How social forces have hurt us and will hurt our children (and what to do about it)
Does it sometimes seem like things would be a lot easier if your children would just listen to you?
Would it make you feel uncomfortable to see your boy dressed in pink clothes, and your girl being loud, demanding, and ‘rude’?
Do you ever feel as though you’re always trying to get to the bottom of an endless to-do list? Or make seemingly endless payments on homes, cars, and appliances – so you have to work more than you’d like to? You may feel torn between your email inbox and your child looking for connection with you.
It might seem like you’re the only parent struggling with challenges like this, but you’re not.
Our culture is organized around the social forces of White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism (bell hooks and others note the connections between these social forces, which reinforce each other).
Social forces aren’t just ‘out there’ in the world. They’re right here in our families as well. Parents transmit cultural values to their children, with a goal of helping children to be successful in that culture. Being successful in a White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist culture requires us to be perfect; to embrace in-group members and push out others; to hoard power. Men are allowed to express anger but not other feelings; women are to suppress anger at all costs. And everyone is to focus on earning money and buying things.
Living within these systems has come at enormous cost to us. Almost 23% of women in the United States take antidepressants, and there are probably fewer men taking them because men are less willing to seek help for mental health challenges like depression. Around 9% of parents are so burnt out that they think their children would be better off without them, and millions more are simply exhausted. Our children try to resist – but when they do we say they have Oppositional Defiant Disorder; eventually many give up: 34% of adolescents are at risk of developing clinical depression. We see these as personal problems to be solved on an individual basis rather than as symptoms of systemic social issues.
These social forces hurt us – and they will hurt our children too if we don’t actively work to dismantle them. Working on this also happens to make parenting a whole lot easier!
White Supremacy: Challenging Divisive Forces
White supremacy is a complex force that quietly divides us. In a nutshell, it’s the idea that White people and White ways of being in the world are better than everyone and everything else, and it shapes our actions without us realizing it. (Racism – the belief that racial differences create inherently superior and inferior races – is only one aspect of White supremacy.)
While our children might get the message in preschool that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a speech and Rosa Parks sat on a bus and now racism isn’t a problem anymore, that’s far from the truth. White supremacy is very much around today, and it even seeps into how we parent. It affects families by creating divisions and stopping genuine connections.
Anti-racist educator Amanda Gross translated Tema Okun’s White Supremacy Culture model for use in in families. For example, White Supremacy Culture values being perfect instead of appreciating each other. It values binary, right-wrong thinking without room for gray areas. There’s little room for disagreement – on issues like gender, valuing paid work over unpaid work, and emotional expression. That person in charge has a right to feel emotionally comfortable, so other family members should ‘be perfect’ to avoid inconveniencing that person. The beliefs that prioritize facts over feelings and maintains traditional power dynamics stems from White supremacy.
Exploring Patriarchy: Beyond Gender Norms
Patriarchy is often oversimplified as a men being superior to women but it is far more complex. It’s about the roles and expectations placed upon every person.
Dr. Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider explain that patriarchy leads us to categorize traits as either masculine or feminine, with a bias toward valuing masculine traits. White, cisgender, heterosexual men are elevated over other men, and over all women. Within this framework, patriarchy divides us, favoring men’s ideas while isolating them emotionally. It allows women to have relationships, as long as they don’t express ideas that are too big or that rock the boat.
As we navigate parenthood things become more complex – with our children, and also with our (opposite sex) partners. Moms often sacrifice their careers to take care of children, because they earn less both before and after having children. Because women – and especially Black women – aren’t allowed to express anger, they often try to hold it inside until they can’t anymore. They tend to shoulder the emotional burden of the family – learning about parenting, and taming their triggers. Mothers aren’t just victims of patriarchy – in participating in this system, we perpetuate it too.
Dismantling patriarchy isn’t only about equality between men and women. It’s about freeing all people from the constraints of predefined roles so they can express their true selves.
Capitalism’s Subtle Influence on Family Values
Then there’s capitalism – the economic engine that drives us. This is not a value-neutral system; it has a huge impact on families and wellbeing. It infiltrates the values that guide family decisions. A persistent voice whispers: “more, more, more.” It encourages us to measure our success through material accumulation – at the expense of the people who make the things we buy.
White supremacy and patriarchy create separation between us and others – and capitalism steps in to fill the gaps. It causes us to disregard the environment, with some of the greatest harms (e.g. pollution and climate change) most impacting BIPOC communities. We override our values of care for others and being part of a community so we can earn more money. Even if we don’t think of ourselves as materialistic, it’s all too easy to get caught in the trap of wanting nice things, and then working more than we’d like to pay for them. Then we don’t have as much time to spend with our children, so we feel even more disconnected from them – and buy them things to show them we love them.
Crafting a New Family Narrative
Parenting under White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism was about being in charge, with challenges to parental power being perceived as an act of “unlove.” Our children’s challenges to our authority doesn’t mean they don’t love us; it just means: “What you’re asking me to do doesn’t meet my need right now.”
If we want to create a world where everyone can be their whole selves, we can start doing this at home. We can understand what needs underlie our children’s ‘difficult’ behavior, and our needs as well.
When we can do this, we can find ways to meet both of our needs. And then parenting gets dramatically easier.
We aren’t passive observers as the social forces of White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are created around us. We create and maintain – or work to dismantle them – in our daily relationships. Seeing and meeting everyone’s needs allows us to shape a new family narrative–one that enables all of us to be our whole selves.
Eager to explore these ideas further? Dive into the pages of Parenting Beyond Power to find a new perspective on parenting and practical tools to make it a lot easier!
References
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About the author, Jen
Jen Lumanlan (M.S., M.Ed.) hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast (www.YourParentingMojo.com), which examines scientific research related to child development through the lens of respectful parenting.