Episode 16: What Children Can Teach Us About Change & Liberation Through Emergent Strategy

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

• How capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy reduce complex child development into behavior checklists and developmental milestones.

• How systemic oppression conditions parents to dissociate from their humanity in order to perform the “good parent” script.

• Why slowing down and appreciating the lessons on change and liberation our children teach us can be an important social justice action.

• What Emergent Strategy (ES) is and what it has to do with child development and parenting.

• Transforming guilt into accountability instead of shame.

• Nonlinearity and nonlinear cycles in newborn feeding, toddler’s play, and toddler’s self-regulation.

• Unsubscribing from systemic oppression’s idea of an ableist linear progression.

• How parents embody nonlinear cycles too.

• Iteration, repetition, and persistent in young children for the sake of curiosity and connection instead of productivity and efficiency.

• How parents practice iteration through trial and error.

• Decentralization of power and children’s parallel play. How children share space without dominating each other. 

• How parents decentralize power when they meet their child where they’re at. 

• Interdependence and how parents and their children mutually rely on each other to heal their fragmented parts, take up space, and become whole. 

• Defining decolonized parenting as a process of discernment. Who’s raising your child?

• How Charles named systemic oppression’s influence on his parenting style and reclaimed his parenting authority by realigning his parenting with his values. 

• Two ways to make daily parenting an act of power-with, solidarity, and accountability as a decolonized parent.