Inspiration
From Chapter 4: Parenting for Economic Justice, by Jaimie Lynn Kessell and Angela Berkfield
When my oldest two children come home from (public) school having just been taught a civics unit where they are learning about how our government supposedly operates, I do the work to correct the inaccuracies they learned. As we sit around my dinner table every night, after sharing stories about how our days have gone, my family dismantles all kinds of complex concepts like white supremacy, the patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, racism, global warming, and economic inequality. I talk about what is happening in the world with the kids in the exact same ways that I talk to other adults about the same subjects: both factually and passionately. I express freely my fears and encourage the kids to do the same. I do vision work with them as well, by talking about what we think a just society would look like.
From Chapter 7: Parenting for Collective LIberation, by Angela Berkfield
One of the precious gifts that parenting has given me is the gift of holding multiple truths at once. This is an important skill for collective liberation: recognizing that liberation isn’t about one or the other, but instead multifaceted. In my house we are laughing our heads off one moment, arguing the next, and calmly reading the moment after that. We go through so many emotions together all day long that I can’t keep up. This emotional roller coaster is one of the aspects of parenting that has been really frustrating for me. But now, as I’m waking up to how tumultuous the world really is, I can see how this lesson of parenting is useful for adults as well as kids. I have been building my skill of holding anger and love at the same time, pain and beauty simultaneously, holding deep grief and also moving through that grief to take action, and holding a vision for justice, even while the world seems to become more unjust by the minute.