Kids Actually Do Care: Dr. Stephanie Serriere on Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers

Dr. Stephanie Serriere shows how young people care far more than we give them credit for — and how listening to them, teaching consensus, and letting go of outcomes can raise a generation of peacemakers.

Stephanie Serriere and Nell Rose Hill

9/14/20265 min read

Peacemaking tips from Stephanie Serriere

Ask young people what's on their mind — then really listen. Don't write off "kids these days" until you've made space and asked. Reposition yourself so they can be heard.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Disagreement isn't a problem to avoid; it's part of being human together. You don't have to be on the same page to move forward.
Let go of the outcome, and trust the seeds. You can't control where things land. Even when an idea doesn't win, the experience can change someone in ways you'll never see.

Kids Do Care

That's Dr. Stephanie Serriere, and she's spent her career proving it. Where a lot of us see young people as apathetic or checked out, she sees something different: a generation that's paying close attention and just waiting for an adult to make room for them.

Stephanie is a professor of education at IU Columbus and the director of the iEngage youth civic empowerment camp. A former elementary teacher who has taught around the world, her research centers on youth civic engagement — supporting the real, relevant issues in young people's lives. In 2025 she received Indiana University's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Building Bridges Award. We sat down with her to talk about what she's learned from listening to young people, and how that listening turns kids into peacemakers.

Reposition yourself, and open up space

We asked Stephanie how adults can better hear young people. Her answer started with the adults, not the kids.

"We have to reposition ourselves," she said. "We have to open up space for youth to talk about what they really care about." So much of the time, we come to young people with our own agenda already set — here's what we're going to learn, here's what matters. Real listening means loosening our grip on that and letting them tell us what's actually on their minds.

She points to Roger Hart's "ladder of participation," a framework describing the levels of involving young people — from tokenism at the bottom (asking for their input just for show) up to genuine collaboration at the top. But Stephanie is careful about what that top rung actually means. It isn't handing kids all the power and stepping back. Sometimes they don't yet know how to do things — and that's fine, because adults have expertise too. "It's not just giving them all the power and letting them lead. It's saying, how can we work together?"

Kids can do more than we think — even the little ones

The heart of Stephanie's work is a belief that peacemaking and civic action can start young.

She traces the roots of her camp to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who founded iCivics and believed knowledge alone isn't enough — that citizens have to do things, not just know things. That idea grew into iEngage, a "learn and do" camp developed at Baylor University, where Stephanie trained before bringing it to Indiana. Kids don't just study how a community works; they research a real local issue they care about and take action on it.

And the capacity for this shows up earlier than most of us assume. Stephanie loves an example from literacy scholar Vivian Vasquez: a group of kindergarteners who realized they'd been left out of a French café event at their school, and wrote a petition — in big, phonetic, all-caps handwriting — asking to be included. It worked. Five-year-olds, changing a decision through their own voice.

Stop shaming the mistakes

One of the most quietly powerful things Stephanie said was about how we react when kids get conflict wrong.

When a toddler mispronounces a word, we don't shame them. We gently correct them and move on, because we understand they're learning. But when a child fumbles a conflict — says the wrong thing, handles a disagreement badly — "we tend to shame. Oh, you did that wrong." We treat a conflict mistake like a family travesty instead of what it actually is: practice.

Her whole approach flips that. If reconciliation is a skill, then mistakes are just reps. The goal is to let kids practice conflict and repair the same way they practice reading or math — with patience, low stakes, and lots of chances to try again — so that by the time they're adults, it's second nature instead of something they suddenly have to figure out under pressure.

Consensus isn't a vote

At camp, when a group of kids has to make a decision, Stephanie doesn't just call for a show of hands and let the majority win. She uses a technique called the "Fist of Five," from the National School Reform Faculty. Everyone shows one to five fingers to signal how much they support an idea — and crucially, any child can hold up a fist to "veto."

That single move changes everything. It means the quiet kids, the outvoted kids, the ones who'd normally get steamrolled by a majority, all still have a voice. The group can't just barrel past them. They have to slow down, listen, and keep working until they've built something closer to real agreement.

"Consensus isn't about winning a vote," she told us. "It's about listening and building agreement together." That's a peacemaking skill most adults never learned — and she's teaching it to ten-year-olds.

Disagreement is part of being human

Stephanie is refreshingly unafraid of conflict. She sees the instinct to avoid a hard conversation — "let's not bring that up, we'll never agree" — as exactly backwards.

"Diversity of thought is welcome," she said. Disagreement isn't a sign that something's gone wrong; it's a normal, healthy part of people being together. What matters is learning to be, as she put it, comfortable with being uncomfortable. When Nell brought up the idea that it's not us versus them but us versus the problem, Stephanie lit up — that reframe is exactly the muscle she's trying to build in young people. You can disagree strongly and still be on the same side, facing the problem together.

Let go of the outcome

We'll leave you with the idea that stayed with us most.

Stephanie told the story of a camper whose big idea didn't win the group over. It would have been easy to see that as a failure — the kid didn't get her way. But that girl went home and started her own club around the very thing she cared about. The camp didn't give her the outcome she wanted. It gave her something better: the confidence and the skills to go build it herself.

That's the long view Stephanie holds onto. You can't control where a conversation leads, and neither can the young people in it. But even when an idea doesn't win the day, the experience can change someone. Sometimes you plant a seed you'll never see grow — and it grows anyway.