Speaking Charlotte’s Language is not only a project about better records. It is a project about dignity, developmental honesty, and the protection of very young children from being replaced by shorthand in the file.
It begins from a simple and serious fact: babies and toddlers in care are often described, interpreted, and acted upon before they can speak for themselves. That gives adult language unusual power. It can shape how the child is understood, what support is offered, how contact is interpreted, and whether family relationships are protected or weakened over time.
For that reason, this project cannot be treated as a neutral exercise in wording. It is concerned with the difference between the actual child and the written child. It exists to resist the use of collapsed language that confuses direct observation with adult interpretation, moral judgement, institutional shorthand, or prior concern. Where such language is used carelessly, the child may be acted upon through meanings they never actually expressed in signal.
That makes interpretive precision an ethical matter, not a stylistic one.
It also means the source must remain prior to the analysis. The child’s observable signal, context, and relational field are not inferior to the adult record made about them. The record has authority only insofar as it remains answerable to what was actually observed and honest about what has been inferred.
This declaration also places a demand on the person carrying the work.
If you use it, you live it.
If you live it, you stick with it.
The work is not to be borrowed temporarily for appearance, rhetoric, or bounded institutional convenience. It is to be carried forward in a way that remains answerable to the child, to the family relationship, and to the wider moral seriousness of how preverbal children are written about in care.
Speaking Charlotte’s Language is therefore not optional to me. It is a responsibility to the work itself, to Charlotte, to other children in similar conditions, and to the discussion that must now open if Scotland is to move more honestly in the direction of The Promise, GIRFEC, SHANARRI, and the Voice of the Infant.
This does not mean that others must adopt the work uncritically, nor that it is the only framework available. It means that a real discussion now has to open about how babies and toddlers are described, what is being treated as evidence, and how family relationships may be governed by language that outruns what was actually observed.
The child who cannot answer back must not be replaced by the record.
That is the duty.