Emme Caldwell

About

I write about what happens when you take children's autonomy seriously. Not as a parenting hack or an ideological stance, but as a genuine reckoning with how we raise people. Most of my work sits at the intersection of education, psychology, and the patterns we inherit without choosing them.

I homeschool my daughter, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about how children actually learn versus how we assume they do. That question led me into cross-system education research — comparing Montessori, Waldorf, classical, unschooling, and dozens of other approaches not to rank them but to understand what each one sees that the others miss.

Before any of that, I was already deep in trauma healing and developmental psychology. The through-line is agency: what builds it, what breaks it, and what it takes to restore it — in ourselves and in the kids we're raising.