Some adults have a romantic idea about children. If the adults just stay in the background and give the children plenty of room to manoeuvre, then the little darlings can have things the way they want. But younger children cannot manage freedom in such large doses.
Other adults think that children can only have contributory influence within a very limited area - defined, of course, by adults. Children's contributory influence occurs here in small ways, often with things which are not important from a child's perspective.
When the objective is to support children's self-determination, this means understanding what is important to children and helping them to achieve it as far as possible, though their ideas often collide with adult conventions and are (luckily) full of fantasy.
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