Ep 81: [Story Time] How I Came to Social Justice Parenting Work

I’m a firm believer that when you practice something for a long time, it’s worth stepping back and remembering why you do what you do. And this episode is exactly that. You’ll hang out with me as I share with you what got me committed to practicing liberation with you and our children and how the Raising Change Agents book came about. There’s no new invitation for you to try, no new analysis to think about…just you and me being humans together. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get our story time started.

[OPENING]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

The heart and soul of Come back to Care

Liberation is both a vision and a verb. That’s always been the soul of Come Back to Care. A vision of society free from cops, corps, and cages where our children thrive with their chosen families without surveillance, punishment, policing, and coercion. A vision where our children have the freedom to be who they actually are, not who they ought to be based on the social identities assigned to them. A verb because to get to that vision of liberation we practice it in every interaction. We release power-over policing and instead rehearse power-with with our children, partners, community members, and co-conspirators. Social justice actions are in these intentional interactions. We’re not waiting for the right savior to be in office or for federal budgets to be restored. We practice liberation in everyday parenting. We’re not waiting for a mass protest. We practice social justice with our children today during the morning rush, mealtimes, play time, bath time, and other ordinary moments.  

And of course, this invitation is not new. It’s deeply rooted in lineages of abolitionist organizing, transformative, disability, and healing justice. We abolish power-over policing in our heads, in our homes, and in our neighborhoods…one interaction at a time. 

What is new, however, something that’s unique to Come Back to Care, is the idea that when you practice social justice actions with your children (most of the time), you promote their development and lay a foundation of resilience with them. The same thing is true for early care and early childhood teachers, therapists, and care providers. When you weave liberation into the care you provide, the impact of your care work deepens. You’re in a coalition with the families, supporting the caregivers to become change agents who raise their children to become change agents too. You’re not standing above the families as a savior. You stand with them in solidarity as you move towards liberation together. To say it a different way, the heart of Come Back to Care —and our unique contribution to the larger work of abolitionist organizing -- is that we connect the dots between social justice actions and child development science. It’s both-and…feeding two birds with one worm and making abolition “irresistible” to use Toni Cade Bambara’s word.

What inspired this theory of change and how Nat arrived at this invitation

And it all started with doing the dishes. Or, trying not to break the dishes in my sink because adolescent Nat was too enraged by transphobia, to be more precise. When I was 16 living in Thailand, my trans sisters and I did what we had to do to survive while staying safe from the unnecessary violence of transphobia. And you have to understand, not all jobs were welcoming and available to trans people, at least not back then. We did what we had to do. But one intentional thing my sisters and I did was to build meaningful relationships with a few store owners with hopes that when we felt unsafe we could come to them, hide in their stores and so on without having to call the police. And it worked! When organizers here in the United States say “we keep us safe,” it’s real! Over time, we built a real relationship. I got to know the owners and their families. One of their sons became my boyfriend. They got to know me as a person beyond my gender identity. At the time, I didn’t know that what we did was organizing or political education, let alone activism. We were just trying to stay alive. Looking back now, we were practicing transformative justice without knowing that there was a name for it. 

You could say that my sisters and I ran a campaign and organized for our safety. The campaign was successful. I mean I’m still alive and kicking. I did stay safe. I also stayed enraged by the injustices against our community. I was young and cute. I had no clue how to take care of my nervous system or metabolize rage. I walked around consumed by rage. I would scrub the dishes and smash them in the sink. Oh, the drama! The drama was real. Organizing and winning this so-called campaign helped me stay alive, but I was far from living, further from living fully where I’m connected to my body, my dignity, and my joy. I remember this particular a-ha moment so clearly. I remember realizing that fighting for liberation was not just about organizing with my people and winning campaigns, but it was also about living each moment fully too, especially the mundane ones like doing the dishes and watering my plants and putting on a lipstick. Because what’s the point of me staying out of harm’s way if I was still too enraged to connect with myself, the land, and spirits? To me, liberation is definitely a daily practice of both the outer community organizing work of how I love people, land, and spirits and the inner healing work of how I love myself.

How practicing liberation with children promotes their development

As you can imagine, when I started working with children and families in Thailand, I brought both lenses to the work: early childhood special education and liberation. Time and time again, these two elements nourished each other. When caregivers practice liberation with children- for example, by sharing power with them and meeting them where they’re at instead of powering over them and controlling them all the time, it promotes children’s ability to feel safe enough to explore the environment, play, try things out, make mistakes, fail and try again, all of which are how children learn. When caregivers practice social justice in their everyday caregiving, children feel safe enough to feel their feelings, learn how to move with these intense feelings, and use these social-emotional skills to make friends, to resolve conflicts, to own their mistakes, and to apologize and actually mean it. So, social justice parenting or radical care nurtures children’s brain development, social-emotional development, attachment, and overall resilience. 

The science makes sense, right? And it goes against the common sense of how to raise children at the same time. The common sense that demands tough love as a way to prepare our children for the tough world filled with all the -isms, -phobias, and antis-. In Thailand, there’s even a common saying that roughly translates: “if you love you kids, chain them. If you love your cows, whip them.” This common sense of adult supremacy makes zero sense to me. And if you want to explore adult supremacy and child development science, I’ll link all these episodes in the show notes for you. 

How the Social Justice Parenting Playbook was co-created

But of course, science without social context is not helpful. Because you, like most caregivers, want to protect your and our children from white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. And over almost two decades, I’ve found that families across races, classes, genders, disabilities, and immigration status want their children to have a better life aka to survive and thrive. There’s a real and practical need to raise our children to be both survival smart and liberation smart. But the problem is when you and I are so triggered and tired from surviving the Hunger Games of Capitalism, we get so reactive and protective. We’re stuck controlling, coercing, and surveilling our children to make sure they’re safe. We end up policing our children to protect them from police brutality. We end up powering over our children to make sure they know how to survive. And we forget that thriving is what we want for our children too. We forget to equip them with liberation smart skills. 

This is why I wrote Raising Change Agents: Practicing Social Justice in Everyday Parenting, to help you balance equipping your children with both survival and liberation smart skills- especially when you’re triggered and tired, trying to survive the Hunger Games of Capitalism. The main framework in the book is called the Social Justice Parenting Playbook. And the Playbook begins with one question, what do I want my child to know right now: how to be survival smart or liberation smart? And you take it from there, choosing how to power-with with your child and promote their development at the same time. 

And that’s how the Social Justice Parenting Playbook was co-created. Co-created because it couldn’t have happened without all the children and families I’ve served in Thailand and the US since 2007.     

But more importantly, the book, the framework, and this podcast were born out of my love for children. My trans sisters taught me how to love the world when the oppressors seek to erase us. But it’s my pre-school students on the spectrum in my first classroom in Thailand who taught me how to love myself, all of myself, unapologetically. Out of this love, the question we ask at Come Back to Care is simple: what if we treated children as change agents? Not as blank slates to be molded or shaped but change agents with dignity and agency. Not as passive victims to be shielded from the world but change agents who are active participants in their learning.

With this wondering, both the podcast and the book ask us to roll up our sleeves and practice liberation in our homes and neighborhoods. 

The Raising Change Agents book asks: wanna start practicing abolition? Start with your reaction. Yup, those emotional reactions after getting triggered.  

The podcast, in similar ways, asks: wanna dismantle white, colonial capitalist patriarchy? Start with adult supremacy. 

So, my dear co-conspirator, what if you treated your children as change agents? What would parenting look like?  

[CLOSING]

And that’s a wrap. Please let me know how you like this story time series where we get personal and take time to reflect and digest the previous episodes together. Feel free to email me at nat (n-a-t)@comebacktocare.com.

Please consider supporting my work by joining our Come Back to Care Patreon or buying copies of Raising Change Agents everywhere you buy books…if you have the financial resources. Or, share this episode with someone you love, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast if you have the time and energy to help me keep this political and parenting education going. 

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.