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.

carla bergman is an independent scholar, filmmaker, and producer. She is the co-director of EMMA Talks, a mini-art festival and speaker’s series by women, co-editor of Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook for Youth, and co-author of Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. carla lives in Vancouver, BC on Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh lands.

carla bergman's profile page

Matt Hern is the director of the Purple Thistle centre, an alternative youth program in Vancouver, BC. He holds a a PhD in Urban Studies from the Union Institute. An accomplished writer and public speaker, he has written three books: Deschooling Our Lives, Field Day: Getting Society Out of School and Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better. He lives with his partner and two daughters in East Vancouver.

Matt Hern's profile page

Dani Burlison (she/her) is the author of Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos: True Stories, a collection of essays that first appeared in her McSweeney’s Internet Tendency column of the same name, and the Lady Parts zines. She has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly, a book reviewer for Los Angeles Review, and a regular contributor at Chicago Tribune, KQED Arts, The Rumpus, and Made Local magazine. Her writing can also be found at Ms., Yes!, Earth Island Journal, Wired, Vice, Utne, Ploughshares, Hip Mama, Rad Dad, Spirituality & Health, Shareable, Tahoma Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, and more. Her writing also appears in several anthologies. She lives, teaches, and writes with her two kids in Santa Rosa, California.

Dani Burlison's profile page

"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