We can’t achieve anything that we can’t imagine ourselves doing. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget how potent this truism is when it comes to our children. How our children think about themselves, how they imagine they are is the most powerful influence on how they think about their own future.

There are many potential obstacles for our children to overcome in order to develop positive self-image in a robust fashion. One to look out for is a failure to separate ‘bad’ behaviour from a fault in the child. That is to say, we need to separate actions from personality. It’s important that we raise our children to understand that if they do something we deem to be bad, it doesn’t make them a bad person. Good people can, on occasion, do bad things. When we are guiding the behaviour of our children, we want them to realise that one mistake doesn’t prevent them from progressing positively, to know that an error doesn’t necessarily close off that path or block their sense of possibility.

In fact, we currently live at a time when it’s more possible than ever to acknowledge the capabilities of youngsters. As we age, it becomes increasingly difficult (for me anyway!) to keep up with technological advances in our everyday lives. What adult hasn’t asked a child to sort out some digital conundrum for them?

We like to think that wisdom accumulates with age in a steady, measured way, that it is the job of those of us who are older to feed titbits of our hard earned wisdom to the youngsters, and that they should greedily gobble them up.

This is not always the way it is, and not just when it comes to technology. Consider the ecological question, or feminism, racism and various other political platforms that are increasingly occupied by the younger generations, as much and even more than the older generations. Personally I think this is something to be proud of, and it is faith in our children that gives me the greatest sense of optimism for the future.

So let’s nurture, nurture, nurture that sense - encourage our children wherever they want to go in lives that are opening out in front of them like a wide horizon. When they take to the stage, don’t even show them the wings. The wings they will grow will lift them to heights we can only dream might be possible.

Here is another in my series of articles based on conversations with children, first published in Teach Early Years magazine. In each piece, I focus on one prominent theme. For this one, it’s POWERLESSNESS, which seems especially apt at the moment. My thanks to editor Jacob Stow for allowing reproduction, and if you want to know more, details of this and their other magazines and resources are available at: https://www.teachwire.net

• Is there anything you don’t like about being a child?
• You have no control because you’re not in charge.             (L - male)

I interviewed this little boy with his mother and I’m sure you are well able to imagine her facial expression on hearing his reply. There was good humour in her silently letting me know that it didn’t always feel that way to her.

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I was recently speaking with a group of children about what they felt was missing in their current educational model and something that came up time and again was the lack of tutoring in how to manage their financial affairs.

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Earlier this year I read an interview with the female footballer Eni Aluko. Her perspective of finding her way in a male dominated field was both inspiring and depressing.

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Earlier this year The Guardian printed a piece by the winner of their Young Sportswriter of the Year (ages seven to nine) award; one Caleb Waterhouse, aged eight.

It’s a piece about the snowboarder Katie Ormerod and how inspirational she is. It’s coherent, informative and charmingly rendered in the vernacular of youth whilst still being eminently readable. The link is at the end of this blogpost.
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