A Child’s Lens

CONVERSATIONS WITH A CHILD.

Human Edge Insight series.

A reflection on what becomes possible when we ask children what they see - before telling them what something means.

Jasmine Luke | Human Edge Consulting

I thought I knew what I was looking at in this deck of cards.

My pre-schooler had chosen a tarot card from a deck I have. I recognised it immediately and, with it, came everything I already knew about what it was supposed to mean. I didn't particularly like the meaning.

Instead of explaining the card to my child, I asked a different question.

What can you see?

Looking at it carefully, the reply: There’s a skull with a tree in it. After studying it a little longer: The tree is breaking it.

What I had always viewed as dark non-descript fruit became blueberries, the flowers near the ground, those flowers are dragonflies. This followed noticing the sun setting in the distance, unremarkable and obscured by the tree. Finally, a look into the branches I was told the flowers are butterflies and they are going on a trip.

I had been looking at the exact same picture. But I had stopped seeing it. I had knowledge, context and an established interpretation. Before my child had spoken, I already possessed a framework to understand what was in front of us.

My child did not.

And because I asked what my child could see, resisting the entirely ordinary adult impulse to explain, correct or translate — I was shown things that were there all along.

That small interaction has stayed with me because it personified something much larger.

We speak often in safeguarding systems about the voice of the child.

We build standards, policies, procedures and practice expectations around children's participation. We recognise their right to be heard, to contribute to decisions affecting them and to have their experiences taken seriously.

All of this matters. But perhaps there is another question worth asking:

When a child speaks, how capable are we of receiving an answer we were not expecting?

Children do not enter our systems without a voice.

They enter systems populated by adults who hold information, professional expertise, statutory responsibilities, histories, assessments, reports and hypotheses.

Those things are necessary.

But they also mean we can arrive knowing a great deal about the picture before asking the child what they can see. And when we do?

A child may then be given an opportunity to speak while the adults around them, often with the very best intentions, listen for information that fits an understanding already formed.

That is not the same as deeply hearing them.

Authentic participation requires more than providing an opportunity for a child to answer our questions. It asks something of the adult.

Curiosity. Patience. Developmentally appropriate communication. Tolerance for ambiguity. Respect for forms of expression that may not arrive neatly packaged in adult language. And enough humility to accept that our expertise does not give us executive ownership of meaning. Not in this context.

None of this diminishes professional judgement. I believe it strengthens it.

Children hold knowledge that nobody else possesses: the lived experience of being themselves.

Their understanding may emerge through words, behaviour, play, silence, metaphor, movement, drawings, humour, hesitation, and apparently unrelated observations or language that makes perfect sense only when we become curious enough to stay with it.

I truly feel our responsibility is not to romanticise every expression, and it is not to abandon the safeguards of evidence and professional assessment. Perhaps there is something worth exploring alongside them —

whether, as our systems become increasingly accomplished at interpreting children, we can also preserve the fundamental art of listening to them.

Because children's participation is not simply something we provide for them. There is something available to us, too.

When children are safe enough to remain authentically themselves — when they are nurtured, respected, noticed and genuinely heard, they can expand the understanding of the adults entrusted with their care.

Sometimes profoundly.

A pre-schooler reminded me of that with a picture I thought I already understood.

I saw a familiar symbol and its established meaning. My kid saw a tree breaking through a skull. Blueberries. Flower dragonflies. And butterflies going on a trip.

The picture had not changed, but the person I allowed to interpret it had.

Perhaps this is one of the simplest tests we can apply when we say a system values children's voices.

Did we give the child an opportunity to speak?

Not only this, but did we remain open to discovering something we did not already know?

Perhaps that is where listening really begins. Not with having the answer, but with enough curiosity to discover what we have not yet understood.

That is the practice of hearing.

And sometimes, when we listen carefully enough, it is how better systems begin to emerge too.