“What If Kids Don’t Need to Be Controlled?” is a powerful and provocative exploration of how our cultural norms around parenting, education, and childhood are rooted in fear, control, and compliance. Narrated by unschooling advocate Akilah Richards, this video challenges the long-held belief that children must earn freedom through obedience. Instead, it invites us to imagine what it would mean to raise children through trust, consent, and mutual respect—not coercion.

Through deeply personal insight and systemic critique, the video reveals how adults often project their own fears—about safety, success, and social acceptance—onto children, resulting in parenting and educational practices that suppress authenticity rather than nurture it. It asks viewers to consider how forced schooling, reward-and-punishment systems, and top-down models of knowledge perpetuate oppression, especially for the least privileged among us.

Richards introduces unschooling not just as an educational alternative, but as a liberation practice—a child-trusting, anti-oppression, love-centered approach to life and learning. Unschooling honors children’s autonomy, emotional intelligence, and innate curiosity, offering a way forward that respects their personhood rather than molding them to fit societal expectations.

Perfect for parents, educators, and anyone questioning conventional approaches to raising children, “What If Kids Don’t Need to Be Controlled?” is a timely call to rethink what it means to nurture trust, freedom, and true belonging. In a world that normalizes control, this video dares to suggest that liberation begins with how we treat the youngest among us.

 Are children inherently untrustworthy? Could we never really trust children enough to grant them certain freedoms? Like the freedom to decide how they wanna spend their time or what they wanna learn?

And I’m asking because young people sure do push for their freedom. They seem to believe freedom to be a human right. I. But our collective adult response is usually something like, no, no, honey. Freedom is not something you are born deserving. Freedom is something people must earn. And I think one reason we push this message is because we, adults have fears around what might happen to children, not just in terms of their safety, but also in terms of their life outcome.

We are afraid of our children growing up to be untrustworthy or worse, unsuccessful. But the way we assuage these fears is to let them lure us into parenting and educational practices that are themselves rooted in fear and lack of trust. We wanna raise trustworthy people, but our approach. Is to control children, their time and their tasks effectively, keeping them far away from the types of life experiences that help to build trust, essentially.

We tend to trust young people based on their level of compliance to us, but is that how trust works? I used to think so until I became a parent and witnessed my children’s academic growth. At the expense of their emotional wellness. And then I couldn’t keep buying into that belief system at all. And I realized deciding that an entire group of people is inherently untrustworthy until we fix them to be trustworthy is madness.

And it’s dangerous. It’s actually orienting us towards toxic and oppressive ideas about what is normal and what is healthy in our relationships. And we do these toxic and oppressive things, not because we don’t love children and want the absolute best for them. We do it because we were taught that we were untrustworthy.

And so we haven’t quite developed the language and practice that roots our parenting and our education in trust instead of fear. So we resort to these oppressive strategies like forced schooling, for example, not because we know that schooling will definitely help us raise trustworthy, liberated people.

We do it mostly because it’s what we’ve always seen. Because today in our society, tools of oppression are far more normalized than trust-based practices. Children should therefore be forced to participate in daily punishment and reward-based systems rooted in the notion of knowledge being this top-down thing passed down to an empty vessel learner from a teacher forcing children to engage in curricula that deliberately pervasively omits black, indigenous, and people of color contributions and knowledge systems from narratives about history and the present.

For many of us, this is a type of liberation work. I call it raising free people. Part of our raising free people practice happens through unschooling. Unschooling is a form of self-directed education. It is different than homeschooling in that it doesn’t enforce any particular curricula or have predetermined ideas of what children should learn.

Unschooling often equals liberation work. The work of raising free people in community even, and particularly among the least privileged. My own definition of unschooling is a child trusting, anti-oppression, love centered approach to living and learning. It’s so much more than an educational model. It’s a way of life, and it’s rooted in consent, respect, and confident autonomy.

Unschooling is helping children to build their self-confidence. They fail at things without being shamed for it. They check in with their own bodies instead of being told when to eat or when to go pee. And they’re developing language and practice for recognizing how their own biases can be harmful to other people, and how to do better mindful questions and trustful practices like the decision to raise free people is helping so many of us to recognize and even disrupt other forms of oppression.

We cannot keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people, so we must examine privilege and power, particularly in our relationships with children.

Akilah S. Richards is an author and digital content writer. Her liberation-focused work explores unconventional parenting and lifestyle choices to help people leave or change the environments where they do not feel free or safe as themselves. She is an intersectional feminist writer with a keen focus on amplifying the spectrum of black and brown voices in the self-directed education (unschooling) movement.

For more information about the speaker, visit her website.

Music Credits:

Guest Editor: Special Thanks to Jeff Young