Too often parents and teachers want to let children know they approve of what the child is doing, and by doing so they ruin the “learning moment” for the child. Keeping our egos out of our children’s learning is hard to do, but worth doing, as it can help children develop a stronger sense of self, as these letters show.

So sensitive are we to the possibility of child labor in the exploitative sense that we’ve made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for children to work at all, even when they want or need to. The following piece of unpublished writing by John Holt may help clarify some of these issues.