Children rules double standard adults perspective

The Rules We Apply to Children, We Do Not Apply to Adults

February 21, 2025•2 min read

We ask children to live by rules we would refuse for ourselves, and then we are surprised when they stop believing their own perspective has any standing.

The Rules We Apply to Children, We Do Not Apply to Adults

Every school in England is required to have an anti-bullying policy. Most spend considerable resource on its implementation: assemblies, PSHE lessons, peer mentoring schemes, reporting systems, restorative approaches.

The language is consistent across all of them. Bullying is the repeated, intentional behaviour of a more powerful party toward a less powerful one. It includes humiliation, exclusion, excessive criticism, the undermining of confidence, and the wielding of authority in ways that are arbitrary, inconsistent, or designed to control rather than support.

Now read that definition again, and consider how it describes the working conditions of a significant proportion of UK teachers.

Half of all school staff say their organisation's culture has a negative impact on their mental health. Research on teacher burnout consistently identifies being marginalised or bullied by colleagues and managers as a primary driver. An inspection system that teachers' unions have formally described as a health and safety risk, capable of producing suicidal ideation in head teachers, operates with precisely the dynamics we teach children to recognise and resist: sudden high-stakes judgment delivered by an authority whose standards shift, with consequences that feel catastrophic and processes that offer little genuine hearing.

The playground rules do not reach the staffroom. The frameworks we deploy to protect children from the harm of adults wielding power poorly are not applied to the adults experiencing the same dynamics from their own managers and the systems above them. We teach children that everyone deserves to feel safe, heard, and treated with consistency and fairness. We do not always build institutions that extend that guarantee to the teachers we ask to deliver it.

This is not an abstraction. A teacher who is being managed in ways that undermine their confidence and professional identity will, consciously or not, reproduce some of that dynamic in the classroom. Not because they are unkind. Because the environment they inhabit is shaping them in the same way that environments shape children.

The child in the correction-first classroom and the teacher in the criticism-first staffroom are experiencing different versions of the same institutional failure. An anti-bullying policy that does not apply to adults is not a complete anti-bullying policy. It is a children's policy. And children notice.

Kate

Kate Markland is a former award-winning physiotherapist with twenty years of clinical experience, the founder of StoryQuest Global, and the co-author of the international bestselling Adventures of Gabriel children's book series. She developed the StoryQuest methodology from clinical listening principles built across two decades of practice. Taken into schools across the UK, it achieved 100% engagement across 465 children in nine schools with zero behavioural incidents, including children with SEND, EAL learners, and reluctant writers. The research was conducted using Classic Grounded Theory across 318 children, identifying seven self-leadership transformations. It has been presented to the British Psychological Society, accepted by UK Parliament, and submitted to UNICEF. The methodology was built during the hardest period of Kate's life. One hour a week on FaceTime with her son. No desk. No classroom. No permission. What came out of that constraint became an Amazon number one bestseller, a validated research framework, and a movement now reaching schools and families across the UK, India, Pakistan, Canada, the United States, Nigeria, and Australia. Kate has been featured on BBC News, Times Radio, and in international publications across multiple countries. She has submitted evidence to the Justice Committee, the Independent Review of Social Work Regulation, and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. She was awarded the PhysioTimes Women in Leadership Award. She was told she was the danger. She built the proof that she was the answer.

Back to Blog