The Child Beyond Our Opinions
What happens when we loosen our grip on certainty — and begin seeing children more clearly
There is something deeply reassuring about arriving somewhere.
Arriving at an explanation. Arriving at a diagnosis. Arriving at a philosophy. Arriving at certainty.
The mind seems to breathe a sigh of relief the moment something settles into place. Once we know what something is, we no longer have to live with the discomfort of not knowing. We can name it, organise it, explain it, defend it. The unsettling feeling of uncertainty dissolves, replaced by the comfort of having somewhere clear to stand.
Perhaps this is simply part of being human. But lately I’ve found myself wondering what we stop noticing the moment we arrive.
As a therapist, I spent years observing children, comparing what I saw against developmental frameworks, and helping determine whether they met criteria or crossed thresholds. Much of the work depended on making distinctions. This child qualified, that child didn’t. This pattern suggested one thing, that pattern another.
Those distinctions mattered, of course. Families needed support, and children deserved access to it. Assessment can have an important place. And yet, the longer I worked with children within systems, the more I noticed something that refused to fit neatly inside the frameworks themselves.
The child was always larger than the category.
There was always something left over. Something alive. Something that escaped description. It wasn’t that the frameworks were wrong. It was that they could never contain the whole child.
Only later did I realise this question wasn’t confined to my work. It followed me into parenting too, where I found myself becoming less interested in arriving quickly at conclusions of any kind.
I noticed it particularly one restless morning not long ago. Almost without realising it, my mind had begun running through every uncertainty it could find. Was I right to home educate? Could children really be trusted to direct so much of their own learning? Should I be building a different kind of business? Was I naïve to believe this writing would find its people? Had I placed too much trust in Human Design and the Gene Keys? Was I mistaking intuition for wishful thinking?
None of these questions were new. What struck me was the relentless energy beneath them. My mind wasn’t really searching for understanding. It was searching for somewhere to land.
As I watched those thoughts unfold, I realised this wasn’t entirely new. I’ve often found myself quietly wondering how people become so certain about things. Not because I think certainty is wrong, but because I’ve rarely been able to stay there myself. However convincing an explanation seems, some part of me eventually finds itself asking: What else might be true?
For a long time, I wondered whether that was a weakness. Whether it meant I lacked conviction, or struggled to trust my own judgement. Increasingly, though, I think it’s something different.
I still make decisions. I home educate my children. I left my profession. I write publicly about what I believe. Life requires us to choose a direction. But I’m becoming less interested in treating those decisions as the end of the conversation. Instead, they feel like places from which to keep looking.
Around the same time I happened to be reading Richard Rudd’s reflections on the 17th Gene Key. He describes its shadow as Opinion. Not because opinions themselves are unhealthy, but because of what happens when we become identified with them.
One sentence in particular stood out to me:
“Whenever you become over-serious about your opinions you immediately find yourself having to defend them.”
I closed the book and found myself thinking about children. I began to wonder whether some of our deepest misunderstandings of childhood begin in exactly this place. Not in what we believe, but in how tightly we need to hold onto it.
It often sounds like this: This behaviour means this. This child needs that. This educational philosophy is right. That one is wrong. We rarely notice how quickly certainty narrows our field of perception.
But I’ve begun to wonder whether our deepest understanding of children emerges not when we’ve reached a conclusion, but just before it. In that brief space where perception is still alive.
Opinion, language and the questions beneath
We live in a culture that prizes certainty. We admire confidence, seek expertise, and constantly ask for answers to the problems life throws up. It is hardly surprising that we carry those same habits into how we understand children.
One of the ways we create that certainty is by naming the world around us. Language is one of humanity’s greatest gifts, allowing us to communicate, organise, share knowledge and make sense of an impossibly complex world. But it also asks us to compress reality into words. Once we call something “behaviour”, “autism”, “giftedness”, “school”, “unschooling”, “neurotypical”, or “neurodivergent”, we’ve already begun to draw boundaries around something that will always be larger than the word itself can contain.
The difficulty isn’t language itself. It’s forgetting that every word is a way of seeing — not the thing itself. I think that’s partly why so many conversations about children become trapped inside false choices. We begin debating the labels until the living child almost disappears behind them.
As time passes, I’ve found myself less interested in answering those debates than in asking the questions that sit beneath them. It no longer feels especially useful to ask whether school or home education is better. Increasingly, I find myself drawn instead to a different question: What is childhood for?
As a former Speech and Language Therapist, I also find I can no longer comfortably place what children do into categories of “behaviour”, “communication”, or even “behaviour that is communication”. Instead I increasingly find myself asking: What is this child trying to preserve? Their sense of safety? Their connection with themselves? Their capacity to stay regulated? Those questions seem to bring me closer to the child than deciding what category the behaviour belongs in.
When I think about education and development, I am less interested in structure versus freedom than I am in understanding the conditions that allow development to unfold well. The relationship between rhythm, individuality, nervous systems, trust and learning feels infinitely more interesting than the argument itself.
And after years specialising in autism, working with children across a wide range of abilities and support needs, I find it increasingly difficult to feel that the words “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” could ever fully capture the child standing in front of us. Instead, I find myself wondering: What happens when individuality meets systems built for averages?
The question, I’ve realised, is often larger than the argument.
Far-Sightedness and Integrity
This doesn’t mean becoming passive. Children still need adults willing to make decisions, hold boundaries, and sometimes act with urgency. What has changed for me is the place from which those decisions are made. Less from the urgency of needing to arrive, and more from the willingness to keep looking.
Richard Rudd describes the gift beyond Opinion as Far-Sightedness, paired with the gift of Integrity. What I find beautiful about that pairing is that the opposite of opinion isn’t indecision. It’s integrity.
Integrity doesn’t refuse to take a stand. It simply refuses to confuse taking a stand with having seen everything there is to see. It asks us to stand for something deeper than our need to be right. It remains willing to let reality reshape our understanding, even when doing so requires us to loosen our grip on conclusions we once felt certain about.
I still care deeply about how children are understood and I still believe many assumptions within education and child development deserve questioning. But I notice I’m becoming less interested in winning arguments, and more interested in asking the kinds of questions that help us keep looking.
The child beyond our opinions
Perhaps this is what I hope my writing does. Not persuade you to agree with me, or replace one certainty with another. But loosen something just enough that another possibility becomes visible.
We will always need language. We will probably always need frameworks, diagnoses, educational philosophies, developmental theories and professional judgement. They help us notice things that might otherwise remain hidden. But perhaps they are at their most helpful when we remember that every way of understanding illuminates something and leaves something else in shadow.
The child remains larger than every framework we create.
We can still describe children’s unique characteristics. We can still use frameworks to understand and support them. We can still make important decisions on their behalf. But perhaps we can do all of that while remembering that every explanation reveals something and conceals something too.
The child is always larger than our words. Larger than our categories. Larger than our opinions.
I don’t think children need adults who refuse to make judgements. They need adults who remember that every judgement is provisional — adults who can make decisions without closing the door on what they have not yet seen. Because the truth is usually deeper and more nuanced than the positions we’re being asked to choose between. Perhaps that isn’t a problem to solve. Perhaps it’s an invitation.
To keep looking.
To keep questioning.
To keep discovering.
As though the child in front of us has not yet finished revealing who they are.
Because the child is always larger than our opinions.
If this piece stirred something, I’d love to hear.
What questions has it left you with?
Have there been moments where certainty gave way to curiosity, and something new became visible?
The reflections beneath these articles are often where those deeper questions continue, and where others discover they’re not the only ones who’ve been sensing them.
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Thank you for this thought-provoking essay, Gem. I love that the opposite of integrity is opinion and the idea that once we become attached to our opinions we then feel obliged to defend them. And the mind closes.
I think of the simplistic way that children are often treated once they attract a diagnosis - as if someone thinks, "Ah! ADHD - so this child needs a fidget toy and help with self-organisation." and forgets to actually consider what *this* child needs.
And embracing our own self-doubts around our decisions and opinions as healthy and markers of our own integrity too.
Great post! 🤗
This is exactly why I am here. Have you noticed how this doesn’t just apply to education and teaching but to everything that is measured? All data, anything that becomes labeled. I think I write to show the overlap. How it applies at a broader context because it’s more relatable to people not in education. How can we fix education? Step 1. We have to get people to see the world through this lense. We can do this!