Negotiating agency and rights: Consent practices with infants and toddlers in ECEC settings
Background: Consent is often understood as a verbal yes/no response, overlooking how infants and toddlers communicate preferences, boundaries, and refusals. This study conceptualised consent as a rights issue in policy, assent and dissent in research ethics, and an expression of agency in education.
Aim: This study aimed to foreground bottom-up understandings of infants’ and toddlers’ voices by examining how assent and dissent were expressed in everyday ECEC interactions, how these voices shaped participation, and how educators recognised, interpreted, and responded to them.
Method/approach: This qualitative case study was conducted in an infant-toddler room in a Sydney ECEC setting. Data were generated through observations, field notes, photographs, researcher reflections, and a focus group with educators. Ethical approval was granted by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee, with informed consent obtained from families and educators.
Results/findings: The findings showed that infants’ and toddlers’ voices were multimodal and often ambiguous. Educators could both enable and constrain whether these voices were given weight. Without recognition and response, children’s voices risked remaining agentic expressions rather than enactments of rights.
Conclusion: As a pilot study, this research showed that infants’ and toddlers’ voices were present in everyday ECEC interactions, yet often subtle and difficult to interpret. Children’s rights were enacted when their voices influenced educators’ practices, requiring ongoing interpretation, reflexive negotiation, and attention to educators’ assumptions.
Implications for children and families: You are brave and capable of sharing what you want, do not want, or are unsure about. Your gestures, gaze, babbling, smallest movements, and silences are your voice.
Implications for practitioners: You are continually interpreting what infants’ and toddlers’ voices mean, staying open to them changing their minds, and considering how those voices should shape their ways of being, relating, and participating.
Keywords: children’s rights, agency, assent/dissent, early childhood, infant-toddler
This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: