Parenting Through Adversity
Whether you are a keystone, or caught between a rock and a hard place is a matter of how you let these times shape your relationships
The idiom “caught between a rock and a hard place” originated in the early 1900’s characterizing a conflict between copper miners and mining companies. Their choice was between keeping on with terrible working conditions (a rock) or facing unemployment and poverty (a hard place). The phrase became popularized during the great depression of the 1930’s as the cultural theme for 25 years was being squeezed by two unpleasant choices.
For most of us, when we feel the squeeze of two unbearable options, the impulse is to shrink away from the pressure, freeze and wait it out, harden against it or wiggle out away from it. Such was the way of our grandparents who survived the depression and their children who inherited the stoicism of that era. I propose there is another, more resilient option: to lean into it, let it move you, allow it to change you, to stay with the trouble until it finds integration in you
Be a keystone
Rigid things crumble under pressure. Dynamic things adjust. The key is to be firm, but not hard, flexible, but consistent, like clay. To tune your eyes and hearts to what is already working and breathe life into that. Teach that. Grow that. Be shaped by that.
Ask yourself and your children:
How do you see people carrying out their relationships based on trust, love and responsibility?
What supports this way of being together?
What makes relationships thrive?
Transformative potentials are already present and new ones are emerging everyday. Though there is violence, extremism, division and suffering, things can be otherwise and they already are. We must tune in, tend, activate, connect and defend the processes of change that we already see happening. This is what it means to be a keystone in your family.
A keystone is the stone at the apex of an arch that allows the arch to bear weight. It is the leaning in of the stacked stones that holds the keystone in place and the keystone is what allows the stones to lean in without falling over. Each of the stones alone would fall in one direction or another at the whim of gravity, but leaning together they form one of the strongest shapes known to geometry.
One of the greatest risks of troubling times like the ones we are in is further relational wounding. Most of us would agree that generational and ancestral trauma is the source of the majority of current power imbalances and what prevents their resolution. Hurt people, hurt people and these unresolved relational wounds fester generation to generation until we actively try to heal them. What we can do is simultaneously heal ancestral wounds and lean in to each other to prevent more relational wounds from compounding. We can embody a kind of parenting model that is hopeful, that participates in active healing, struggle and the practice of shared power. It starts in our own homes and ripples out from there.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ~Rebecca Solnit
To be a parent is to have an active kind of hope, a shove you out the door kind of hope because you are compelled to contribute to the creation of a better world for your children to inhabit and you are spurned by the incredible responsibility to make their world, today, right now, inhabitable.
I have chosen to shape myself and my family in direct relation to struggle, healing and transformation. It was thrust upon me as a young mother as I survived the preventable death of my husband due to failings in the healthcare system. Becoming an activist as a widowed mother of 3 white sons opened my eyes to the injustices that permeate all the institutions we are taught to rely on. In the years of rising up from the ground in solidarity with my grassroots kin, I anchored a number of keystone lessons in raising conscious kids that I will highlight here and follow with a series of more in depth writings on each.
Don’t teach kids what to think, teach them HOW to think.
For our kids to have confidence in adverse situations and effectively lead themselves, we need to teach them to think critically and creatively about differences of power.
Mindful reflection and systemic thinking foster interdependence because self awareness is central to sensitivity in relating with kin having a different experience than ours. Mindful reflection includes
1. Self awareness
2. How we soothe ourselves
3. Personal accountability
Systemic thinking is a tool for seeing the complex patterns that form to precipitate current events. Systemic thinking asks what beliefs and values underlie this event? What are the relationships between the values and patterns? What have the trends been over time? Where are there opportunities to intervene at the various levels that led to the event?
Model emotional intelligence by using transparency
Transparency builds durable bonds because when we take emotional risks with each other and model empathy, our relationships are deepened. Nurturing relationships are not an escape from or bypassing political violence, they are the very means of undoing power over structures that devalue care work. Undoing empire also means undoing oneself. Undoing oneself means becoming capable of becoming something new. When we make obvious to our kids how we are navigating our own emotions, we provide them with a lens to normalize their own emotions and a map to navigate their own internal terrain.
Find leverage points and inspire imagination
Leverage points are places within a system that we can intervene. We can call this resistance, fighting the good fight, uprising, even militancy and that’s fine for adults. For children and youth, it’s helpful to get to the root of what resistance is trying to do such as transform and reorient relationships, create resonant communities of practice, make new things from old things, and nurture interdependent and response-able ways of being together.
Neuroscience is contributing to our understanding of the role of imagination in the development of empathy. Imagination is a neurological bridge between empathy and self-regulation. So, in the complex system of our children’s brains imagination = empathy = self-regulation = accountability. Imagination is essential for effectively solving complex problems.
“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be accountable” ~Carla Bergman
Model generative leadership
Modeling affirmative experience by verbally acknowledging a different behavior or value can change the way our genes are used. It can alter their potential to grow in one direction or another. Imagine the power for social change that influencing your child’s gene formation holds by simply affirming what is working! Researchers are showing that epigenetic patterns can actually be reversed. We don’t need to wait for some future date to celebrate transformation. If we are contemplating the questions at the beginning of this writing with our kids, the change is already happening. That means that the shape of us is different throughout the day, the week, the month and the year. We are already otherwise, right now.
Change is emergent.
When families create a culture in which they feel genuinely supported and cared for, each member is able to extend this to the greater community. When families are nourished and their minds imaginative, they find themselves willing to confront injustice and take risks together because the individuals are transformed in the transforming of culture.