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My ethnographic work with children over the past 25 years demonstrates how completing a successful IRB proposal has assisted me in building strong connections with my young consultants. What went unspoken in my 2012 article about the Institutional Review Boards (IRB) was that having worked with an IRB to produce a framework, the researchers must enact in both in the field and in their offices as they write. They must continually engage with children in a respectful and just manner. As I look over my career of working with IRBs to do ethnographies on children in religious communities, I offer scholars insight into how to use the IRB process in ways that strengthen their connections to their young consultants. In so doing I argue that the IRB is not a hurdle to be overcome, but a process through which scholars continually negotiate the core categories of consent, privacy, and harm/benefit analysis.