Anti-adultism

Adultism, connection, consent, reflective parenting, non-coercion

Unschooling is based on the idea that all people, including children, have a drive to learn, and that relationships should be based on consent, connection, and mutual respect. Forcing children to go to school, and assuming they will not seek to learn if they aren’t in school, is part of adultism.

If parents drop control, adultism, rewards and punishments, what tools do they have? Connection, consent, and respect. Connection parenting is also called peaceful parenting, gentle parenting, conscious parenting, etc. Instead of coercion, we build respectful relationships with our kids.

Disability justice also means, in part, respecting autonomy and consent. Often, supports and accommodations are needed in order to facilitate autonomy or communicate consent.

Disabled and/or neurodivergent children are doubly marginalized: their autonomy and ability to say no is doubly undermined by ableism and adultism. Unschooling is a radical act, but for parents and caregivers it means an ongoing process of deschooling, unlearning adultism, and unlearning ableism.

” In our culture (and most others in the world), adults have a special status of control over kids — control that is easily and often abused. Adults make decisions for children (their own and other people’s), create rules that govern children’s day-to-day lives, and generally tell kids what to do. That manifests in ordering, yelling, directing, preaching, disciplining, demeaning, embarrassing, questioning, patting and other touching without permission, yanking, ignoring, and referring to children in the third person.”

Wendy Priesnitz

“Adultism is so pervasive, we often don’t think twice about treating children in dehumanizing ways.

What would it look like if we actually treated children as whole human beings whom we loved and respected instead of like second-class citizens whose thoughts, feelings, desires, and boundaries we ignore and overrule?”

Iris Chen, Untigering

“If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.”

John Holt,