As children return to school this week, it is worth pausing to reflect on something quieter than uniforms and timetables: whether we are creating the conditions for children to speak, participate, and shape the decisions that affect their lives. This week is as good a moment as any to explore how we strengthen children’s voices and remind them of the power they hold in shaping every decision that affects them.
Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognises every child’s right to express their views freely in all matters affecting them. Many of us readily embrace it but limit its application to the child’s right to be heard in custodial and administrative proceedings, in courts, and in decisions that determine where they live and who cares for them. It sounds progressive. It sounds like something we already believe in.
But watch what happens when that same principle shows up at the dinner table.
Too often, we overlook a child’s right to participate in everyday decisions, from what they order at a restaurant to what colour bicycle they prefer or what flavour they choose for their birthday cake.
We treat it with even less patience when the decisions grow more significant; which subjects to study, which career path to pursue, who they want to become. Too often we dismiss their views and invoke age as justification, as though maturity were a locked door that swings open only a particular birthday, rather than a capacity that develops precisely because children are given opportunities to exercise it. This right to be heard was never meant to switch on only when the stakes are high enough for adults to notice.
Kenya’s Children Act, 2022 makes this explicit, it grants every child the right to express their views in all matters affecting them, with those views given due weight according to their age and maturity. It grounds parental responsibility in the idea of the child’s “evolving capacities”, a legal recognition that a child’s ability to reason, choose, and understand consequences grows over time, and that our duty as adults is to keep pace with that growth, not freeze it at an arbitrary birthday Even the law’s approach is guided by the same principle: correction must be commensurate with a child’s evolving capacity. (A principle that deserves further attention and one I hope to explore in a future article.)
Participation is not just a moment. It is a habit built over years. A child who is asked what they think about small things, a meal, a colour, a plan for the weekend, is a child building the confidence to speak up about the bigger things later: the school they want to attend, the subjects that interest them, and the future they are trying to imagine for themselves. You cannot expect a sixteen-year-old to confidently advocate for their career aspirations if no one ever asked them, at six, what they wanted for dinner.
Agency does not appear fully formed when a child reaches the age of majority. It is cultivated, sentence by sentence, choice by choice, every time an adult pause to ask a child what they think, and then genuinely listens to the answer and gives it due weight.
When we deny a child the right to participate, we are not being protective. Nor are we exercising sound judgement on their behalf. We are teaching them, early and often, that their voice does not count until someone else decides it is worthy of being heard. Denying a child’s participation does not simply silence them in the moment, it undermines the very idea that their perspective is worth offering. Over time, that lesson takes root. Children who are never asked stop offering opinions. Children who are never listened to stop believing their views matter. By the time we finally do want to hear from them, we may already have spent years teaching them not to speak. We take away their agency long before we hand them the moment, we claim to be preparing them for.
Neither the Convention nor Kenya’s Children Act asks us to hand children the final say in every decision. Both ask us to hear them genuinely, and consistently, starting with the small things.
As classrooms fill up again this week, that means asking a child what they want and meaning it , whether the question is about a birthday cake, a subject combination, or how their term is going , and treating the answer as something worth building on.
Age is not, by itself, a reason to silence a child. It is a reason to adjust how we listen not whether we listen at all.