229: Raising kids in divisive times: Where do we go after the 2024 election?

Adrian 00:03

Adrian, Hi, I’m Adrien in suburban Chicagoland, and this is your parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child, from tooth brushing to sibling fighting to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from 1000s of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you’re facing that hadn’t seen possible before. If you’d like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not. That’s less than one minute long that describes what’s happening, and email it to support at your parentingmojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.

Jen Lumanlan 00:52

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Last time I did an episode like this was in January of 2020, right after the US capital was stormed. And so this is the only episode I’ve done since then that focuses on current events, and it is not one that I have tightly scripted, because I would have taken another two weeks to be able to do that. And so it’s definitely an episode that I don’t feel totally comfortable with. So I just want you to kind of know that going in, I don’t find it easy to comment on current issues, because I need time to process and digest but this was kind of too big to let pass. So I find it hard to know what to say about big events like the election, because I’m not a political analyst, and frankly, it kind of drives me up the wall when people who don’t have much knowledge about child development and parenting, uh, kind of like, you know, economists tell us how to raise our children, and because making the best decisions for one family using economic rationale doesn’t help us to create a society that benefits all families. And so if you have sophisticated political analysis, you may find mine to be lacking. It’s mostly drawn from other sources which are cited in the references for this episode. I do draw very heavily on Dr John Powell’s work, and you can hear from him in our episode 114 on how to stop othering and instead build belonging. And he has a new book out that I was very interested to read, and I also draw heavily on Dr Jonathan Heights work as well. So what I’m going to do today is to kind of share some ideas that I hesitate to share because they may not be popular with listeners. Not everybody sees the connections between politics and parenting or wants to see them. Parents have told me that they put off episodes related to social issues that I have recorded for, quote, unquote when they have time, and that they focus primarily on the episodes that will help them with their children’s behavior, which I totally get. But then they tell me, Well, I just, you know, I never have time. And so I do wonder, Are we a little more willing today to start to see the connections between the ways that we are raising our children, between the political climate and you know, our children’s future. And so a lot of people have already written about why Trump won, and so I’m going to draw on those ideas and try to understand what that means for our families, for our culture, for where we go from here, connecting quite a few different ideas from different places. Because I think the argument that all the people who voted for Trump are racist misogynist is kind of dangerous. I don’t think that that’s really real. Maybe some of them are for sure, most of them are not. And so why did they vote for him? Where do we go from here? Can we avoid going through this again? And if so, how do we do that? And so the first tool that I’m going to draw on is Dr Jonathan Haidt model The Righteous Mind. And I have to give a hat tip to Dr Ari Parsi, whom I interviewed in a podcast episode a few months ago, and she was the person who introduced me to his work. I actually read it after I had already written parenting beyond power, and as I read it, I was like, yes, yes, yes. And I wish all of this could have been in the book as well. So it was too late that ship had sailed by that point, and so the purpose of the book is to to kind of uncover how liberals and conservatives have such different ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong, and the underlying idea is that our opinions are really kind of based on gut instincts about our morality rather than reason. And so there’s one central graph that’s in the book, and I’m going to post these charts that I’m going to walk you through, sort of verbally on the episode page, so that you can go and see them for yourself. And so the first chart is one that I basically rebuilt directly from his book, and he illustrates how liberals and conservatives perceive different issues. He has these five major foundations, and Haidt argues that we evolved each of them to help us cope with specific challenges that we face throughout our evolutionary history. So these five foundations, the first one is the care harm Foundation, which helps us to care for vulnerable children, makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need, makes us despise cruelty and care for those who are suffering. The fairness cheating Foundation helps us to cooperate with each other. It makes us sensitive to indicators that other people are likely to be good partners for collaboration, and makes us want to punish cheaters. The loyalty and betrayal Foundation helps us to develop group coalitions that are essential for survival, where we become sensitive to signs that another person is a team player, and makes us trust and reward people who are team players and hurt those that betray our group. The authority subversion Foundation helps us to forge relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies, and makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status and to signs that other people are behaving properly given their position. And then finally, the sanctity degradation Foundation helps us to cope with the potential risks and rewards of eating a wide variety of foods, and now the challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. And so the diagram kind of shows, you know, given these five foundations, how important are these two different groups of voters? And so the key thing that you can kind of see in this diagram is that liberals see care and fairness as incredibly important to almost four on a scale of zero to five, with zero not being at all relevant to their views, and five being extremely relevant. And liberals see loyalty, authority and sanctity as not being very relevant to them at all, between kind of a one to 1.5 on that zero to five scale, conservatives put these issues in roughly the same order of importance as liberals, but rate them much more evenly. All cluster between two and two and a half on that scale of zero to five. And so the way that we express these foundations is also very different, and liberals will use policies like health care to provide care right, health care for all conservatives want to be able to provide for their family in a way that they see best and don’t want the government interfering in their lives. So conservatives see care as being relatively less important than liberals do, and also the way that they want to provide care for their families differs from the way that liberals want to do that. Liberals want to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, while conservatives think that each person should take care of themselves, and if they can’t do that, then their church should help them, because accepting help that you haven’t earned is called free riding, and is not acceptable, right? Liberals are willing to accept a degree of free riding to know that wealth is being redistributed and that everybody kind of has what they need to survive. Liberals talk about getting rid of in groups, which leads us to things like open immigration policies and conservatives primary loyalty is to their in group, the people who are already there. And kind of thinking back to a book that I read on New Mexican history a while ago, and I had never fully wondered why Hispanic Latino voters vote for conservatives, and that book helped me to understand that there’s the people who are have been in the US, the who identify as Hispanic or Latin X for generations, see themselves very differently as immigrants that are crossing the border, and the old timers kind of see, you know, I’ve been here forever. I’ve been here before this country was even a country, and you all are just, you know, Johnny come lately, who are trying to flout the rules, and that’s not okay, and illegal immigrants should be kicked out. So I had perceived this kind of shared heritage as a reason why Hispanics, Latinos should be kind of supporting immigration when actually people are seeing it very differently. Liberals want to flatten hierarchical power structures to increase equality. So conservatives like the hierarchical power structures of church. They like having a strong president who’s going to lay down the law to others, and the idea of lawlessness is not okay. And then there’s the cleanliness purity, right? How pure is the in group? So liberal see everyone’s ability to be their whole selves is important, and that kind of fits with the care fairness Foundation, whereas conservatives perceive this as contamination. And so conservative viewpoint might be that transgender people are a threat to the natural order of the two sexes, and so they see this as a contamination. And Seth Moulton, who’s a Democratic Representative in Massachusetts, said Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. He said, I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that. So that kind of walks through kind of the five moral foundations and how they fit together. So if you can basically kind of imagine this arrow shape where we’ve got kind of liberals on the left really kind of thinking this. Because the you know, the care and fairness are really important, and also the loyalty to the in groups is not so important, right? We should get rid of the in groups. We should flatten power structures. We don’t really see these contaminants as a threat. So there’s a real bifurcation between those two things. And as we head over to the right side of the diagram, where we represent conservatives, all of those are considered much more evenly. They’re much more evenly important to conservatives. And so after the election, I was just kind of thinking, Okay, can I translate this into the idea of needs that we talk about on the show? And if you’re not sure kind of what needs are, I would definitely encourage you to go to yourparentingmojo.com. Forward slash needs and there is a list of needs there, and I basically use that list to try to think through, okay, what do these concepts mean to the people who hold them as best I can, right? Obviously, I identify as a liberal. I don’t fully understand the conservative position, but based on Jonathan Haidt explanation, can I understand what needs conservatives are trying to fill, and also what needs Democrats are trying to fill, right? And so I so I’m sort of thinking through, okay, well, care for all. It means care for everybody, right? Care for for everybody is casting the net as broadly as we possibly can, and government is the mechanism through which this happened. And so sort of big government is kind of necessary to be able to make that care for everybody happen. Conservatives on the other side are kind of seeing, you know, care for few is the most important, and autonomy is super, super important as well. I want to decide what’s best for my family. I don’t want the government telling me what’s best for my family. I perceive that as government overreach. And then there’s sort of the, you know, the fairness equality obviously very important to liberals, and that contrasts with the independence and self reliance that’s really important to conservatives. So liberals will say, you know, every person gets what they need, and conservatives will say, Well, every person gets what they earn, because what’s in my pocket is most important. Loyalty is about group belonging and how wide we draw that circle. So conservatives will draw a pretty narrow circle around family and church, and liberals will draw that circle really wide and say, you know, everybody belongs. Liberals want the freedom that comes with flattening and subverting power structures a strong hierarchy where there’s kind of God at the top, and then the President and men in charge feels comfortable for conservatives. So there shouldn’t be any lawlessness. When we think about the Israel, Palestine, Israel is seen as civilization in the Middle East, rather than, you know, free Palestine, sort of subverting the power structure that’s in place there. And then finally, you know, liberals think that my and your and everyone’s self expression enhances the group’s beauty, and conservatives see that self expression as threatening the group’s purity. So there, we’re talking about sort of needs related to self expression and cleanliness and purity. So, you know, obviously this is where you get the culture wars. So Trump has sexual impurity, right? That’s pretty obvious, but other factors are more important to people who vote for him. And so then I started to think, well, you know, is there some overarching need or set of needs that kind of sits over all of these needs for liberals and sits over all of these needs for conservatives? And what I eventually realized was that we can ladder them all up to safety, but that safety means different things to each of the two groups. So for liberals, safety means the ability to be and express our whole selves, basically to be in integrity, right to have these values and live in alignment with our values. And for conservatives, safety is about having the ability to provide for my family, and in a capitalist society, that means having enough money and the autonomy to decide how I spend it government doesn’t get to make that decision, and also the autonomy to decide, like think, cultural things in my community that feel really important. And so I think that we have to find ways to help conservatives feel economically and culturally safe and have a real say in how we get there without compromising our Liberals’ ability to be our whole selves. Because when conservatives feel safe, they’re going to be more willing to share resources with others. When we liberals don’t feel safe, we seek power as a substitute too, right? Conservatives are seeking power through voting for Trump, and obviously they’ve got power, and a number of them are very happy about that, and so they weren’t feeling safe, and so they sought power, and they won, and we voted for Harris because we wanted to not lose the power and hopefully gain some more power to self express and to be in integrity. So and I think, you know, I just want to kind of situate this within the idea of a meritocratic society, which we like to think that we have here in the US, which is the idea that I have what I have because I earned it, because social and economic arrangements are natural and neutral. And so, you know, any any decision that we make is a real decision and it’s based on, you know, any any person could make the same decision that I could make. And so, you know, I’m going to use an example here that obviously I don’t believe in, but the view that, well, native people can make a choice not to be an alcoholic. I’ve had a hard life, and I’m not an alcoholic. So, you know, why don’t they just make a different choice? And, you know, digging into the data on this to just kind of, you know, illustrate this point, a 2002 study on alcohol dependence and treatment among 172 Native American and Native Alaska Native women found that 81% had been emotionally, physically and or sexually abused as children. 78% had been abused as adults. Over half had been abandoned by one or both parents, raised by relatives, sent to a boarding school or had run away from home as a child. Close to 100% of the study participants described using alcohol to suppress grief, self pity and loneliness. 43.4% of Native Americans surveyed had an alcohol use disorder at some time in their lives, compared with 32.6% of white people. And so the point that I’m trying to illustrate with this example is when we frame the choice not to drink as a personal choice, and ignore the very real trauma that these individuals have faced, as well as the historical trauma of genocide and displacement, we’re ignoring absolutely critical context. Building on that, I also think if a third of white people have an alcohol use disorder at some point in our lives. Is the system really working so great for us either? Because I would kind of argue that it isn’t. And you know, the traditional argument against sort of helping one group of people more than another is because individuals are free. They form their own preferences and they act on them, and any sort of departure from this that privileges one group over another interferes with free choice, which is a key value of conservatism, and anyone who challenges the status quo that provides their free choice is blameworthy, and it doesn’t take us very long to get from there to seeing whites as racial victims and the racial other, right, in this case Native Americans as an undeserving perpetrator. So just trying to kind of illustrate how some of this thought process might be working on the conservative side, but we liberals are not off the hook. And in fact, I would say we are very much not off the hook. I believe that we have been very hypocritical on three of the main tenets that we kind of form, that we hold as an integral to our way of being, and those are care for all fairness and belonging. And so I want to walk through just some illustrations of the ways that that has happened. So if we think about care for all right, when social security was enacted, democrats held the presidency, we held the house, we held congress by, you know, by a huge margin in both cases. And social security provided for white male, able bodied workers and agricultural and domestic workers were deliberately excluded as an appeasement to get it passed. And of course, that excluded 65% of African American workers and the 75% of women who didn’t work outside the home at the time. And this policy is not racist in intent, right? Nobody going back to the you know, Seattle schools, nobody’s saying, Oh yes, I’m going to deliberately discriminate against black people and against women, but it had racist, it had misogynist implications. Same for the Highways Act that encouraged white flight into the suburbs and bulldozed urban neighborhoods. There’s the GI Bill that paid for education and housing loans, but was implemented at the local and state levels, not nationally. Was overseen by Southern congressmen. So black people were excluded, they’re rejected, they’re discouraged from participating. And 98% of the benefits of some portions of the GI Bill went to men. But the Supreme Court found no discrimination, because there was no proof of any explicit, conscious desire to exclude women. So, you know, bringing this to, I think a more, more recent set of data, the GDP is ever increasing, right? There’s a, there was a tiny little dip at this at the beginning of the pandemic. Unemployment is around 4% right now, which is not very high. And so we’re kind of throwing these numbers out. I’ve seen the New York Times throw these numbers out a lot in the last couple of weeks and say, you know what, everybody’s fine. There’s there are no problems here. There is plenty of money to go around, and what they don’t tie into that data is average home price jumped $125,000.

Jen Lumanlan 19:29
During the pandemic from 400k to 525k housing rental rates are up 8% in one year from 2022, to 2023. Child Care is up 32% from 2019 and how much your hourly wages up 4% the stock market is up over the last five years, and that benefits the wealthiest families. And a very big reason why house prices are up so much is people who did very well in the stock market during the pandemic, who realized that they didn’t have to work in the office anymore, could work from anywhere, and started moving out across the country and buying up housing stock that otherwise would have been very affordable for people, and pushing local house prices up so that locals couldn’t afford them anymore. So is that care for all? Is that really what care for all looks like? Because I don’t think it is. It doesn’t seem like care for all to me. The second issue where I think we’ve been hypocritical is fairness, right? We know it doesn’t make sense to treat people who are situated differently as if they were the same, if we think about reparations, right? Ta-Nehisi Coates essay on the Case for Reparations, we believe that that people should be treated differently based on the difficulties that they’ve had in their life, which, frankly, white people have been the result of, you know, have been the cause of many of those difficulties for in quite a lot of cases, and particularly white men, who also create difficulties for women and for white women. But when we think about, you know, the transition to clean energy, there is a huge split on the values of different different groups. And when they think that, you know how fast we think that that transition should come, if you talk to liberals, they think, oh, yeah, clean energy, yeah, we should do that right now. But there are people who work in coal mines, in in steel plants and oil drilling, right? Climate change is, is going to hurt all of us. Yes, that’s true. But you people who are not making my very much money to begin with, you kind of have to, you know, just go up your job, just kind of suck it up, you got to retrain, do something else, we’re not going to help you retrain. You got to figure that out, part out for yourself, so that we can all have a functioning planet. And I think this kind of brings us to Dr John Powell’s work that we talked about last time, which is where he talks about targeted universalism and the idea that, well, universalism is a policy that benefits everybody the same, right? Things like social security now, things like minimum wage, and they don’t take into account where people have come from, they just treat everybody the same, whereas targeted policies treat people differently based on where they come from, but people who think that they are losing out via those policies get very, very angry about those because they think they’re missing out. And so we need to change the way that we make policies so that we can be more fair, so that we aren’t telling white workers that you, you know, you just have to, you know, suck it up and and change what you do for a living and move to somewhere else when your family tires are here and you have, you know, ties to this place so that so, because it’s fair to everybody right that we minimize climate change. And then the final one that I think is really important, and this ties directly, very directly, to John Powell’s work, and that is belonging. And we talk about belonging as if it’s kind of cut and dried. And if you are a person who believes in belonging, then you’re a good person. And if you don’t, then you’re not right. If you are, if you believe that all races should be, you know, treated equally ideally. But in the meantime, we’re, we’re not really there yet, right? Then, then you’re welcome, and if you are colorblind, then you’re not welcome. You’re either racist or you’re not racist. And actually, we there’s no sort of cut and dry I’m racist, you’re not racist, or the other way around, right? We can act on racial anxiety, on bias in one situation, and then openness and fairness in another situation, and we see this all the time, right? Democrats will send their kids to private schools so their kid doesn’t, quote, unquote, suffer in a public school where kids get low test scores. And I’ve obviously looked at a bunch of studies on this four episodes that we’ve done on this topic. But just to take one example, a study where the authors interviewed self identified, progressive white parents was filled with quotations from parents who were worried about their child being a minority in school. And here’s one example. Parent, Suzanne, didn’t want her daughter Vicky, to attend a nearby public school because whites weren’t in the majority at the school, and the parents said Vicky would have been the minority as a white person, I think as a white person, you start thinking about things like that. You don’t really think about that much. One of the schools was like 10% white and 70% black. Another school seemed to be okay. There are a lot of white people, there are Asian people, there’s, oh, this is an Indian kid, you know, there’s a good, a good couple of black people and it just seemed like a better mix. And so Suzanne is expressing a desire for diversity in a mix of students. But she makes it clear, the most desirable mix is where whites are in the majority, and whiteness is the norm. And so, you know, we say we should welcome immigrants. Good liberal, you got to welcome immigrants. But then in the Bay Area, where it’s sort of Bastion right of progressive thought, we don’t want to build more housing, because it will quote, unquote, change the character of the neighborhood. And so teachers in the Bay Area no longer can live near the schools they teach in. It’s not uncommon for teachers to have three hour daily commute, right hour and a half in each direction every day, so that they can afford to live in the house that their salary will support and have a job. And so there’s this joke that somebody told me a while ago, and I can’t remember who it was or where I heard it from, but it’s sort of, you know, I think it made me laugh. I think it was fairly accurately depicting how we think, right? If a conservative walks into a bar full of conservatives and says, Hey, I’m a conservative, all the other conservatives are like, Oh, hey, come on in. And if a liberal walks into a bar for liberals and says, Well, I’m a liberal, everybody in the bar is like, well, how liberal Are you? Right? We want everybody to see the issues in exactly the same way that we do, and use the language that we use. And every single issue, the person has to have all their ducks lined up in a row on those issues, and then we cancel them if they don’t see it the same way that we do. And to me, that doesn’t sound like belonging. It doesn’t sound like we are actually living in alignment with our values here. And you know, if we think about who voted for Harris, who voted for Trump, we’re going to talk more about the parenting beyond power book club that I’ve been hosting with Kerry Cavers of moms against racism. In a bit. I was on that call on Friday, and we were talking about the election, and we were talking about, you know, how we’ve been reading how a lot of Democrats are asking. Well, how could anyone vote for someone who has such bigoted and misogynistic views? You know, isn’t that a deal breaker? And one of the participants at that book club said, quoted comedian Meg Indurty, and said, If you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for Kamala Harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him. And I just thought, wow, yeah, that kind of brings it home, doesn’t it? And so that starts to have me thinking, Okay, well, where, you know, where are we going from here? Related to this idea of belonging, and I had seen this long post from a listener of mine. Actually, we’re connected. I don’t know the person you know personally we have never met, but I assume it’s a listener to the podcast, and that’s how we got connected. And this post is talking about how the person has been hearing calls to find common ground with Trump supporters, and they say that racism, homophobia and misogyny are not political views. The man has been found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law. He took children away from their parents and put them in cages people died who didn’t have to because of his COVID response. That’s not a difference of opinion, that’s a deal breaker. And why is it always minorities in the oppressed who are asked to be patient, to be understanding, to reach out the olive branch while they’re being actively harmed. It’s not only unjust, it’s exhausting. And then this person goes on to state their views on a variety of topics that liberals, including me, typically support. And then the text accompanying the post concludes, you can’t say, leave politics out of relationships and then vote for a party that wants to take away my rights and supports policies that endanger my children’s future. And, you know, I see Trump as a demagogue, and he’s seeking support by appealing to people’s desires, to people’s prejudices, rather than by using rational arguments. And so demagogues incite fear in their supporters, and they cast others as responsible for those fears, and those fears are mostly directed downward toward marginalized and less powerful people, and Trump is by far the first person to do this right. Karl Rove, who orchestrated George Bush’s election campaign, pushed a bunch of same sex marriage referendums out onto ballots, into a bunch of states, to stoke fears among Christians that their religious traditions were under attack, which then got them to the polls to vote for George Bush.

Jen Lumanlan 28:44

And so I want to start kind of weaving in this idea of identity and identity threat. Whenever part of somebody’s identity is threatened, that part suddenly becomes very central. And so, you know, in the Karl Rove example, religious identity suddenly became very central for people who were offended by the idea of same sex marriage, and for me, you know right now, my and my daughter’s female identity feels very central and obviously same for my listener as well. And people who identify as bipoc or transgender or queer now may feel very threatened and Trump activated an identity threat for conservatives by stoking these so called culture wars. And I think back to the What’s the Matter with Kansas book right trying to understand why people would vote against their economic interests. And in doing this, Trump has been incredibly successful at uniting disparate groups. His most obvious voter base is white men, but just over half of white women voted for him as well. We’ll talk some more about why that might be in a little bit, along with 24% of black men, 47% of Latino men, despite all of the you know, Puerto Rico’s floating garbage patch comments uniting those groups around the common enemy of Harris’s support for transgender people, which they ran ads on absolutely relentlessly in the last couple of weeks and was never answered by her. And you know, the belief that women should not have power over their own bodies, which some women go along with. And so this kind of hatred of the external other is one of the best, most effective unifying agents available. And he was massively successful at doing that. And so there’s sort of a catch 22 that I see in sort of how to respond to this, which is that when we’re organizing to do something in response to Trump, we are forming social group. So Right? Social group, social movements, and these social movements require a sense of group identity, of cohesion, of solidarity, and that inspires people to contribute over a prolonged period, because it’s gonna like, we’re two years from the midterms, right? That’s gonna be our first real opportunity to change things up. But even as we create solidarity amongst ourselves, we make and strengthen the identity that is excluded. And so this is coming from Dr John Powell’s most recent book, how we build belonging without othering, and it’s a fantastic book. I highly, highly encourage you to read it. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, and so I’m going to quote a lot of examples from that book as we kind of move through the rest of this episode. One of those is that Russia invaded Ukraine because the Russians think Ukraine is part of Russia. But during the invasion, pro Ukrainian attitudes inside Ukraine increased. It was almost like, you know, the Ukrainian, Ukrainians were not super, super nationalistic, but the invasion incited the nationalism, the nationalistic attitudes inside Ukraine, right? They can. It consolidated the Ukrainians desire to use the Ukrainian language, even among people who had spoken Russian from birth. And so the same is true right now, right? In scapegoating women, LGBTQ people, so called minorities, Trump makes these identities even more important for not all, but some, many of the people who hold them right now. And that’s kind of the position where we are right now. If you’re listening to this podcast, you may well be seeing that some of your some aspects of your identity are very valid. I feel it feel very kind of at the fore right now, and things feel scary. And so if we respond by attacking Trump voters because they voted for Trump, we make that part of identity even more important to them. If we attack them for thinking gun rights are more important than children’s lives, their identity as a person who holds a gun, who exists within a culture of gun ownership becomes threatened.

Jen Lumanlan 00:32:46

And I, you know, I also want to, sort of, I don’t want to neglect, you know, the liberal elite aspect of this kind of talking down to women, even, right, that you know there was obviously a big message from Harris on we that you vote for me and is a vote for it, for your own power, for your own autonomy, but also right? I’m thinking about that ad that was narrated by Julia Roberts, and she was the ad is showing these white women who are secretly voting for Harris when it seemed like their husbands are expecting them to vote for Trump. And some women, right? Even some, some opinion columnists thought that Harris was talking down to them. And, you know, the this obviously brings to mind here Hillary Clinton with her basket of deplorables coming which, which was meant to mean that Trump supporters are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, right? All of those things and kind of united them around this idea that, you know, you wealthy liberals, don’t get to tell us how to think. And I also want to kind of look at the economic story here, because I do think that that Trump was was successful with people who earn relatively less money on a national scale. Right on the national level, poorer white people were more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones. But there was some really good analysis done that said that when you factor in local conditions, this relationship actually reverses. So when you look at it at a very local level, so people who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes were more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor and sociologist, early hot, hot child’s book, stolen pride. She’s an awesome writer, by the way. She has done a lot of work. The second shift was a book of hers that I read that’s really fantastic on how women will you know their their role in the family is to be the person who is the caretaker and who keeps the home clean and does all the cooking, and that we do that as kind of the second shift, even though we’re working. So she has a new book called stolen pride, and she argues that Trump appeals to these people’s pride in their region’s traditions and their shame in what it’s become as these tradition. Well paid blue collar jobs decline and are replaced by in many cases, rising drug addiction. And so this voter, this Trump voter, may not be struggling personally, but his region is and Trump kind of offers up liberal coastal elites who support LGBTQ people and minorities on a platter as the people who are responsible for this, and so Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas are angry that they don’t set the social terms of American life, and political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with. And then, you know, we can also equate this to French Revolution, which was not triggered by the desperately poor. It was triggered by the middle class who wanted more political power. And, you know, I think that this, this was also kind of espoused in the, I think, after the last election, the New York Times ran an article that was sort of, you know, I forget how many graphs it was, but it was something like, you know, eight graphs that that show the difference between liberals and conservatives. And one of them was, you know, what show they watch. And so among liberals, Game of Thrones is super, super hard at the time. And among conservatives, it was Duck Dynasty, which I think Americans might call Duck Dynasty, but I’m pretty sure it’s Duck Dynasty. And so, you know, there was just this real cultural, I hesitate to say the word bifurcation, but a split, maybe, between the kinds of media we consume, between the things that we think are important, and that really shapes how we vote. And so when people who used to be in a position of power in their group see others getting help. They perceive this as a direct threat to them and to their families, right? And this comes up in the transgender girls competing with girls in school sports is a threat to their daughters. Women who have rights like choosing who to vote for are a threat to the biblically based definition of marriage and family, where the man is in charge and he gets to decide how she votes. And there’s a former basketball player, Royce White, and he challenged Senator Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. He was on the podcast the fallen state, and he said that marriage, marrying a college educated woman would probably not be a good idea. And the podcast host Jesse Lee Peterson opposes women having the right to vote, and said during the interview, educated women do not make for good wives and mothers. And fortunately, Amy Klobuchar bar won, and so Amy Klobuchar did win that that re election, but we’re seeing a lot of candidates who have these ideas, right? This is not just Trump. And so Trump talks about protecting women, quote, unquote, whether they like it or not, right? And this is actually a form of male domination called benevolent prejudice. And so it’s different from hostile prejudice, where you’re potentially being verbally or even physically violent towards women. Benevolent prejudice is where women are idealized and cherished, and it creates the illusion of support for women, while also reducing their autonomy because they are weak and fragile and in need of protection. And so in countries where sexism is most prominent, women actually endorse benevolent sexism even more than men do. But even in countries where men endorse it more than women. The difference is not very large, and that includes in the US. So when, when Harris is sending out these ads, kind of saying that women have the right to vote for whoever, whoever they choose, there’s a good number of women in this country who don’t think that that’s the case. And so, you know, we’re just to kind of bring this back up again, right? We’ve got this, the belonging, the fairness and the care for all, are kind of the three areas where I think that we have been a little bit hypocritical, because we we’ve been saying that these are our core values, but we have not really been living them. We’ve not really been caring for everybody. We’ve not really been fair to people who have had to give up their income so that we can transition to a clean economy. Just as an example, we have not really been that great about creating belonging for everybody, especially for immigrants once they actually get into the country, especially for conservatives as well, right? We’ve not been very good at creating belonging with conservatives. And so when we when we think about where we go from here, I think Dr John Powell proposes a couple of alternatives, right? One of them is segregation. Well, yeah, maybe not, because this worsens into group violence. And obviously he this is his argument. This is, this is not the way to go. If we think about partition in India, as India’s sort of partitioned in India and Pakistan didn’t really end well. Apart, apart apartheid in South Africa didn’t really go very well. We could sort of require assimilation, where everybody has to forget their culture and just become American. And I think we’ve sort of tried that, right, the great American melting pot. But you know, requiring that everybody leave their culture behind is is an incredibly traumatic thing. Thing to require that people do. We have tried anti discrimination laws and policies, and these have reduced disparities in poverty rates, home ownership rates, education levels and life expectancy to some extent, but they’ve also created a lot of resentment among some white people, I think a really important place that we have to go from here is the thing that my my listener, with the long Facebook post didn’t want to do right is taking the other person’s perspective. And in one study, it was white and Asian people who were the study participants. They were asked to take a black man’s perspective, and they were introduced to this person by a photograph or a film clip, and then the participants who had done that exercise to take that person’s perspective. Were then told that there was a fictitious lab assistant who was black, who needed help in practicing his interview skills, and the people who had done this perspective taking exercise set up their chairs much closer to each other than people who had not take done the perspective taking exercise. They also did another experiment where they did the similar perspective taking, and then there was a black experimenter who would come in and have a conversation with the people who had either done the perspective taking or not, and the black experimenter didn’t know which participants had done the exercise and which ones hadn’t. And the experimenter rated the kind of warmth and sort of forwardness of the participants in the study as higher when they had done the perspective taking exercise than when they hadn’t. So there so taking somebody else’s perspective can be a really powerful exercise. And you know, I was actually in the shower a couple days ago thinking, we have to listen to Trump voters. We have to understand why they voted for Trump. And then later that morning, I actually found an article that said that after Victor Orban, who is in Hungary, lost an election in 2002 He then spent years holding civic circles around Hungary. These were grassroots meetings, often around churches. They built an agenda, a sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. And so I hope that somebody in the Democratic Party is thinking. Okay, how do we start doing this right now, right? How do we start understanding, really, what led Trump voters to vote for him, and how do we not just listen and sell right? Which I think is, is a reason I’ve never done the sort of door knocking that candidates always want, sort of, you know, hardcore voters to do is to go and knock on other people’s doors and convince them why they should vote for that candidate. I’ve never been comfortable with that, because obviously you’re trying to convince the person whose door you’re knocking on to do something. And I assume you’re kind of, you know, listening for just enough of some sort of sense of commonality to be able to use it as a hook to say, oh, yeah, you know, my candidate is going to do this thing that’s really going to help you. And to me, that’s not really listening. I think that we have to listen with an intent to understand. And it’s only from there that we actually are going to be able to generate ideas, to generate strategies that are going to help these voters. And just coincidentally, a few days ago, I was listening to something on KQED, my local NPR station, on a new park that’s opened in India basin in San Francisco, and it’s in Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, which is a historically black neighborhood where basically anything that the rest of the city didn’t want it ended up there. So that’s where the shipyard is. That’s where industry is. And so the park developers for the city. We’re talking about how they had developed Tunnel Tops, which is a park on the other side of the city, on the north side of the city, which is heavily, heavily white, very well off. And apparently, the park developers kind of said, well, we want to build a destination park that anyone will come to. Everybody is welcome here. We’re going to build something absolutely amazing, and people will come to it. And a few years after it opened, they ran a user survey, and they found that the vast majority of the people who are using the park have a very high household income and they’re from within a quarter mile of of the park. So they built a very lovely and very expensive neighborhood park, and so they started using the same approach in India basin, and started kind of building this destination park model. And I guess the parks department was talking to one of the local organizers and kind of saying, “Well, why is nobody very excited about this?” And one of the organizers saying, “Well, we don’t think you’re building this for us”, and I think that that’s what we’re doing when we are knocking on people’s doors and trying to get them to vote for our candidate. We’re kind of saying, you know, this is what’s already built. We built this amazing park at Tunnel Tops. Don’t you want to come? And instead, what the park developers did was they had listening circles and they really heard what it was that people wanted to get out of the park, and so they ended up building in money for things like swimming lessons, because of segregation in swimming pools and because there were not as many swimming pools available for black kids to learn how to swim that many black kids today, a lower proportion of black kids today can swim than white kids can. So they built swim lessons in as part of it, they found that people wanted extra large benches so they could have really big family gatherings around the benches. They wanted every single bench to be disabled accessible, not just one bench to be disabled accessible. And I remember them describing how they put these kind of porch swings at the entrance to the park, because it was reminiscent of homes in the south, because a lot of people who live in that neighborhood had migrated from the south where, sort of having a covered porch and having a swing on the porch is sort of a sign of home. And so they hung these swings on the porch in a sort of architectural nod to the houses in the south, and as a way of saying, you’re welcome here. This is this is your home. This is your place. So I just thought that that was such a beautiful example of we have some of the models for how to do this already. We just need to apply it in this situation and understand what really are the concerns that people are are dealing with, and how can we build policies that will address that? And frankly, if we spent some of the billion dollars that we spent on TV advertising, that Harris spent on TV advertising, on some of those policies, could that have had a measurable difference? I mean, I have to think it does. So. So this taking the other’s perspective, I still think is going to be critical. Another idea is presenting a compelling alternative vision. And this idea originally came in a conversation before the election from a friend of mine, Brian stout, and we co interviewed him, with him, with the conversation with Dr Carol Gilligan. And you know, he said, We need a we need a different vision for masculinity, for racially integrated relationships that bring joy. And we haven’t been that good at that, right? We haven’t been that good at that ourselves as liberals. So how can we sell this to conservatives as something that they should want to do?

Jen Lumanlan 47:20
And so let me kind of break that down a little bit right. In parenting beyond power, I shared some of the ways that patriarchy has been active in my relationship up to that point. Obviously, that was written like three years ago now. Before I got married, my husband assumed I was going to take his last name, and I kind of, you know, floated the idea, left it until the last possible moment. It was like four days before the wedding, and people are already traveling to to be with us, and you know, he kind of says, Well, if you’re not taking my name, then maybe we shouldn’t get married. And another example was after we had Karis, and she starts going to daycare, and he just assumes that, because I work from home, and he has has a commute, that I’m going to be doing all of the pickups and all of the drop offs, and I kind of put my foot down. And I think the thing that gave me the ability to do that was that I, you know, I was not the person in this relationship who wanted children. He was the person who primarily did it. And so I kind of said, you know, you you wanted this kid, there’s one pickup and one drop off every day, and you’re going to be doing half of them. And so that enabled me to do that. But I still earn the money that’s just about keeping us afloat. I do almost all of the cooking, right? All of the homeschool research, all of the tracking of the things that we do, in case the state ever comes calling and wants to know what we’re doing. I do all of the repair around the house, right? I do a lot of the work. And it’s just recently that I’ve kind of been able to point more of this out to him, and just sort of examples of where I see patriarchy showing up in our relationship. And it hasn’t taken that many examples, and he has started taking the initiative to do things like posting our schedule on the chalkboard, because Charis is at different places on different days and different hours on different days and and then I post my call schedule underneath it. And another example would be, you know, after the election. Karis was actually in the hospital at night. She had gotten dehydrated because she had a stomach bug and couldn’t hold down water, and so that that was a rough night, plus the election happening, and then recovering from that. And then there was other stuff going on as well, and I got a migraine, and so, you know, be I do most of the cooking, but he took the initiative to say, Okay, this is what we’re gonna have for dinner. The next days, I’m gonna go grocery shopping and and he just took care of it. I obviously do a lot of research on parenting, and he has taken a number of those ideas on over the years, but there was a time recently when I was asking him, do something that I thought was really important for our relationship, and he didn’t want to do it. He waited six months because he didn’t think it was his choice. He there were other factors involved as well, but a big factor was I wanted to be my choice to do this, and I didn’t think it was my choice because you were telling me to do it. But he routinely tells us what to do. There was a period of time last year where our fridge was broken and the alarm would go off to tell us that the door was open, and it was like really loud and piercing every time you open the door to the fridge, which you know is 10’s of times a day, and you know, it just comes out of his mouth, you gotta press the button to shut off the noise, right? There’s no choice here, there’s no question, there’s no asking, it’s you’ve got to that phrase, you’ve got to and then, you know, similar for Karis, you’ve got to eat ice cream at the table. There’s no opportunity for her to have a say in what feels meaningful to her. And so he had been using his patriarchal power to get his needs, for comfort, right, for not hearing noise, for order, for the ice cream make sure it doesn’t drip on the floor or the furniture, instead of inviting the other person into the process and allowing them to meet their need for autonomy as well. And so, you know, I see this in my relationship too, and we like this is what we are actively working on right now. And so I work with so many women who describe themselves as progressive or liberal or feminists, and they’re in relationships and marriages where they are not happy and their partner won’t go to therapy and won’t try to use any different tools, and might even apologize for all the things they’ve done in the past that have hurt the partner, and nothing changes. And so the women I’m working with are basically staying for the kids. They’re staying so they don’t disrupt their kids lives, because they know that divorce counts as an adverse childhood experience, although the research on divorce indicates that it’s the stuff leading up to the divorce that’s just as harmful as the divorce itself. And so my invitation to you is that if you’re a man, especially in a cis het relationship, to ask your partner, are you happy in this relationship? Are your needs being met? What could I do to help make your life more wonderful. And if you hear those words and you can’t even conceive of asking your partner that question, then you can be reasonably sure that your partner is probably not very happy and that their needs are not being met, and that they may even just be staying in the relationship with for the kids. And this is not to put all the responsibility on men. Women can also ask this of their partners and may find ways to better support their partner. But so much of our responses to patriarchy rely on women doing the work to uncover that there’s a problem and identify viable solutions and present those solutions at just the right time and just the right way to their partner to make sure their partner is receptive. And I struggle with that for quite a while, and eventually we were able to get to a point where that did sink in, and now we are actively working on addressing it in our family. And of course, the real test comes when we get busy, right? We slip back into old patterns. Who’s going to be responsible for pointing things out then? Is it going to be the husband in a set relationship who says, Hey, I noticed we’ve been really busy lately, and all of a sudden you’re doing all of the cooking and cleaning and washing and all the other stuff as well. Do you want some help with that? What should we do about that? How should we redistribute that? So that’s a real test. And then, as we sort of think about, you know, compelling alternative visions, I think that that’s when we think about schools and other places that targeted universalism is a really powerful concept here. And so this is where, again, we’re, we’re, we’re aiming to not just help everybody the same, or target only the people who have most harmed. We’re not trying to close gaps between the dominant group and everyone else. We’re not saying, okay, let’s get black kids test scores up to what white kids test scores are. What we’re saying is, what are ideal conditions for everyone, and then set up policies that help people get from their current circumstances to what everybody decides are the ideal conditions. And so Dr Powell has a video on his website that describes his work in Portland, Oregon, which has historically relatively low home ownership rates several points behind the national average. White home ownership is closer to the average, and black and native ownership is far below the average. And he said, before he came into this community, there were absolutely vicious fights and accusations of racism from the black and native people towards the white people. And of course, the white people are like, well, any policy that’s designed to help the black and native people is not helping me. And so no, I don’t want that. And so when Dr Powell’s group came in, they set a goal of getting everyone to the national average. And I would say, you know, getting again, we’re going back to this idea of getting up to the average. In this case, I would say it’s, it’s not a an inappropriate goal, because we don’t want 100% home ownership rate, whether we have to have some housing stock available for renters. And so this was going to be a 10 point increase in home ownership rates for white people, 40% for blacks, 50% for Native people, and nobody protested it, because everybody could see how the goal is helping them, although I will say I tried to find information on this, and I could see where the City of Portland, State of Oregon, has been talking about this, but it’s unclear as to how much they’ve actually put into practice. And it also makes me think of a book that I was sent to review a while ago. It’s called life under pressure, and it’s about kids in Palo Alto. It’s, I think it’s, has a pseudonym of like, poplar Grove or something like that. But if you’ve, you know, there was a huge Atlantic article a few years ago on the suicide rate in Palo Alto. And you know, if you’ve stumbled on that, it’s pretty obvious that it’s Palo Alto that we’re talking about. And so kids there. I mean, you know, the homeownership rate is probably pretty close to 100% I would imagine, and incomes are sky high. These kids have all the advantages. But a CDC report, essentials for disease control report, found that Palo Alto had this highest youth suicide rate in Santa Clara County, although that is still lower than the national average. And, you know, I decided not to look at that book for a whole podcast episode, because I, you know what, what’s the take home from it? You know, if you, if you don’t want your kids to commit suicide, don’t want, don’t do what the parents in Palo Alto were doing, which is putting extraordinary pressure on kids to to, you know, to do the absolute best they can, that if they get anything less than an A then things are not going to go their way. They’re not going to get into the elite college all the rest of it. So what we’re not wanting to do is, let’s do what Palo Alto is doing, even though their suicide, their youth suicide rate, is lower than the national average. Obviously we don’t want to aim for that. What we’re aiming for is, how do we create conditions so that no young person ever thinks that suicide is their best available option? And so you know, so how do we do this, right? How do we how do we create belonging for people? How do we create a world where everybody truly believes that they have a place in it, where immigrants have a place, where people who have been here for before the country was a country have a place, where conservatives have a place, where liberals have a place, and everybody sees that they have a role in the country and that their role is valued. And so Dr Powell talks about how belonging is different from inclusion and even equitable inclusion. So inclusion is like when members of a previously excluded group are allowed to join a long standing club. And so the exam a good example of this is 1969 Yale University admitted 230 women for the first time among 1200 freshmen. And the college had previously had a goal of educating 1000 male leaders a year, and the male applicants had to demonstrate academic achievement and leadership potential, and they didn’t know how to evaluate women. And women, of course, where they were like, well, can women even lead? And so they were evaluated on grit. And so the administrator, Henry Chauncey Jr, said that this meant a certain toughness, a pioneer quality. And they thought, well, how can we find women who have this quality? And what they ended up looking for was women who have brothers. And so the vast majority of the people who were admitted to that first cohort had brothers, because they assumed that, well, if you’ve been raised among boys, then and you’re doing pretty well, then you must be a good leader. And so 65% of women had a class in which they were the only woman. Half never had a female instructor. 16% said they were sexually harassed by Yale professors or authorities, and the university had no system for reporting it. And of course, that doesn’t even consider harassment by fellow students. They couldn’t have lunch at the private dining club that all the other men were members of. They were barred from most extracurricular activities. So, you know, women were allowed to be there, but the institution was not going to change. It was assumed that the individual women were going to assimilate to Yale, and then so that one step beyond that is equitable inclusion. So people are allowed to join a group on a fair basis and be able to fairly enjoy the benefits of it, and so in the workplace, we might kind of get at this by practices like removing names and genders from resumes so that each candidate is judged without potential bias. Our company might attend career fairs for diverse candidates, reach out to underrepresented communities, provide pay transparency, close gender and racial pay gaps. We might offer inclusive leadership training provide supportive work conditions for employees with disabilities or health conditions, and in schools, we might use things like differentiated instruction to provide more support for children who need it, frameworks like universal design for learning to be flexible on how children learn and support the use of assistive technologies. Yeah, but we’re not really changing the system here, right? We’re giving people the women at Yale. We’re not given the tools to be able to thrive at Yale in actual, equitable inclusion. We’re saying, yes, you’re here and you’re welcome here, and we’re going to give you the tools to do well. True belonging means that not only do we have full and unconditional membership, but also we’re empowered to have a say and have a stake in the organization and a say in how it’s run, and we can participate in creating the culture of an organization. And so Dr Powell says that belonging encompasses and requires inclusion and equity. It also incorporates a felt sense of connection with others, right? Not just a connection, but I have to feel and know that there’s a connection, visibility, recognition, so being seen and heard, and also agency, so the power to act and the potential to influence, and there are very real health benefits that come with belonging. So there was recent research done with a nationally representative survey of almost 5000 people, and found that people who feel like they belong have better health, a better experience in their jobs, more trust in their neighbors, community, other Americans, local and national government, they have decreased feelings of marginalization, and they also support democracy more. And this echoes the Surgeon General’s 2023 report our epidemic of loneliness and isolation, apparently, the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and that’s even greater than the mortality risk associated with obesity, which of course, has a whole bunch of other factors going into it, and physical inactivity, but a vast majority of Americans experience non belonging in their workplace, their local communities andor the nation. Americans with more diverse friendships reported higher levels of overall friendship belonging and non-hispanic white americans living in ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods reported less fear of democratic demographic change as they experience more local belonging. But most of us don’t have friendships with people of different races and ethnicities. We or people who are affiliated with different parties, religions, sexual orientation, socio economic status or country of origin, I was curious to tell and it wasn’t obvious from the survey. It wasn’t the data wasn’t there whether liberals have managed to create more belonging. There’s no question that asks about belonging and political affiliation. Specifically, the closest it gets about to that issue is asking about rural and urban areas, and if we allow that, many cities are more liberal places, big cities do have slightly higher levels of belonging and slightly lower levels of exclusion than smaller cities, urban, suburban areas, small towns and rural areas, but not by very much. And my hypothesis is that cities have not succeeded in creating more belonging. And this builds on Dr Powell’s observation that liberalism dissolves the intensely felt bonds that conservatives feel in church communities, and replaces them with this kind of more general sense of care for all people, but that isn’t deeply and emotionally and individually felt. So maybe I care for all trans people, and I want them to all have the rights to be able to express their whole selves as people, but I might not know very many of them and have a personal relationship with them. And so there’s kind of the example of, you know what? What are, what are good examples of creating engagement and the military, military is great at this, right, throwing people from all different backgrounds together against a common goal. And people come out completely trusting each other, even though they came back from totally different backgrounds, because they’re united in their sense of purpose and staying alive and defeating the common enemy. Of course, we don’t want to increase the the number of people who are going into the military to kill other people so that they can belong more to with their fellow soldiers. So what we’re trying to do is say, Okay, if we see what belonging looks like, can we create that? And can we create it without othering, right? Can we look back to the, you know, the Russian example of it’s the invasion that creates the identity threat that then says, okay, yes, I’m Ukrainian. Before it was like, Yeah, okay, yeah, we’re Ukrainian. Now it’s, I am Ukrainian, and you don’t have the right to invade and so that other ring is what creates the challenges between us. And there’s a really clear trend in the research that people who participate in more than one civic engagement. An example of that would be parent teacher associations, coaching youth clubs, attending places of worship. If they do that have, if they have more than one civic engagement in the last 12 months, people feel more belonging and less exclusion than people who are participated in one or no civic engagements. So I think that’s a really important thing to know, is that if you’re not participating in in ways that feel meaningful to you in our civic society, then you may well be feeling less engaged and with a with a lesser sense of belonging. I think it’s also important to see that our identities are really fluid, and to remember that the ones that feel threatened seem really important to us right now, right my identity as a woman seems really important to me right now, but there are other aspects of our identities where we’re also parents, we’re fellow citizens, we’re people of a certain age, we’re people who speak certain languages, who have certain abilities and educational backgrounds and work experience. And our identities are really fluid and changing. I you know, 10 years ago, I wasn’t a parent. Now I am a parent. If you think about a big event that you’ve been to, like a concert or a sporting event or a political rally, you probably create a community with hundreds or maybe even 1000s of people you never even met before because you’ve shared this interest. I also think about the TV show survivor, right? They create identity through colored bandanas. They split people into into these groups. They give them colored bandanas and say, you’re on this team, you’re on this team, and then they screw with you by shifting people’s identities and say, okay, you’re no longer the yellow bandana. You’re now the green bandana, and you have to go and completely change your identity and go and fit in with that group instead. And you can do it right? You can do it there’s, there’s research on, sort of the rubbers cave that that says that, you know, this is totally possible, that you can have kids that are out to get each other, and then you mix the groups around, and all of a sudden, you know, they’re totally fine being mixed up, and they can get along. And so I think a lot of people are having this tendency, this inclination to move inward, to turn inward, right now, right? Like the listener who shared that their beliefs and said that people who don’t believe those things are wrong, where, in a way, it’s almost like, Okay, if we hunker down, if we just hunker down, will we be good enough for the next couple of years, until the midterms, for the next four years until the next election. And one person who commented on that post said, Yeah, I unfriended some people, it felt good, but when we hunkered down, we missed these opportunities to potentially create real belonging. And one person who commented on that thread shared this cool story. I thought it was really awesome. Story about taking a class at MIT with a professor who shared a story of their own. And so this is a story the professor shared. So one of these professors took one of the professor’s colleagues, took a group of climate change activists to West Virginia, and they met a foreman of a coal mine, and the climate change activists are opening the conversation by attacking him and the industry. And this kept going for a while, until a facilitator interrupted and said, Sir, tell the group about your family. And so this foreman of the coal mine reveals that he and his wife adopted five kids who were born already addicted to meth. Their parents were addicted to meth. He talked about the challenge of raising these kids and the stuff he was doing to try and create a better life for them. And at that moment, you could have heard a pin drop.

Jen Lumanlan 01:08:07

And the climate change activists noted none of them would do what that man did for those kids. And all of a sudden, they saw this man, not as an adversary, but as a human being. And the conversation just dramatically shifted, and suddenly the collective group became allies, and they came up with a set of policy ideas that would benefit the community and provide jobs to the coal miners and have a positive impact on the environment. And this was only possible because they came together. And the commenter said, you know, this was we have two options. We can refuse to talk to the other side, a message I’m seeing from friends on the left and the right. If this is, what do we do? What is the next logical conclusion, civil war? Is that where we want to go? Or can we follow this example outlined above to find common ground? And so, as we think about, you know, finding common ground, particularly with people who have, I mean, who maybe make different economic choices than we do. Maybe the choices are actually more similar than we might think they’re definitely people who voted for Trump saying, you know, this is, this is the best economic decision for my family and but also the policies Trump is going to bring into place are going to benefit people at the top of the heap far more they’re going to benefit people at the bottom of the heap. And our culture has kind of sold us this idea that money and power are the things that we should be aiming for, and money can allow us to have fun, right? We get to go places, to do things, to treat our families to things, and it provides security in a world where we don’t know many people and we can’t rely on anyone else to take care of us, because we don’t have much of a sense of belonging. When people are trying to take things away from you, it seems like what you need is power. And we voted for Harris because we wanted the power to stop people taking things away from us. And Trump voters voted for Trump because they wanted to make sure that Harris voters couldn’t take things away from them. And I’ve been co-hosting a book club on Parenting Beyond Power with Carrie K Rose of moms against racism Canada. And we had a call schedule for friday and it just so happened, we’re almost at the end of the book club, and we’re talking about needs. And so I messaged Carrie that morning, I said, do Canadians want to hear about the election? Are you even talking about this? And she said, yes, we are. We see this as a potential harbinger of things to come. And so we sort of we, we talked a little bit about needs generally first, and how to identify needs. And then we were going to talk about the election, kind of in the middle. And even before we got to that piece, one of the book club members, kind of, you know, asked the question, well, how do we work with others who have a need for power and dominance over other groups and reconcile that with trying to dismantle systems of dominance? And I could see it was a male and female. It’s his hep partnership, and the wife is kind of sitting next to him, like desperate to say something. And you know when, when the husband speaks, finishes speaking, the wife is like, you know, sometimes it almost seems like our kids have a need for power too, right? It’s like we’re giving you autonomy, and now it seems like you actually want to and then kind of, you know, tailed off, and the implication was their kids want to dominate them. And so I addressed the part about about their kids, and because they’re relatively new as a couple, right? The wife had read parenting beyond power. A while ago, their husband had not, and was having a hard time finishing it, and I think has has become invested in finishing it through the book club. And so now they’re, they’re seeing clearly their kids needs for autonomy, and they’re trying to move toward giving their needs for them, their needs for autonomy, and allowing for those to be met. And I said, Well, you know, is it possible that, since you’re still new to this, there might be times when you kind of clamp down a little bit, and other times when you are more willing to do it. And it’s kind of like the rats running through the maze right when you, when you have a rat that runs through a maze, if you reward it every single time, and then you stop rewarding it, then they just, they just stop running the maze. They give up. But if you reward them intermittently every few times, and they’re not, and then it’s completely a random schedule. They will keep running that maze just to see if they can get the reward that time. And so I’m wondering, if your kids are pushing, pushing, pushing, trying as hard as they can to see okay, is am I going to get the reward? Am I get going to get the autonomy this time? And and using that because they don’t fully trust yet that their need for autonomy is going to be met. And so we talked that through, and then Carrie shared her thoughts, which I didn’t know what she was going to say, and it was so beautiful the way she said. It was so beautiful that I asked her if I could share the actual recording. The couple that I just mentioned gave me permission to share that story, and Carrie gave me permission to share the actual recording of what she said on the call, and so, so this is what she said.

Jen Lumanlan 01:13:06

So I don’t know if you were like me and you got to adulthood and didn’t realize that you had needs. Were you like me? And even now, like needs feel like a fuzzy enigma of like trying to figure out what that is, but we’ve walked through life creating strategies right to try and meet this feeling that we have, that we’ve never been shown or taught how to name right and to connect with so that whole power dynamic, that need for power, that’s a strategy to meet something that we’re not getting right, and it’s the same for kids. So if you’re like me as an adult, that did, wasn’t allowed to have needs growing up, have no idea what my needs are, and I’m relating to my kids the same way of strategies and not needs. My kids are going to strategy back at me, right? They’re they’re not going to need back at me. They’re going to strategy back at me, and this is where we get into this, this play of this. And one of the strategies that we learn early on that’s really effective is to weaponize power and so and that can be, you know, poking at somebody and getting them upset. Because if you can get a reaction out of somebody, you have power over that person, right? That can be stonewalling people, that can be a whole bunch of things. As long as you can tip that situation to that, you have the power in that situation there is a false, a soothing of that underlying unmet need that happens and when we look at it on a larger systemic scale, and we take into consideration white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism and all of the socialization that we’ve been taught to suppress our unique needs depending upon our unique identity factors, we have a whole group of people who clamor for power by trying to move themselves closer to that Center of Dominance. So that’s when we see people making choices that you’re like, why are you making this choice that’s not in your own best interest? Because they’re trying to align themselves with how to how to win the system, and not necessarily knowing their own needs underneath.

Jen Lumanlan 01:16:16

And so this deep need that she’s talking about is belonging. We want to know that we belong and when we can’t have that need met, we try to get power instead. And this is kind of a shift for me in terms of how I’m thinking about power, and it’s kind of analogous to how I think about control. There are a lot of needs lists online that have control on them. I don’t see control as a need. I see that when we are, when we’re afraid of something happening, we think that we have to be in control. And so anytime that we’re we think, yeah, I have a need to be in control. What we should be looking at is, what am I afraid is going to happen? And so I think that there is a similar my thinking on this is developing right in the in this last week, that that we actually don’t have a need for power. We have a need to belong, and when we can’t have that, we try to get power instead, because power and power structures feel really comforting when we don’t have belonging. And I see this playing out in our family as we’ve transitioned. You know, we were in sort of a pretty formal daycare, preschool situation, and we’re never in school, but the daycare is sort of set up as as you would expect it to be set up. And, you know, there were policies and the way things are done, and there’s not a ton of flexibility there, because it’s they have their systems, and now we’ve transitioned through a variety of programs where the group is sort of, in a way, making things up as they go along, and I have been able to transition. It has not been an easy transition to being much less rigid about my perception of systems and structures than I used to be. It used to make me very uncomfortable when I didn’t know on a Friday night what Park Charis was going to be at on Monday morning. And I see that my husband still has a hard time with these systems, with sort of decentralized decision making, with sort of democratic decision making, which is not how things run in school, where you’re kind of told how things are going to be, and maybe you have the ability to have a little bit of a say around the edges, but really most of the structure is provided for you, and being in an environment where you actually have real say can feel a little bit scary, and so because it’s a real step away from that power over structure that we’re so accustomed to to being with in our in our daily lives. So if we want to move away from that power structure, if we want to create a world where everybody truly belongs, not in the sort of semi hypocritical way that we’ve been doing it so far, but everybody truly belongs, then the good news is that you can increase your level of belonging. You don’t have to wait for it to happen to you. And I wanted to suggest a variety of strategies that you can use to do that. And so one member in my parenting membership, who’s a Christian, volunteers with peace fest, and her family hosts four meals every year that bring together Christians and Muslims for intentional conversations and friendships. So there’s one strategy that you can try. Another is what we worked with when we read Monica Guzman’s book. I never thought of it that way, and I invited listener Lulu onto the podcast to have a conversation about how much I talk about white supremacy on the podcast, and the framework within Monica’s book gave us the tools to have difficult conversations with people and truly listen to them. And Monica also works with an organization called braver angels, where you can sign up to be matched. With somebody who thinks differently from you on a variety of different dimensions. And I just today signed up to have my first conversation across different with a preference. I express a preference among all the different kinds of conversations you can have with someone who leans red. And I’m assuming this is going to be a Trump voter, and I am going to probably learn some things that I don’t know about Trump voters right today. So there’s another strategy you can use. Another is to be in community with people in our schools and to listen to them, right, especially people who come from different backgrounds than we do, who have different perspectives than we do. And the episode on how to advocate for the schools our children deserve with Alison Kriner Brown and Cassie Gardner Manjikian offers a ton of tools on that topic. And just as a specific example right there, we can, we can tell stories about things that are successful with organizations like Parent Teacher organizations up in Portland, Oregon, where they don’t allocate it like they don’t fundraise for one school, and then another group of parents who at another school fund raises for their school. All of the parents fundraise, and then all the money goes into a central pot, and then they allocate it to the schools on a per student basis. And that’s just the way things are done, and nobody complains about it. And so we need more examples like that of things that are working so that we can do them in more places. And so when I was messaging with Brian on the topic of, why is this so hard, his exact response was, I think people are longing for visions of multiracial solidarity that can thread this needle acknowledging the past without being trapped in it and working together for a better future. I think this is one of the reasons people love the Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, duet at the Grammys. We have so few examples of white men and black women in shared power and shared joy, where the black woman can lead without it feeling like the white man is somehow now the oppressed person. And I hadn’t seen that the performance, and so I watched it on YouTube, and oh, so beautiful. Tracy looks like she’s about to cry at the beginning of it. And the audience, all the audience knows the words. Of course, they’re all singing along, and they’re singing so loud at the crescendo, right? And what is the crescendo? I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone, right? Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to belong. And, you know, I want to kind of leave you with a story of Mary Robinson, who was elected president of Ireland, right? Is, is there a more conservative Catholic country was there one, you know, 30 years ago, possibly not. And she had very liberal principles, but she also had a close working relationship with the church. And so there’s that, you know, listening across difference. And she was partly elected because there was a scandal that happened with one of the other candidates, she was definitely not the universally preferred candidate, and in her inauguration speech, she said, the Ireland I will be representing is a new Ireland, open, tolerant and inclusive. And she spoke of the strengths of the Irish people and extended a hand of friendship and love to communities in Northern Ireland, which is governed by the British. She acknowledged that symbols unite and divide people, and said she would promote the telling of stories, stories of celebration through the arts, and stories of conscience and social justice. As a woman, I want women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history in the words of even Boland, finding a voice where they found a vision. And so over the course of her term, which was not super long, I want to say it was like 1990 to 1997 or something, she made contraceptives fully available where they were not before. She decriminalized homosexuality, which was previously criminalized. She legalized divorce, which had previously been constitutionally prohibited. Halfway through her term of office, her approval rating was 93% and in 2018 the Irish public overwhelmingly voted to repeal the country’s eighth amendment, which was one of the strictest abortion bans in Europe. And so I think what’s really important about what Mary Robinson said is, is the telling stories, right? This telling stories is critical. These stories about the PTAs that are sharing money stories about cross racial relationships, and especially cross racial relationships, where we mess up and we come back together and we repair and we become stronger. We don’t just cancel each other and walk away. That’s not belonging. If we want belonging, we have to be it. We have to be it ourselves, not just talk about how great it is, and so we also have to, you know, try and see how to create full belonging in systems where we don’t have much power. And our schools are are an example of that. A lot of decisions are made by administrators at county levels, at national levels, children, right? We think we have little say in how things happen. Children have little say in how things happen. And so I mean here, here’s the best place I see to start creating this vision of a society where everyone belongs. It’s in our families. It’s where everybody gets a say in how the family runs, where everybody sees the child’s needs as equally valid as the parents needs. And in parenting beyond power, I ask two questions. Who? I ask a bunch of questions, but related to a specific topic, I ask two questions. The first question is, what do you want your child to do? Right? Parents usually have a pretty easy time asking answering that question. And then second question is, what do you want to be their reason for doing it? What do you want to be their reason for doing it? And that’s usually a lot harder to answer because we don’t want them to do it, because they’re afraid of what we might do if they don’t do it. But often that’s kind of what ends up happening, and what we want the answer to be is because they want to do it, or because they seeing that, they see that doing it doesn’t block them from meeting a need that they have.

Jen Lumanlan 01:26:08

And so the more that we create space for our child’s needs to be met, the more they are willing to come toward us and want to help us meet our needs. And so if you want to start with this, the phrase would you be willing to is an awesome place to start. So would you be willing to do X? And you have to be ready for no to be the answer that comes back to you. So don’t say it with something that you’re not ready to hear no. Start with something that feels fairly safe, that it’s okay for you to say no. And then you can get a little more daring and move into topics where you have previously been fairly inflexible in terms of what will happen if you say no. So would you be willing to and the first time that you hear your child say to you, would you be willing to do whatever is the thing they’re asking you to do, that actually gives you the space to consider, do I have the capacity to do this right now? It’s it is a magical moment, I can tell you, it’s a magical moment. A few years ago, I said to Karis, you don’t have to ask me if you can do things anymore. Just tell me what you’re going to do and check if it’s okay, and I’ll do the same with you. So she says, You know I’m going, I’m going for a walk, and I’ll be back at six o’clock, okay? And I check in and think about when dinner is and 90% of the time my answer is okay, and so I do the same with her. And so what we’re doing is we’re creating a culture in our family where we have real belonging, and where Karis is participating in creating the culture of our family. She has a real say, and she’s also observing me creating community in our street, and I will tell her all about the conversation I have with the red leaning person through braver angels. We also point out how all these social systems show up in the books and the media, the movies that we consume, that are training our children to stuff down their needs to gain power over others, instead of finding ways for everyone to belong. And so this stuff is is all around us every day. And I believe that if we want things to be different the next time that there is an election, we have to, we have to start creating this belonging with other people that Civil War is not, is not a place where we want to end up, and that we can do that through having conversations with other people who think differently. But also if we’re going to create this vision that we want everybody else to come along board with, we’re not there yet. We are not in a place right now where we can say this, this is the awesome thing that we want you know, that we think is really going to help all of us, that we have heard you, we’ve listened to you, we’ve incorporated the best of your ideas into this as well, and that we invite you to come along for this ride. We are not there right now. And I believe that when we do this work in our families, when we raise children who truly know from the youngest ages what it means to have belonging, what it means to have agency in a family, that they will be so much better equipped than we have been to go out and create belonging in the rest of the world as well. And I hope that that takes us to a place where we can be in integrity with our values, where we can allow for everyone’s self-expression, where we can have a felt sense of safety ourselves. And also people who voted for Donald Trump today can have a sense of safety as well, knowing that they have participated in creating our culture, that they are financially safe and that their needs are being met as well. So that’s where I hope to go. That’s what I’m taking out of the last week or so of processing of what has happened. And I definitely invite your thoughts on all of this as well. If you’re in one of my membership communities, I’m sure we’ll be discussing it there. You can always join us in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group, and that’s free to join and happy to continue the conversation there as well. And if you need some help in kind of, you know, taking these ideas forward in your family, Parenting Beyond Power is my book. It’s where I have kind of, most clearly and fully laid out all of these ideas, and not just, you know, from an idea perspective of this is what I think the world should be like, but okay, this is how we do it on a day to day basis, when we’re dealing with tooth brushing, when we’re dealing with why won’t you put your shoes on when we’re dealing with things that look like misbehavior? How do we get from there to truly meeting my need, to truly meeting our child’s needs, to truly creating belonging? So thank you so much for being here with me today and cautiously hopeful. After the first couple days, I cried. You know, I was feeling very sad and overwhelmed. And we are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. We’re not even in the woods yet we there is a very real place for a mutual aid for making sure that people are safe have safe places to be, and it’s our work as people who have relatively more safety to take this on, right to take on this work of creating a world where everybody truly belongs. And I so hope that I get to do that with you. So thank you so much for being here, and I’ll see you soon.