What is Child Honouring?
Child Honouring is a philosophy—a vision, an organizing principle, and a way of life—the children-first way of sustainability.
It starts with three givens:
- The primacy of early years—early childhood is the gateway to humane being.
- We face planetary degradation that is unprecedented in scope and scale—a state of emergency that most endangers the very young, and that requires a remedy of equal scale.
- This crisis calls for a systemic response in detoxifying the environments that make up the world of the child.
Child Honouring is a children-first approach to healing communities and restoring ecosystems. It views how we regard and treat our young as the key to building a humane and sustainable world. It is a novel idea—organizing society around the priority needs of its youngest members.
The essence of the vision is expressed in A Covenant for Honouring Children and its underlying principles.
Its spirit is invitational—a call to imagine and create a diversity of child-friendly cultures. A child-honouring society would show love for its children, and thus for all of us, in every facet of its design and organization.
Read more, in the essay Organizing Principle, Catalytic Power.
