Trust Kids!

Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy

carla bergman (Editor); Matt Hern (Foreword)

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 on every page. 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.

Praise for Trust Kids!

"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

carla joy bergman is an independent scholar, writer, podcaster, and mom. She has spent the past two decades working in her community to create collaborative multi-media platforms that range from print to films. carla loves to zoom in on the in-between happenings and issues and to bust binaries. She is the co-author of Joyful Militancy (AK Press, 2017) and co-founder of Grounded Futures, and is continuing to write on a variety of subjects. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Matt Hern lives and works in east Vancouver, where he founded the Purple Thistle Center and Car-Free Vancouver Day. A former sportswriter and a radical urbanist whose writing has been published on six continents and in ten languages, he is the author of Big Moves (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020) and Common Ground in a Liquid City (AK Press, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Vancouver Book Award.