If you want to be able to trust them later, you have to trust them sooner.
This is a core tenet of my approach as an educator and as a parent: let your trust spread as wide and as deep as it possibly can.
The key to making this work is to start trusting earlier, and to continue to increase trust alongside learning. The more children learn about the world, the more they’re able to be trusted in complex situations.
As a parent, if you want to be able to trust an 18-year-old to make good choices out in the world, you need to have trusted them to make their own sandwich a decade earlier, and to be responsible for their own grades and schoolwork in middle and high school.
As a teacher, I want to be able to trust my students to make musical decisions when I’m not on stage with them, and to have effective sectional rehearsals that I’m not in. These bigger trust asks come inexorably from earlier, smaller displays of trust.
Children will honor the trust you give them if you give it to them genuinely. Start small, start early, and continue to build it over weeks, months, and years.