What's The Difference? Ally vs. Advocate

Parent leader Maleika Robinson shares her advocacy origins and how allyship and advocacy can differ and the importance of knowing the difference.

We all have an advocacy origin story and mine starts with an epic fail.

My daughter Mighty, along with the rest of her 1st grade Mandarin immersion class, was having a lot of behavior problems in her classroom due to a new teacher. In order to help, I repeatedly went to the school to provide extra hands for the teacher and discuss the issue with the principal. I wanted the school to provide more support to the teacher while she got acclimated; however, the principal felt that parents needed to better manage their children's behavior.

Throughout her time at this school, Mighty had asked me multiple times to transfer to the Spanish-language track but I never seriously considered that as a solution. We were already on the Mandarin track so I assumed that wasn't an option and never asked. Plus, being fluent in Mandarin would be great for her future. She was a child and of course, she wouldn't understand that. If I could fix the classroom situation, she wouldn't need to change classes and everything would be fine.

Unfortunately, the classroom situation didn't improve - the principal and parents had come to an impasse. Without knowing how to get my issues heard or to get the change needed, we sadly left the school and the community that my family loved, feeling frustrated and demoralized.

That was a serious failure for our family and it put me on the path to learning more about effectively advocating for the needs of my child. But the more critical failure is that I didn't include Mighty in the decision. I was so focused on advocating for a solution that I thought was right that I failed at being an ally to my child.

What's the difference?

An advocate is a person that publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy. An ally is a person who uses their privilege to advocate on behalf of someone else who doesn’t hold that same privilege. They are often used interchangeably, but they are critically different.

In any social justice movement, the best practices of allyship have been defined as becoming educated, learning to listen, examining your privilege, actively unlearning biases, and resisting the urge to be the expert. It is impossible to be an effective advocate without first being an ally, yet when it comes to advocating for children, I have heard very little about the connection between the two. In fact, with advocacy for children, we promote the idea that parents are the experts and rarely mention children as a source of expertise - see the disconnect?

We have an opportunity to expand the framework of advocacy for children to include allyship. We need to examine how our privilege as parents affects our advocacy, unlearn biases against children, and lessen our reliance on ourselves as experts. More importantly, we need to develop multi-generational practices of discussion and decision-making that help adults use their privilege to advocate for ideas that children want and meet the family's needs, not just what adults think is best.

Reflecting on my experience, I know I did the best I could at the time with the skills I had. I believe that if I had the values of listening to children and trusting them, along with believing Mighty as the true expert of her own abilities, we could have come up with a solution that worked for Mighty and kept us in our beloved community. Parents have an extremely important role in teaching our children about participatory democracy. What better way than to learn and advocate for ways in which children can more directly participate in the decisions that affect their lives?