Make Room
April 6, 2026
We keep naming laws after children who were harmed.
Isaiah’s Law. Benji’s Law. Megan’s Law. The Adam Walsh Act. Jessica’s Law. Erin’s Law. Each name is a memorial and an indictment — evidence that a child suffered because the systems meant to protect them moved too slowly, listened too little, or looked the other way.
While in foster care in Idaho, nine-year-old Isaiah and his siblings endured abuse during court-ordered visits with their biological parents. His foster mother, Monique Peyre, listened to her children. And then she made the system listen, too. Monique called lawmakers. She testified. She brought the children’s stories — their own words, their own experiences — into rooms where policy is made. Governor Little just signed Isaiah’s Law, which gives judges a clear framework for pausing visitation when physical or sexual abuse has been substantiated.
What Monique and the families behind these laws accomplished deserves to be honored. But the fact that we celebrate each new protection is itself an indictment — not just of policy, but of how we think about children in the first place.
The thread connecting so many failures is not just a lack of laws or good intentions. It is something more fundamental: a way of thinking about children that treats them as extensions of their parents’ rights rather than as human beings with rights of their own. When children are regarded primarily as subjects of adult authority, their safety becomes negotiable, secondary to ideology, convenience, or cost. The problem is not what happens in most families. It is what happens when systems fail to protect a child the way a loving caregiver would.
This pattern has deep roots in Idaho. The state was home to six federally funded boarding schools where Indigenous children from the Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock, and Coeur d’Alene tribes were separated from their families, stripped of their languages, and forced into a system designed to erase who they were. At the schools in Fort Hall and Fort Lapwai alone, at least forty-two children died. These were not distant institutions; they were part of Idaho’s landscape, operating within living memory. The last one closed in 1974. The premise underlying those schools — that adults in power knew best, that children’s own voices, cultures, and bonds did not matter — is the same premise that surfaces whenever we fail to treat children with dignity.
That logic has not disappeared. It has just changed form. Idaho remains one of a handful of states where parents can deny their children lifesaving medical treatment on religious grounds without facing criminal charges. Under the state’s faith healing exemption, at least two hundred children have died of treatable illnesses since 1972. The same law does not protect a parent who denies medical care to a spouse — only to a child. Advocates, law enforcement, and a former Idaho Supreme Court justice have called for repeal for over a decade. The legislature has repeatedly declined to act. In both boarding schools and faith healing exemptions, the pattern is the same: adults claim authority over children’s lives, and the systems that should intervene defer to that claim.
Isaiah’s story shows us what it looks like when that pattern breaks. When Monique carried his words into the Statehouse, a child’s experience reshaped Idaho law. That did not happen because an adult decided what was best on a child’s behalf. It happened because an adult listened — and then made sure the people in power listened too. That kind of listening is more than a technique. It is a moral commitment to honoring the dignity of every person, including and especially the youngest among us.
That commitment shapes our work at the Wassmuth Center every day. Each Tuesday morning, preschoolers and their caregivers gather for Compassion Crew, where four- and five-year-olds practice asking questions, naming emotions, and speaking up for one another. Not someday, but now. In our Wassmuth Youth Leadership Program, high school students are not simply learning about human rights. They are looking at the communities where they live, identifying the issues that shape their daily experiences, and building their own initiatives in response. No one had to ask them to care. The adults just had to make room.
These young people are showing us what becomes possible when we stop deferring dignity and start listening. We can cultivate the kind of communities where their voices arrive before the harm does.