Fostering Children’s Freedom

23 April, 2026

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EduFamilia

Voices

31 October, 2025

7 min

Fostering Children’s Freedom

A Guide to Helping Children Grow Up Free, Responsible, and Happy

Not only respect, but promote freedom!

Respect would be an understatement.

Human freedom is destined to grow constantly.

Therefore, a proper education strives to foster and strengthen the freedom of students, helping them to make it increasingly firm and broad.

Educating is not only about respecting,
but also about fostering children’s freedom
positively and consistently,
according to their age and circumstances.

Educating and promoting freedom: fostering love.

Educating for freedom

With regard to freedom, the educator’s task is threefold:

To make the student—in our case, the child—aware of the nature and sublime value of their own freedom.
Teach him to exercise it correctly, in accordance with that nature and that worth.
To help him be able to exercise it in that way.

As we will see,
educating is equivalent to fostering
authentic, genuine freedom.

Promote freedom

A relatively clear “need”

In more direct and practical terms, the task of the parent-educator consists of:

to foster the freedom of each child in a continuous and determined manner,
without fear or hesitation,
teaching them and encouraging them to fly as soon as possible
and consciously assuming the risk (and suffering) that all of the above always entails.

And this is for a very fundamental reason, which in one way or another has been present throughout all these articles.

Namely:

because only those who are free can truly love,
And only those who truly love to develop and grow as individuals and, as a result, are happy.

Although difficult to accept

But it is not easy to fully understand what freedom is and its close relationship with good and with love (a relationship that I can only point out here, but which I have developed extensively and in detail elsewhere).

This lack of understanding of their deepest nature often leads to an unjustified fear of freedom, which prevents it from being fostered properly and ends up turning children, as the years go by, into eternal adolescents, with all the problems that this entails.

It is not easy to understand
that the greatest enemy of one’s own freedom
is selfishness, the disordered love of self.

Promoting the freedom to “neglect”

Promoting freedom = developing love

Although now is not the time to substantiate this truth, ultimately, whoever frees themselves from the slavery of selfishness is truly and radically free:

♦ who is capable of wanting the good of the other as other, forgetting himself;

♦ who is capable of loving.

He acts with freedom
who overcomes the slavery of his own self,
the chains of selfishness.

Promoting freedom as the capacity to love

How to begin to sense it?

In contrast to what happens to animals.

Freedom is relatively easy to understand when contrasted with what is necessary, required, or predetermined: with what cannot be done in any other way.

And, as instincts compel animals to pursue their own good—determined by their instincts—, freedom, by contrast, is realized in wanting what is not compelled by our instincts-tendency: that is, instead of one’s own good, the good of the other, precisely as others.

And, according to Aristotle, that is precisely what love consists of:

in wanting and seeking the good of the other, precisely as others;
That is, in loving him for his own sake, effectively seeking his good, that which improves him and makes him happier;
and not for oneself, pursuing one’s own benefit.

Promoting freedom means
promoting and developing
the capacity to love,
to want the good of the other as others.

To promote the supreme freedom of love

Who is truly free?

He who, once he knows it, does good because he wants to do it, out of love for what is good.

On the contrary, those who act incorrectly “lose” their freedom because, deep down, they are not capable of wanting and doing what they would and should want and do (what they would and should want and do… if they had more knowledge or more willpower: more and better love, ultimately).

A man may take his own life because he is “free,” but no one would say that suicide improves him as a person or increases his freedom.
Even if one can understand the reasons that led to suicide, no one in their right mind will argue that that person actually gained something by taking their own life.

Educating for freedom or fostering freedom therefore means helping to distinguish what is good —for others and, consequently, for one’s own happiness— and encouraging the corresponding choices and appropriate actions, always out of love.

He fosters freedom
by helping to distinguish what is good
and encouraging people to do it, always out of love.

Love the freedom of our children!

Promote freedom from a very early age

Giving children increasing freedom with prudence helps make them responsible, capable of growing on their own, of loving freely, of being better people and, as a final consequence —or result—, of being happy and content.

And that starts to be built very early on, even before the birth of each child:

When, contemplating it with the eyes of the soul in the mother’s womb,
We warn that he is more a son of God than our son
and that our task as parents is to disappear,
forgetting our preferences,
except to the extent that we help them advance on their path of growth as people or, what amounts to the same thing, on their path of return to God.

For parents,
fostering their children’s freedom
means learning to disappear
for the benefit of their children:
for their human and supernatural development.

A crucial warning to parents!

Avoid excessive dependence of children on them (on their parents)

Contrary to the oft-repeated assertion that one’s own freedom ends where that of others begins, it is much truer and more profound to believe that one’s own freedom only grows when it promotes and fosters the freedom of others.

Therefore, any kind of dependence of children on their parents indicates a lack of genuine educational ability: an excessive attachment to oneself, which robs us of freedom and results in harm to the children.

We don’t count! We shouldn’t count.

What truly matters is the real good of each child, which can only be achieved by exercising their freedom.
Hence our commitment to constantly promote and improve it.

One’s own freedom only grows
when one knows how to foster the freedom of others.

Promote freedom, for love!

Learning to trust children

Saint Josemaría Escrivá’s long experience as an educator allowed him to affirm:

“It is preferable that [parents] be deceived sometimes:
The trust placed in children makes them ashamed of having abused their power, and they correct themselves;
On the other hand, if they do not have freedom, if they see that they are not trusted, they will always feel compelled to deceive.”

When children are not loyally trusted, and
their freedom is not encouraged,
they will be moved to deceive us.

To educate is to foster freedom

I stated in previous articles that the goal of all education is to teach how to love.

It can also be said, since it is essentially the same thing, that to educate is to promote freedom.

Or, to put it more clearly, educating is about gradually making those in our care more free and independent (or better yet, helping them to become so):

so that they can learn to fend for themselves as soon as possible,
be in control of your decisions,
and act with complete freedom and total responsibility.

So that they may become well-rounded individuals, gradually approaching their full potential.

Educating is not just about respect,
but about fostering each child’s freedom in a positive way:
ensuring that they
know how to be self-reliant and capable
of making their own decisions.
Only then will they be capable of loving.

(To be continued)

Tomás Melendo,
President of Edufamilia
http://www.edufamilia.com
[email protected]

EduFamilia

Edufamilia es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro, nacida en el año 2005. Su fundador, Tomás Melendo, advirtió que una mejora en la calidad de las familias facilitaría la resolución de bastantes de los problemas que aquejan a la sociedad de hoy. Y, apoyado siempre por su mujer, decidió lanzarse a esta aventura que cuenta con casi veinte años de vida y con múltiples ediciones de los distintos cursos formativos: Másteres y Maestrías, Expertos, cursos más breves, conferencias, ciclos culturales, seminarios y otros programas educativos. Aunque las primeras ediciones tuvieron carácter presencial, actualmente se ha hecho un gran esfuerzo por promover la infraestructura virtual para adaptarse a los nuevos tiempos y que la formación en torno a la familia alcance al mundo entero.