes it quietly radical. In a culture obsessed with productivity, play can look suspiciously useless. Children are asked what they are learning, what skill they are building, what outcome is being achieved. Even play is often packaged as preparation for something else. But real play does not work like that.  It makes dens and potions and elaborate worlds from cardboard. It spends an hour watching a beetle. It invents rules, breaks them, changes them, argues over them, starts again. It does not always photograph well. It does not always produce evidence. It cannot always be turned into a worksheet.

For home educating families, protecting play can feel like swimming against the current. But it is one of the most powerful things we can do. Not because play makes children more productive later, although it may well support many skills. But because play belongs to children now. It is part of their humanity. It is part of how they process the world, test ideas, build relationships, meet themselves, and experience freedom. That should be enough.

Respect is not the same as permissiveness

When we talk about treating children as equals, people often hear “letting children do whatever they want”. That is not what this means.

Respecting children does not mean abandoning them to make every decision alone. It does not mean pretending adults have no responsibility. It does not mean children never need limits.

• It means power should be handled carefully.
• It means adults should be willing to explain, listen, apologise, rethink and repair.
• It means children should not have to earn basic dignity through compliance.
• It means their distress should not be dismissed because it is inconvenient.
• It means “because I said so” should not be the backbone of family life, education or public policy.

In home education, this matters deeply. We are not just choosing a different place for learning. We are often trying to build a different relationship with learning, power, trust, time and childhood itself. That can be messy. We will not always get it right. I certainly have not. But the attempt matters.

Children are not just future adults. They are people now

There is a common phrase adults like to use: children are the future. It sounds kind. It sounds hopeful. But it can also be a way of postponing their personhood. Children are not only future adults. They are people now.

• They do not become worthy when they pass exams.
• They do not become fully human when they enter the workforce.
• They do not earn respect by becoming economically useful.

They are not practice people. They are here already.

And perhaps this is one of the quiet gifts of home education. At its best, it gives us the chance to live as if that is true. Not perfectly. Not without doubt. Not in some idealised, soft-focus way. But in the ordinary daily reality of listening more closely, questioning old assumptions, protecting play, making room for difference, and allowing children to be more than future workers in training.

Maybe that is political. Maybe raising children who know they are equal in worth to adults is one of the most political things we can do. Not because we are trying to turn them into miniature activists. But because a child who is respected learns something powerful.

• They learn that power can be questioned.
• They learn that love does not require obedience.
• They learn that their voice matters before the world gives them official permission to use it.

And that, quietly, changes everything.