Trust Kids!: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy

by carla joy bergman

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 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.

Paperback | 240 pages | AK Press | 2022