Trust Kids!

Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy

By: Carla Bergman - editor, Matt Hern - foreword

Narrated by: Zach Bergman

Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Trust Kids! weaves together essays, interviews, poems, and artwork from scholars, activists, and artists about our relationships with children in all areas of our lives.

The contributors of Trust Kids! write from different backgrounds, genders, ages, and sexualities and combine past lineages with more recent child-rearing ideas to offer a fresh, inspiring perspective. Many works on parenting and families wind up re-inscribing hierarchies by declaring how kids should be liberated. Trust Kids! insists on youth autonomy, listening to youth, and questioning adult supremacy.

At the heart of the book are conversations about all the ways that children can be included, loved, and cared for in more generative, just, and egalitarian ways. Its essays explore the liberatory potential of consent and autonomy in relationships among children, youth, and the adults in their lives. They also trace how oppressive attitudes toward children, far from being “natural” forms of kinship with the youngest members of our families and communities, have identifiable social and historical roots.

©2022 Carla Bergman, Matt Hern (P)2022 AK Press

Critic reviews

"Trust Kids! is wild and playful and challenging and engaging. Like those playground conversations with other parents. Like stories children tell around kitchen tables. Like the exhilarating possibility that the future is, in fact, in good hands if we just trust kids."
—Tomas Moniz, author of Big Familia

"Trust Kids! is based on the radical premise that 'solidarity begins at home.' Recognizing that we reproduce the seeds of hierarchy in our everyday relationships, this horizon-expanding book not only offers guidance for youth liberation and intergenerational justice but also prefigures an alternative to adult supremacy. Drawing on and interweaving voices across generations, this collection of essays, interviews, poems, and art centers young folks' perspectives and wisdom. Rather than prescribing a blueprint for revolution, the authors present a diversity of creative approaches to how adults can learn to trust kids more deeply and immediately co-create our futures together." —Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World

Great Book on Adultism and Youth Liberation!

This is a phenomenal book on the ways in which youth are uniquely marginalized under adultism, as well as what to do about it. <3

Planted seeds

The stories and suggestions have planted seeds that I plan on nurturing. I am moved to sit with my childhood experiences and move in a way that is trusting of kids.

The book I have been waiting for

Magnificent collection of poetry, Prose, Essays and so many feelings and sensations- gut wrenching heart bursting love and anguish. I feel enthralled, I feel moved deeply in so many ways. I have a book now I will listen to over and over again. My siren heart has called for this book for so long. My ears have yearned to hear it. As a parent, I finally feel like I am not alone in the hunger I have had for my child to have their autonomy and rights fully honored. As a social worker, I see a way my role can help children feel seen and heard with the power and forcefulness these children inhabit. As a wife, I feel I have a manuscript to express so much in my heart to my spouse, to have the understanding external used in a book that can be shared, relished and savored.