What If Children Already Know?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the ways we ask children to exist in spaces that were never really created with their ways of knowing in mind. We build the room. We establish the schedule. We decide what is safe, what is appropriate, what constitutes learning, how long someone should sit, when they should move, when they should speak, what they should touch, and how they should respond when all of that becomes too much. Then, when a child struggles within the world we created, we begin teaching them skills to tolerate it.

We call this regulation.

I am increasingly interested in what happens when we turn that whole idea on its head.

What if, before we teach the skill, we become curious about what the child already knows? What if the movement, refusal, curiosity, play, hesitation, sensory seeking, proximity, withdrawal, imagination, and even the behavior we find most difficult are not simply things to change, but information? What if children are telling us something about themselves and about the environments we have created for them, and we have become so focused on teaching that we have forgotten how to listen?

This is where standpoint theory has become particularly important in the way I think about children. Standpoint theory, at its core, asks us to consider that what we know about the world is shaped by where we stand within it. Our social position matters. Power matters. The person standing at the center of a system experiences that system differently than the person standing at its margins, and those different positions produce different knowledge.

We talk about this when we consider race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and other identities, as we should. But I think there is another standpoint we rarely privilege.

Childhood.

Children occupy a profoundly different position in the world than adults. They are physically smaller. They have less autonomy. They are dependent upon adults for virtually every aspect of their lives. Adults determine where they go, when they go, what they eat, when they sleep, what they wear, when they can leave, who they spend time with, and which parts of their behavior are acceptable. Even in loving, healthy families, there is an enormous power differential between adults and children because there has to be. A two-year-old cannot be solely responsible for deciding whether it is safe to run into a parking lot.

But necessary power is still power.

And when we forget that, we can begin to mistake the adult experience of childhood for childhood itself.

That distinction matters.

When an adult says a room isn't too loud, that tells us something about the adult's experience of the room. It does not tell us whether the room is too loud for the child. When we say a transition is "no big deal," we are describing our experience of that transition. When a toddler walks away from an activity, and we describe them as refusing to participate, we have already interpreted the experience through the standpoint of the person who wanted them to participate.

What does the child know about that moment that we don't?

I think that question can fundamentally change the way we work with children.

Children, particularly very young children, do not always know through language. They know through their bodies. They know through play and movement and sensation. They know through repetition. They know by moving closer and moving away. They know by watching something for twenty minutes before deciding to touch it. They know through imagination and relationship. Their bodies are constantly collecting information long before they have the language to explain that information to us.

This is one of the reasons interoception is so important in our work. Interoception is our awareness of what is happening inside the body: hunger, thirst, tension, temperature, fatigue, a racing heart, a stomach that suddenly feels strange, the physical sensations that accompany fear, excitement, anger, uncertainty, or connection. For young children, those signals exist long before they can reliably identify and name them.

So, initially, they borrow us.

They use what is happening outside of themselves to begin understanding what is happening inside of themselves. They read our faces. They hear the change in our voices. They notice whether we move toward them or away from them. They learn whether their distress makes the adults around them anxious, angry, dismissive, curious, or available. Our external response becomes part of the information they use to organize their internal experience.

This is why I believe connection has to come before skills.

We are very good at giving children coping skills. We have breathing exercises and sensory tools and calm-down spaces and feelings charts and movement breaks. I love tools. We use them all the time. But a tool without relationship is just another adult instruction.

Think about what we are actually asking when we tell a dysregulated child to "use your coping skills." We are asking that child to notice an internal sensation, identify what it means, connect it to an emotional experience, remember a previously taught intervention, determine which intervention is appropriate, and then implement it while their nervous system is already under stress.

That's a pretty sophisticated neurological task.

And yet, we often approach the inability to do it as a behavioral problem.

Connection changes the equation because co-regulation gives the child an experience before we ask them to develop a skill. The adult notices. The adult stays. The adult becomes curious. The child experiences activation and then experiences what it feels like for that activation to shift while another safe person remains present. Eventually, with enough of those experiences, we can begin connecting language to what the child already knows in their body.

Your body really wanted to move.

You came closer to me when that happened.

You kept watching before you decided to try it.

You moved away when it got louder.

The point is not for me to tell the child what they experienced. That would simply replace one form of adult authority with another. The point is to offer language and remain curious about whether it fits. The child remains the primary knower of their experience.

Read that again.

The child remains the primary knower of their experience.

That is standpoint theory in practice.

And this is exactly what we are trying to create in Honey Child.

When toddlers come into Honey Child, I have one overarching hope for that hour: I want them to experience freedom.

I don't mean anarchy. There are adults present. There are boundaries around physical safety. Nobody gets to launch another toddler off the furniture in the name of self-expression. What I mean is something much more intentional. For that hour, I want to remove as much unnecessary adult direction as possible and see what happens when children are allowed to experience the world without someone constantly telling them how they should experience it.

Because think about the life of a toddler.

Put this on. Come here. Sit down. Hold my hand. Don't touch that. Put that back. We have to go. It's time to eat. It's time to sleep. Be careful. Not that way. This way.

Again, much of this is necessary. Toddlers require adults to keep them alive, which is not a particularly small responsibility. But imagine for a moment being two feet tall and living in a world in which almost every person with power over you is three times your size and nearly every part of your day is determined by someone else.

Then imagine walking into a space where someone says, in essence, Go see what you know.

That is what interests me.

Some children move constantly. Some barely move at all. Some children watch. Some immediately touch everything. Some return to the same object over and over and over again because whatever adults think should happen next is completely irrelevant to the work that child is doing. Sometimes two children begin playing together and, within minutes, create a reality that did not exist when they walked into the room.

This is another place where I think adults underestimate children.

Children don't simply participate in communities.

They create them.

Watch toddlers or young children when adults stop organizing every interaction. They create rules. They negotiate. They imitate. They challenge each other. They decide who belongs in the game. They change the game when it stops working. They build entire cultures around objects adults would have thrown into the recycling bin. A cardboard box becomes a house, then a boat, then something none of us can identify because apparently we were not consulted in the world-building process.

There is knowledge in that.

There is also power in it.

Play gives children an opportunity to create realities in a world where they ordinarily have very little control over reality. They get to decide what something means. They get to test a boundary. They get to approach and retreat. They get to become powerful, small, invisible, enormous, dangerous, nurturing, loud, quiet, or something for which adults do not even have a category. They get to construct a community and figure out how other people exist within it.

When we rush in to direct that play, correct it, organize it, or turn every moment into a teachable moment, we risk colonizing something that belonged to them.

That may sound dramatic.

I don't think it is.

If we genuinely believe that children have a standpoint worth privileging, then we have to tolerate the discomfort of not always being the expert in the room. We have to accept that children may know things about their bodies, their relationships, their environments, and their communities that we cannot know from where we stand.

Our job is not to abdicate our responsibility as adults. Children need boundaries. They need protection. They need us to lend them our nervous systems when theirs become overwhelmed. They need language and skills and support. But there is a tremendous difference between using adult power to create safety and using adult power to create compliance.

I am interested in the former.

Because when children have enough safety to explore, they give us information. They show us what organizes their bodies and what overwhelms them. They show us when they seek proximity and when they need space. They show us what captures their attention, how they approach uncertainty, how they recover from frustration, how they negotiate with other children, and how they create meaning.

Then the tools we teach actually have somewhere to land.

Movement becomes more than "a movement break." It becomes something the child recognizes their body needs. Quiet becomes something they can seek rather than somewhere they are sent. Deep pressure, music, breathing, sensory experiences, nature, rhythm, creativity, connection, or space become possibilities rather than prescriptions.

This is the difference between teaching children to comply with regulation and helping children develop agency around regulation.

And there is one more piece of this that I think we have to be willing to confront.

Not every dysregulated child needs to become better at tolerating the environment.

Sometimes the environment is the problem.

If we privilege the standpoint of childhood, we have to be willing to hear that too. Sometimes a child's body is accurately communicating that something is too loud, too fast, too demanding, too unpredictable, too crowded, or simply too much. Sometimes the intervention is a coping skill. Sometimes the intervention is changing the room. Sometimes it is slowing down. Sometimes it is reducing the demand. Sometimes it is an adult interrogating why a particular expectation exists in the first place.

That is harder work because it requires us to give up the idea that adults are neutral observers of children's behavior. We aren't. We create most of the environments in which that behavior occurs.

Full stop.

We cannot create the conditions, define the expectations, hold the power, and then pretend we have nothing to do with what happens next.

This is why I keep coming back to standpoint theory and the idea of privileging childhood as a way of knowing. It asks something different of us. It asks us to listen more than we direct. To observe before we interpret. To connect before we correct. To become curious about behavior before we try to extinguish it. And, perhaps most importantly, to recognize that children are not unfinished adults waiting for us to teach them how the world works.

They are already experiencing it.

They are already making meaning of it.

They are already telling us things about it.

They are already creating communities within it.

The question is whether we are willing to believe that their knowledge counts.

I am.

And I think some of the most important work we can do with children begins right there: creating enough safety that they can explore what they know, enough connection that they can begin putting language around it, and enough freedom that they can imagine realities beyond the ones adults have handed them.

Then we give them tools. Not tools designed to make them more convenient for the systems around them, but tools that help them understand their own bodies, communicate what they need, connect with other people, navigate the world, and, when necessary, challenge it.

Because healing happens in community.

But children are not simply recipients of the communities we build for them.

They are knowers. They are meaning-makers. They are world-builders. And if we stop directing them long enough, they might have something to teach us about the communities we should be building together.