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Chapter 4 63 the sense that the adult (generally) is the educator and the child the one being educated. The trust they have in each other might therefore be of a different kind. Baier sketches the ‘natural order’ of trust to show how children start from initially unself- conscious proto-trust to eventually self-conscious (chosen) trust. 57 We agree that most children start from a position of great, possibly unconditional, trust (or better yet, ‘proto-trust’, since the concept of ‘trust’ arguably does not meaningfully apply to babies and infants yet) in their parents, which is rooted in their (initial) full dependency on their parents. 58 Above that, children need parental trust. In a general sense, as Bollnow said, trust is important for human beings, and especially for human (intimate) relationships. But it is also important in a particular, pedagogical sense, because, ‘[b]y this trust the child is stimulated to both accentuate and expand his capacities’. 59 As such it is ‘a condition for the development of the capacities of children’. 60 But for parents this is different, they do not depend on their child to stay alive; they are not dependent on their child in the same way as the child is dependent on them. However, in a different sense one might argue that parents and children are mutually dependent, because they are in an intimate relationship together, and as such what the child does will affect the parent and vice versa. This type of dependency makes it also important for parents to be able to trust their child. According to Spiecker, appropriate trust is characterised by a cognition (belief), which is properly grounded. 61 We think that this is true for parents’ trust in capacities/powers of the child. For example, letting one’s child crawl up the stairs all by herself, trusting her to be able to do that, is usually well grounded in the fact that before this point, the parents have supervised her crawling up the stairs numerous times. ‘Statistics’ persuade them to trust her stair-climbing capacities. Trusting one’s child’s good will/inclinations seems to be different. Initially there are no ‘proper grounds’ for parents to trust their child’s good will. However, this doesn’t seem to be a reason not to trust one’s child. Generally, we think, out of love for one’s own child, and because of the uniqueness of this intimate relationship (the mere fact of the child being one’s own child), a parent will start from a sort of a priori position of (an inclination towards) trust in the good will of their child. 62 We argue that this is not a rational form of trust, if ‘rational’ is taken to mean that other 57 Baier 1986, p. 236. 58 See also Baier 1986, pp. 241-242. 59 Spiecker 1990, p. 163. 60 Ibid., p. 158. 61 Idem. 62 It can be argued that rather than to start from trust, parents start with the hope that their children will have a good will. We think that because hope can be defined as desire plus expectancy (see Eagleton 2015) parents also expect that their child is trustworthy, and therefore it can be assumed that parents start with an inclination towards trusting their child.