Attitude

When I first started doing international development work I was certainly keen to help children, but do you know I rarely asked the children what they needed. I spent my time talking with adults about how we could help the children. That’s all changed. Now I make sure there is time set aside for sitting down with children.

Our attitude toward children is incredibly important. It is certainly the first and most vital step in being child centred. Yet it is often an attitude that goes unexamined.

We usually begin helping children out of compassion for them. We take pity on them and want to improve their situation. Compassion is a wonderful human quality yet it is only the beginning to truly empathising with children.

Children are much more than merely beneficiaries. They are capable of being actors in their own development. They have a lot to contribute.

As we begin to empathise with the children’s own desire to improve their lives we hear from them about how things can be improved. We learn they have ideas and plans as good as those of adults. We see they have capacities to change things and get things done.

We begin to see them as significant people in their own right.

Gradually children begin to become central to the work we do. No longer are children “seen and not heard” but on the contrary they are consulted and involved.

We are changed and begin to see the world more through the eyes of children, as they see it.