During Week 5 of program delivery, one of the children in St. Lawrence’s Kindergarten group imagined a St. Lawrence with more buses, bus routes, & walkable terrain. I told him I liked his imagined world because it made his school so much more accessible. He lit up upon hearing the word, “accessible.” It was new to him; he asked what it meant. I said it means “something that is easy to do. For example, with your buses, getting to school would be easy to do. It would be accessible.” He was so excited. “I want to make everything ac – stess – a – bull,” he said. “I want everyone to use the busses and play together.” His hope was palpable and effervescent. As a disabled person, I could tell that he was thinking about my comfortability, about everyone’s comfortability. I was filled with excitement, fantasizing about a disabled future.

It made me think about how the hardest privilege to see is one’s own; even more so when one is a child that has barely developed a grasp on the societal structures that make up our social norms, rules, & ways of living. I had always thought that children tended to focus mostly on themselves, but this child made me reconsider that assumption.

I wondered how this child would feel about his city upon learning about the prioritization of car infrastructure over walkable terrain & accessible ramps; the removal of safe consumption sites across all of Ontario; the barrier for Indigenous communities to access clean drinking water. What would he think about the integral decline of for-profit thrift stores, the ones with prices so inflated they have become the enemy of the low-income communities they initially served? I had no idea that children could feel how hard it was for others and themselves to travel within and across Hamilton.

We sometimes assume that kids lack critical thinking and cannot see the metaphorical bigger picture, but we could not be more incorrect. As much as I am in an educator position, I appreciate that there is a level of reciprocal learning from my side as well. I love that I can introduce kids to different perspectives, which encourages them to think more about the world they are growing into and the future they want to help shape. It gives me hope that even though our city infrastructure can sometimes be challenging and unwelcoming, there are still many citizens in our community who care about each other and strive for positive change.