What's Decolonized Parenting? How to Start Decolonizing Your Parenting?
Parenting comes with many expectations from society that trickle down into your home. These expectations come from oppressive social norms like white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism.
It’s like parenting is a role with “good parenting” scripts we’re forced to perform written by social norms.
Decolonization means unlearning all of these oppressive scripts of urgency, domination, extraction, coercion, control, either-or binary, and perfectionism written by colonialism and upheld by patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. So that we can relearn liberatory scripts like accountability, solidarity, reciprocity, interdependence, and power-with.
Decolonized parenting invites you to do four things:
raise your child according to your own parenting playbook that you’re writing instead of the playbook pre-written by those oppressive social norms.
balance the need to prepare & protect your child to survive under systemic oppression with the need to be present with your child and raise them according to your values.
practice social justice actions in your daily parenting while advocating for policy changes. Because what we do in our homes with our children has to match the advocacy we’re doing in the community.
do all of the above in a community, because as bell hooks wrote quote “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” End quote
While we know that these norms are violent and inequitable, we also know the dire consequences when we don’t conform to the scripts assigned to us based on our identities, even when conforming requires us to contort ourselves to fit inside each tiny box in the demographic form. We contort our bodies to conform and perform according to scripts like “A good immigrant must…” or “A good Asian woman must…” or “A good trans woman must…” because otherwise we risk losing our jobs and then access to food, housing, and medical care.
To survive this “Hunger Game” of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, we’ve conditioned ourselves to perform for the oppressors so we’re not perceived as a threat to the status quo.
As a parent, you love your child and absolutely want to prepare them for the same Hunger Game of oppression you’re trying to survive and to protect them from the same dire consequences of nonconformity. But in trying to prepare and protect them you might unintentionally over-nurture the seeds of coercion, control, extraction, and domination and under-nurture the seeds of care, compassion, connection, rest, joy, and wonder.
For example, you might be extra tough on your child because the world out there is tough. You might train your child to work hard and never give up because that’s how you go to a good school and get a good job. You might see this survival training as a form of love. I mean how is it not love when your parents showed love to you by teaching you and preparing you for the world? But when we default to raising our children by the business-as-usual (or autopilot parenting instead of decolonized parenting), we risk reenacting the same oppression with our children.
To stop perpetuating intergenerational oppression, I invite you to interrogate the “good parenting” scripts and write your own parenting playbook. So that you can raise your child according to your values. This discernment is the heart of decolonized parenting.
How to begin practicing decolonized parenting?
To decolonize parenting, first discern then do.
First, discern “who’s raising my child?” Is it my own values? Is it my in-laws’ beliefs? Is it white colonial capitalist norms of dominance, control, coercion, and extraction? This discernment de-tangles the knots of oppressive social norms so you can align your parenting with your values. Without it, you risk unintentionally practicing autopilot parenting where you “perform” parenting according to white, colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal scripts. Discernment helps you “practice” parenting and raise your child according to your own values.
And if you’re feeling some guilt or shame coming up right now about autopilot parenting, please know that it’s not because you lack the skills or the motivation to practice liberation at home. Rather, when you lack structural support like paid parental leave and universal childcare, sometimes at the end of the day all you have the energy left to do is to “play by the book” to get to bedtime in one piece.
Struggling on the road to liberation is never an individual flaw -- it’s a systemic issue. Liberation is a group project not a solo assignment.
Once you’ve discerned who’s raising your child, then you “do”. You align your daily parenting with your social justice values. For example, you can let your values of nonviolence and abolition guide your parenting decision on how you’d like to set limits during meltdowns. Or, you can let your value of solidarity guide your parenting decision on how you would like to navigate your triggers before meeting your child where they’re at. Not only do these social justice actions offer you rich opportunities to walk the walk, they also promote your child’s brain and social-emotional development at the same time too.
Closing Reflection Questions:
Please reflect on the values you want to share with your child. For example, kindness, community building, or reciprocity.
Then, get curious about the urgency to prepare and protect your child that often undermines your efforts to instill those values in your child. For example, you want to model to your child how you share resources with those who need them in a mutual aid network. But your efforts keep bumping up against capitalism’s conditioning of scarcity that teaches many of us to hoard resources rather than share them.
Often our discomfort and resistance come from some where and knowing their origin stories can help us not get tangled up in them so we can consciously work with them.