High Agency Children

What does it mean to be high agency? What fosters and what destroys it?

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I will start with my attempt at a definition. When you are “high agency”, you know the  world is a malleable place, that reality is not ‘fixed’ and that you have the potential to create whatever you want. You can see and tap inner and outer resources to do so. It is being possibility-seeing and having a can-do spirit, without deferring to outside authority for approval.

People are born with agency and lose it as they progress through childhood. A healthy young child generally has no problems with frequently voicing his genuine desires and putting in motion the things that are needed to get them. As the kid hits early adolescence, he enters the world of rules, should’s, comparisons and fixed concepts. All of them reduce his confidence in his own will, in what he can achieve and the effectiveness of his actions.

So how does a person maintain and grow a mind of their own, not too polluted by conditioning of what already exists and what is deemed possible? What follows is an overview of what I have found to be meaningful ingredients:

1. Doing useful things. No demarcation of child games and adult activities.

When we asked my son what his most memorable holiday memory was (and he has been on many cool holidays), he recalled a basic thing we did in Cabo Verde,  when he was 6 - rubbish picking. 

We went off the official beach into the dunes, noticed trash, took trash bags and went though the sand dunes collecting trash. It was the most memorable thing for a 6 year old because it was high agency: He is doing something that has an impact, something unplanned, unstructured, outside the confines of school/home/official beach lounging and it is an activity that no one else is doing. A perfect combination. Now he has a rubbish picker tool he proudly carries to the park which he sometimes uses to fish things out of the lakes.

I love this awesome exploration of agency and taking children seriously by Simon Sarris. He rightly notices:

‘We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim’

2. Interests are noticed and valorised

Every time Jeff Bezos had a new interest as a child, like mechanical engineering, his mother would change the decor of their home or add stuff in it to match his new interest. This valorised it, made it noticed and meaningful. She made the environment one with what he wanted to practice.

Now.. changing decor is overkill for a wuwei/no-excess-effort parent like me. Having said that, if the child here becomes interested in any subject, we will offer him deeper exposure to it, through books, tools, connections and experiences where possible. This is encouraging the feedback loop of “my curiosity and interests can drive more interesting things in my reality”.

Asking questions and asking him to teach us more about it, is an easy way to inject further enthusiasm and deeper curiosity. I am so excited that my kid is going to be smarter than me and already is in some ways. I let him know this.

3. Parents see the world as malleable

This is best modeled with the counterfactual: Imagine parents that believe things are fixed as they are, there are confines and unbreakable rules that one operates with. You look at job ads and apply for jobs that are available as opposed to reaching out to apprentice with someone you really want, even if he has no listing. You believe you wait till you are officially in adult territory (18+ ) before you can do meaningful work and contribution in society. You think life happens to you as opposed to you being a creator of those events. It is a belief tunnel where you are convinced about how things ARE, together with the absence of a culture of questioning and exploring truth. This models low agency for the child.

More on what it means to  “see the world as malleable” can be found in this great interview with Danielle Strachman at Rebel Educator. 

I also love this reminder on the risk of becoming a member of the herd from Jim O’Shaugnessy:

“Most societies, religions, philosophies, institutions and their hand-maidens in media, corporations, celebrities and other fellow travelers are there to tell you *what* and not *how* to think. If you let them, you surrender your agency and become a member of the herd. Resist it.”

Which brings me to the next part.

4. Taking risks is encouraged (and our obsession with Safety is re-examined)

Agency dies with Parental Overprotection and “Safetyism a theme explored by Jonathan Haidt in his books “The Coddling of The American Mind” and “The Anxious Generation”. Safetyism started exploding in the 90s and is an ideology that places self-perceived safety, especially the feeling of being protected from disagreeable events, ideas and information, above all other concerns. Rather than seeing safety as one concern among many, it becomes a sacred value. From the book “The Anxious Generation” :

“‘The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system, which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood. Parents who try to raise their children in a bubble of perfect hygiene are harming their children by blocking the development of their antifragile immune systems. It’s the same dynamic for what has been called the psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.”

The book provides plenty of research showing how kids need antiphobic risk-taking for healthy development:

“Sandseter and Kennair define risky play as “thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury.” Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They’ll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s.”

When grandpa here offered to buy a workbench with professional drill and different drilling attachments for adults, for our 8 year old..  we say Yes!. Unsupervised drilling and sawing happens here. When I need something drilled in the house, like a hole in a plant pot - I call the 8 year old to do it.

Ways to give kids more independence, play, and responsibility can be found here: https://letgrow.org/ - a charity co-founded by the inspiring Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids.

What environment could you create so the child doesn't require your constant input?

5. Unconditional Love 

Agency dies when parents try to shape and push a child in a direction, when parents' love is conditional. The subtle aura of  “I reward you and am proud of you if you get this degree/grade/school admission/profession. If you make ME proud.” 

When the child knows that being loved is kind of conditional, through many subtle unspoken ways it manifests,  doing something authentic that involves risk of failure of any kind becomes less viable. The best way I have seen demonstrated the subtle language and display of conditional vs unconditional love is in this series of summary videos of Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg kindly shared by Dmitry Buterin, father of Ethereum’s Vitalik. Full workshop link is in resources. Dmitry says :

‘People overthink parenting. If you can give your kids unconditional love and not pass on too much of your own trauma, you are way ahead of the game. Trust the universe.’

So obvious and simple. But how much of it happens in practice? Especially that trusting the universe bit and not not passing on your own limitations. All this writing on agency is not rooted in the need for my son to become rich or famous. It is highly rooted in the value of him becoming authentically himself and exploring the richness of that experience. Whether it is living in the jungle amongst the monkeys or developing space exploration, my only concern is if he is getting a rich enough experience based on his own metrics.

6. Parents emotionally connected to the richness of life

If richness of expression of emotionality and authenticity is observed in their environment, the child is more likely to notice his desires and aspirations from early on. He can be transparent about them. If parents never display excitement or awe, it is harder for the child to know what one can reach for. I wrote about exploring awe for for the intellectual here.

Following your bliss and having fun being valorised at home is contagious. Work can be play, play can be work. 

7. Not knowing is seen as exciting as opposed to scary

Not passing an exam or not knowing the answer results in a reaction of “Oh, here is something else I can master!” and “Here is an opportunity for me to learn to do difficult things”  as opposed to ”‘I really suck, it's daunting and I failed”. 

A powerful insight from Nat Eliason in this article:

“The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself” 

I also try to model to my son lack of certainty being great because it means a field of unfolding possibilities, as opposed the need to have certainty and all the answers.

8. Linking things the kid is learning to what is meaningful to him

I would personally steer away teaching philosophical ideas too abstracted away from the practical, after the basic skills are in. But we cannot avoid this happening in most schools. So if a teenager complains about meaningless work there, it is potentially a valid complaint. Learning should be linked to the things that the kid wants in life , for example options and possibilities to pursue his interests (“you need grounding in  basics like math and literacy to do cool things”). At some point the kid might be held back by traditional school because the world is changing and education is not able to catch up. The persons reasoning as to the alternative he wants to pursue should be heard.

This kind of sums up my exploration into the elements relevant for high agency in children. If you have any other ideas, drop them in the comments. The final thing I have the most confidence in (but nothing to back it up): 

Look at the child without preconceived notions of who he is and what he can be, like he is not your property , like you see him for the first time. When you look at the child occasionally, try to spot the Infinite Force and all of creation in their eyes.

“To serve the children is to feel one is serving the spirit of man, a spirit which has to free itself.” ~ Maria Montessori in “The Absorbent Mind”

Interesting resources on the subject:

• Interview with Danielle Strachman from 1517 fund ( “We back dropouts working on hard problems & sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their companies”)

• Simon Harris excellent article on why agency matters and the forces that threaten it in current times. “13-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.”

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

• This nonviolent communication workshop is transformational in the sense of ironing out any remaining trace of parent neediness and expectation, so the child can naturally flourish under real unconditional love:

• On modeling the value of attention agency to kids https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/kids-attention-agency-and-the-us

• Agency for the immigrant is usually natural. There is a strong personal drive to get ahead away from poverty / limits etc. I was exploring here how this can be perhaps accessed for the non-immigrants. https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/land-of-the-free-level-2

• I wrote about the mindset of high agency that allows to take opportunity of the personal agency renaissance here https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/personal-agency-renaissance

• On  debunking fears based on one example of societal conditioning https://www.wuweiparent.com/p/the-stuff-fears-are-made-of

• https://letgrow.org/ has great ways to give kids more independence, play, and responsibility