Yesterday during our weekly chat on Clubhouse (which you can join in too! Right here) we discussed how being in partnership with our children, how centering consent, how doing all the things we do serves a much bigger purpose.
Ok I’ll back up a minute. Someone actually asked whether we knew of research that showed how kids who are parented respectfully fare in adult life and in the workplace.
I understand the spirit of this question. We want our kids to do well in life and work, whatever that means. We want our kids to be okay. We don’t want them to struggle more than they need to, or feel like they don’t belong in society, or lack all sorts of skills that might help them find work.
Or do we? Because when I read what I just wrote, I have so. many. issues with it.
I think I would be more likely to agree with my statements above, if the world we lived in were a world I actually felt complicit in, a world I felt was worth keeping. I’d be keen for my kids to feel a sense of ownership if we lived in an economic, political, educational, and social system I could get behind. I’d be keen for my children to develop skills if those skills were directly relevant to the survival of a community worth fighting for.
Except they’re not. Because when we talk about, “Will my child do okay in the job market?” we are working on the assumption that a) the job market won’t change, and b) we want them to join the current rat race like a good little rat.
I don’t particularly wish either one of those things for them. Although of course, I don’t wish much other than that they figure out what THEY want, and who THEY want to be. And that I also recognise that a degree of complicity with our current systems might also be inevitable. I’m not naive or privileged enough to believe we someone live on a separate place to all that - we do not. But.
This fairly basic question got me thinking. Are we raising kids to fit into our current system, or are we raising them to question it, to mobilize to change it, to find like-minded people and build something different?
And if we’re doing the latter, do we care whether our kids are going to have “the right skills” for the job market? Or do we trust that our children will always be on a journey of figuring out who they are and what they need, at any given time? That the skills or knowledge or whatever will develop as a result of that? LIKE IT HAS FOR CENTURIES OF HUMANITY?
Because that is what humans are actually built to do. We are built to be curious, to discover, to practice skills, to connect, to collaborate, to create things together and to be interdependent.
We are built for that! Why do we think our children won’t get there?
And worryingly, we do we think that treating children like people won’t prepare them to be.. whole people?!?
Clearly, some of us believe that respecting our children won’t equip them to live in the real world. Some of us need research to prove that it will.
It is utterly mind-blowing that this is the case - both the disbelief, and the need for “proof.”
Here’s part of why: there is an increasing consensus that humans started off in partnership. Of course we can’t generalize about the whole of humanity. Of course we don’t necessarily have incontrovertible evidence for every single human community or group. Of course this looked different in all places in all cultures. What we DO know - and I think we also know this deep within ourselves, not just in an academic paper kind of way - is that we did not become humans under fixed, entrenched systems of domination. We needed one another, at the start. We needed to survive. We were connected and interdependent. We collaborated.
I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
Respecting our children as humans, creating a home where our interactions are not based on “might is right”, are not dependent on one person or group dominating another, is HUGE work.
It’s not huge because it’s new; it’s not new, it’s as old as time (yet we apparently still need “proof” that it “works”). It’s huge because it is breaking a cycle of domination that we have become so steeped in we can’t even see it, nor can we remember or even conceive of a time before it.
We live in a society where dominating, taking without consent, overstepping boundaries, are all routine dynamics. Where power is wielded without a second thought. Where if you have the power, you will almost always find a way to use it for your own benefit, and the benefit of those like you. Where you will try your hardest to come out on top, lest you end up at the bottom. Where you will push and grab and not take no for an answer because that is what you were taught to do. Where you will constantly feel you are being ranked, and exist in a state of scarcity, of never enough.
By choosing to partner with our children we are committing to preserving their wholeness as people. We are committing to stepping out of this societal dynamic.
I am consent-based as a parent because I believe it is the right thing. Not because I’m hoping for a tangible outcome based on societal ideas of success.
What I do hope is that my child will emerge intact from their childhood, and go out into the world requiring everybody around them to respect their humanity, their wholeness. And hopefully do the same for others in return. Not only do it, but demand it for others.
And perhaps they will bring this idea of partnership with them, out into the world. Maybe rejecting that things can only get done by trampling over others.
That is the bigger purpose of understanding consent, coercion and power dynamics. Of seeing domination and they ways it is consistently, predictably replicated in so many contexts, like the dull, uniformly boring idea that it is.
It’s what I hope. You can show we the research too, if you have it. Perhaps we even need it, as a society! But if you stand by the idea that we often repeat what was done to us, that the way we are raised affects the way we go out into the world and build relationships, that in the same way we can break cycles, we can also start cycles, then all the research in the world will only prove what we already know.
What humans have always known, I should add.
So I 100% agree with the conclusion: raising whole children, arming them for their encounters with the world (although the terminology leaves much to be desired) with a sense of themselves and the radical idea of their right to exist as themselves. I paraphrase but…where I disagree is your contention that on a societal level we have ever been anything but a species riven by dominance, greed, pier struggles etc. there is simply nothing large scale or sustainable on a societal level that I can point to. But I would add: that doesn’t bother me. We should prepare our children to choose light, goodness, their own souls, however you want to put it; that’s what the best of humanity has always done. I do 100% think that many many many people in areas of power and privilege in our societies refuse to acknowledge the political and economic structure that underly education. Do they lie to themselves? Truly not know? I have no idea. But it’s a tragedy that all these social justice crusades are horribly bound up in institutional solutions (read solutions that will fail and cause unintended harm much greater potentially than the problem they solve - example, the education) to moral, ethical, and spiritual dilemmas. Humans have always faced these dilemmas, but only in the modern era have we developed a “mass culture” bent on solving them. And the modern era has done so much good! Solving problems of hunger, illness, etc. but the solutions beget new and sometimes worse problems. And this is where I see your education arguments slotting into broader cultural discussions. A solution to a problem (inadequately share knowledge and skill with the written word increasingly needed since Gutenberg) has created a terrible set of other, potentially worse and more pernicious problems! I would say this has happened in all human endeavors, always. And it is so, so important to speak up and to push back to to highlight that the solution is a problem. So, please keep writing :)