Reading
George Lakoff's Moral Politics and the birth of my own son last July have led me to start seriously examining the role of child-rearing in our political life. The basic question: what can we as parents do in order to raise our children with progressive values?
When my son was born, I felt more than a few moments of despair - what kind of world had I brought him into, and would he end up like Alex P. Keaton? How can we stop this from happening?
How we raise our children has important consequences for our nation's political life - both in the future (for those of us with wee bairns) and right now, as we are all still someone's children, hopefully still learning from our parents and teaching our adult children. What follows are some of my observations on how we can raise progressive children, and I hope that progressive parents and children of progressives can add more depth to this conversation.
More on the flipside...
Before I begin in earnest, I just want to say that if there's one thing that I've learned in the past 9 months, it's that talking about parenting styles is a dicey business. Everyone has an opinion, and a lot of people get
really defensive about parenting. No one wants to think their parenting style (or the style of their parents) is wrong. So please don't think that anything in this diary is a moral judgment on how you raise your kids. I understand that there's a multitude of child-rearing styles, and I don't intend to suggest there's one correct way.
Likewise, I don't want to limit the discussion to Lakoff's dichotomy of strict conservative parents/progressive nurturing parents. These obviously don't entirely determine how a kid turns out. My parents are of the strict conservative type, but that didn't stop me from becoming a forest defender, union organizer, Deadhead, or left-wing sociologist.
That said...
Teach respect by respecting children - How many times have you seen a parent tell their five year old to shut up. I'm sometimes amazed that we treat children, people who are extremely vulnerable and impressionable, in a way that we would never treat our peers. Some people believe that kids have nothing important to say. We see this with infants: parents are told to let a 3 month old "cry it out," without understanding that 3 months old aren't manipulative. They are expressing some sort of need, for comfort, for food, for a dry diaper, something. When we ignore their crying, we send the message that what they have to communicate is unimportant. So, we should listen to our children and value what they have to say. Fact is, I've met a number of 13 year olds who were far more politically informed and engaged than many adults. It boggles me that these kids, who do have a very real stake in politics, are not allowed to fully participate in our political life, while we'll let some yahoo over 18 years of age choose our nation's leaders based on which candidate he'd rather go fishing with. Listen to the kids, they have important things to say!
Teach critical thinking - This has to begin at home, because it's not happening in many of our nation's schools. An anecdote is illustrative of this - a friend of mine recently applied for a job as a high school English teacher in a rural Oregon town. She visited the school and what she saw shocked her. In an English class, Shakespeare was being taught. The class complained that they didn't see the relevance of Shakespeare, that it was too hard to read. The teacher agreed with them, but said she had to teach it to fulfill curriculum requirements. In the school's computer lab, a large poster hung in the front of the room. On one side of the poster was a picture of George W. Bush, and the caption read "Freedoms we have thanks to George Bush." Among these are the freedom to read and write - I was unaware that we didn't have the right to do this prior to the second Bush administration. Huh. On the other half of the poster was a picture of Saddam Hussein with the caption "Freedoms Iraqis didn't have under Saddam Hussein," such as the freedom to fresh fruits and vegetables.
This, obviously, is fucked up.
Now, I have the skills to teach critical thinking to college undergraduates, but how do we start teaching them to our own children at a young age, so that when they get to schools like the one mentioned above, they're able to evaluate what they hear and not swallow the tripe just because their teacher said so? We don't want our children to be rigid and dogmatic in their thinking (I don't want my kids to be dogmatic conservatives or dogmatic progressives - but especially the latter, because I think that's contrary to what being a progressive is all about).
Get them engaged young - Parents start getting their kids into sports at an early age in hopes of their being the next Tiger Woods. Why aren't we getting our kids engaged in the community at such an early age? In his brief 9 months on the planet, my son has already attended several rallies and protests (he's a RNC veteran!), has attended multiple union membership meetings, and he goes with me when I volunteer at the local Catholic Worker house in town. Even though he's pre-verbal, I believe that being around people united in a common cause is a vital experience for him. He is being taught that life isn't about merely pursuing individual ends. It's also about community, forming lasting social bonds, and working together to achieve common goals. The more often he participates as a community member at a young age, the more likely he is to see the importance of such collective participation as he grows up.
I've obviously only skimmed the surface. Needless to say, raising progressive children in today's current reactionary environment is exceedingly difficult, but is vitally important to our future. So please, let us know what, in your experience, has worked in inculcating progressive values into yourself or your children.