Healthy adult and children relations – Edition 1

Hi,

My name is Vhutali and I am an AIME Global Mentor in South Africa.

I am working on a systems change project on Healthy Child-Adult Relations where I will be having 100 conversations in 100 days to imagine a future of healthy adult and children relations.

Listen to the podcast below and get in touch if you would like to spend some time chatting with me.

Safety of minors all around the world is of paramount importance. No one working with minors or having kids under their care wants to see them hurt, especially under their watch.

In the 20 years of AIME working with minors, it is evident by the effort put towards child safety that the organisation also wants to see kids safe under their care. In every interaction where you have a thousand minors, more than a handful of them are probably going through a form of abuse, be it sexual, physical or emotional. Non-profit organisations working with minors create child protection rules that reduce the risks of there ever being an incident that harms minors. The rules are created to guard against bad actors, but they also create a barrier for seamless engagement with minors for the well intentioned.

Without shedding responsibilities, organisations should start thinking of fostering healthy and meaningful relationships that flourish. This might mean being brave enough to allow these conversations to happen, go to the spaces of confronting the barriers and see what we are protecting the kids against, see if they can be solved through relational transactions.

Organisations need to be comfortable enough to say ‘we don’t know what might happen’, but also go further and ask about what we can do to create healthy relations between adults and minors and still keep minors safe, knowing that approaching child-adult engagement being afraid of the worst that can happen is not a great way to start a healthy relationship.

More than anything, the first healthy child-adult relationship yarn raised more questions than answers, leaving more room for further conversations. Few of such questions are:

• what can we design in the system to foster healthy child relations?
• How do we get to designing processes that inform systems in local and national government and also with other organisations?
• How can we get to a point where we trust people again?
• How do we create room for complexity and depth in our vocabulary around child relations?

Call to action: In the coming 100 days we are keen to chat with people from around the world about child relations and how we can answer some of the questions raised above, including minors themselves and people considered to be outside the margins. Reach out to if you are interested in chatting with us

Sincerely,

Vhutali Nelwamondo

Global Mentor (South Africa)

Listen to the conversation

We must fuel the fire inside all of our hearts, and find the space for healthier relations. As BRAT I paint Mad Hatters, to remind us all that when we are at the Mad Hatter tea party, in the heart of the complexity of conversation, between the absurd and intelligent, the established and the new, the broken and the fixed, when we can imagine, we can move. And on this topic we must strive to move to a world of healthy patterns of cross hatching of relations between adults and children. No one should be alone.

Image and reflection by Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME Founder and CEO.