"May I Dump This Bucket of Water Over Your Head?"

There are three broad categories of things about which we adults know more than the young children in our care: safety, schedules, and courtesy.

The rest is trivia. Yes, I may know more about Elizabethan novels than the typical five-year-old, but they know more about, say, Kpop Demon Hunters, so that's a wash.

Safety is obvious. Indeed, it's our number one job. None of us will last long in this profession if we're regularly sending kids home with major injuries. We say, "My job is to keep everyone safe. That's not safe. I can't let you do that." Then we don't let them do that.

Schedules can be inconvenient. We do what we can to minimize interruptions to the children's play, but the reality is that most of us have some sort of schedule to which we must adhere, even if it's just a matter of getting everyone ready when it's time to go home. We say, "My job is to make sure we're in the lunchroom at 11:30. It's 11:30. Now is lunch time." Then we usher them into the lunchroom.

Courtesy may not at first blush seem to fit with these other two, but this is where I see "consent" living. I don't expect children to align their behavior to the etiquette formulas with which many of us grew up (e.g., Emily Post), but I can't let them, say, dump a bucket of water on someone's head without first checking to make sure it's okay. I mean, it's only basic courtesy.

I once watched a boy sneak up behind a girl and dump a bucket of water over her head. He was shocked when she burst into tears. Later, as we discussed what he might have done differently, he asked, "Why is it funny when it happens on TV?"

The difference is consent. I explained that those people on TV are actors who have agreed to have water dumped on their heads, even if they pretend they didn't like it. Obviously, this kind of thing can be confusing for preschoolers and it's why they need our help to tease out the difference.

I remember when the Miss Manners column began appearing in our local newspaper back in the 1978. What made her advice different from what came before her was her insistence that etiquette wasn't about arbitrary rules, but rather about making social life work while preserving everyone's dignity. Courtesy is the answer to the question: how do we behave toward other human beings so that we respect their autonomy while still making it possible to live together? 

Young children might not grasp that concept exactly, but by the time they're three or four, most children are capable of understanding the concepts of consent and agreement. And this requires dialog, even going so far as to ask the question, "May I dump this bucket of water over your head?" then respecting the answer.

The Golden Rule is often offered as a kind of catch-all guide to living with others, but its weakness is that it allows us to judge the autonomy and dignity of others by our own sense of autonomy and dignity, rather than, you know, actually asking them how they feel about it. It's only basic courtesy.

A boy one time spent an entire morning asking his classmates if he could shoot them with his finger-gun. I admired his sense of fairness even as I found his line of inquiry unsavory. One after another, the children told him they didn't want to be shot. At some point he complained, "No body wants to play with me."

I answered, "Well, no body wants to be shot. I know I don't want to be shot. But maybe they'll play a different game with you."

He didn't like that idea. "But I won't really shoot them," he moaned, "It's just pretend."

"Maybe they don't know that."

He thought about this for a moment, then approached another child, "Do you want to be pretend shot?" Before long, half the kids were joyfully blasting each other with their fingers, everyone's dignity and autonomy intact.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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