The philosoher Alfred North Whitehead defined children as "our immortality--in them we see the story of our life rewritten in a fairer hand." Whitehead was an optimist. He was someone who found adventure in creative ideas and who could see limitless creative possibility in the artless--sometimes ruthless--honesty of children.
But the honesty of children isn't valuable just because every once in a while they jar us into wisdom and we find ourselves saying, "Out of the mouths of babes ..." Nor is it obvious only when they say the wrong--but embarrassingly accurate--thing in front of company. We've all gathered here because we know that in their very experience of life, whether good or bad, and whether they're on the playground with the other kids or are locked in a closet for two years by abusive parents, they're being honest about what they know about what we, adults, think about them and how we value them. Every time kids come safely home from the playground, they're telling their parents they know how highly they're valued, whether they realize it or not. And every time kids run away from the playground because they don't want to go home or are afraid to; every time social workers retrieve kids from some horrible situation; every time a kid shows up in juvenile detention--in these instances, too, the kids are honestly telling us they know just how valuable we think they are. That's why A Child's Place was established.
What does it mean in today's world to weigh the value of a child's life experience? The people who set up A Child's Place figured it means being willing to do something--literally, do. Doing means more than good intentions. It means acting on them. For the volunteer advocates at A Child's Place, doing means getting trained, then acting on that training by going to court to maintain that value. For those of us who can't work in the "trenches" of the court system but who value the work of A Child's Place, it means of...