Trust Parents.
By Claire Louge, Executive Director

Sometime last year, I heard these two quotes:

“The best way to get trust is to give trust.”
“We can only move at the speed of trust.”

These statements struck me as deeply relevant to how we do our work. Our sector wants safety and well-being for children. And to do that, we know we need to support their parents/caregivers to protect and nurture them. And to support parents, we need to give them trust. Have you ever felt supported without being trusted? Not me.

But trusting parents isn’t the default mainstream lens- yet. Our lens, historically, has been to surveille so we can spot problems. A lens of surveillance, however, is the opposite of trust. Instead, a lens of strength- in which we assume that parents want to do their best and are trying their best in their given circumstance- changes everything. It shifts the culture of surveillance to a culture of trust.