Abolitionist Family Values: When Children Practice Repair
A family is a microcosm of society. It is a site of both unparalleled adoration and intense violence; the best and the worst of humanity. Many will tell you they learned love for the first time when they became parents, and yet, statistically speaking, if you are to experience childhood sexual abuse, a family member is the most probable culprit.
It is this confluence of connection and conflict that make parenting the richest soil for cultivating abolitionist seedlings. And as it is the principal ethic behind my politics and my spirituality, so too does abolition define my parenting stance. As many have pointed out, most recently by Josie Pickens in my inbox, abolition is no utopian premise of science fiction: it is praxis more practical and present than any ethic. Through childrearing, we can rehearse the kind of world we hope to bequeath to our descendants and theirs. A household can become a “prefigurative space,” as Harsha Walia puts it, in which caging humans to solve our problems seems like dystopian science fiction in turn. This is how I parent my daughters. This is the family culture we’re tending together, both for the three of us and for the world as we dream it.
When I picked up We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, I expected to encounter advice about mitigating against copaganda (notice how much retribution, punishment, and policing show up in cartoons) and raising activist, politically engaged children. I did find and benefit from that, but my primary takeaway was that I recognized my existing parenting philosophy in the words of wiser writers with sharper abolitionist analysis. I realized that it is not just that abolitionism informs my parenting, it’s that I’m an abolitionist because I’m a parent. I learned that transforming how we parent is essential to abolishing state violence. And it may just be the only way we create the conditions for liberation.
“In this small and yet vital way, I am building the world I want to exist for everyone. We don’t need to wait for some imagined point in the future. We have the ability to do the work of abolition now. All of the practices that we engage in at home are practices that we can take out into the wider community. We are mutually responsible to and for one another. It starts with us, individually, interpersonally, and communally.”
Day to day, this shows up in utterly familiar ways. In response to any “wrongdoing,” for example, I do not punish my children. I’ve never spanked them, of course, nor inflicted any physical pain intentionally, but we further recognize that no harm is ever ameliorated by any form of counter-harm. Instead, we prioritize curiosity about the circumstances that led to destructive behavior. We’re obsessed with the roots of everything. When I have found myself sending one of them to their room for some temporary physical separation, we all know that it does nothing to address the root of the conflict, and only serves to cool tempers and de-escalate. Physical separation is only ever helpful if agreed to by all of us and chosen for the purpose of emotional reconnection. Indeed, the opposite of carcerality is connection. The goal is always reintegration, healing, and restoration. As such, apologies are holy and commonplace. My children are my favorite people, but they are no cherubs, and I myself am rarely as patient and present as I aspire to be. So, we apologize to each other all the time.
Just as PIC abolitionists spend as much time on mutual aid and otherwise meeting communities’ physical and psychological needs as they do protesting police violence, abolitionist parenting does not wait for conflict to arise. My first priority in every aspect of caretaking is ensuring that my children know and feel that they are loved. That they are enough. We revere the space between us - what Rob Bell describes as the zimzum of love - the spiritual threads that knit our souls together while preserving our individuality. We nurture our interdependence. It seems too cute a comment given its saturation in popular culture through lyrics like all you need is love, but it’s still the case that love is probably the most abolitionist ethic we can embody. As we often say at home, “love is more important than fair,” which does not mean we devalue accountability but that restoration trumps retribution. I am a love supremacist.
This extends to how we observe the world around us and everyone in it. Since my children were infants, we eschew the characterization of any TV villains as “bad guys.” It is pure delight, by the way, to hear a three-year-old describe Scar, or whomever, as an antagonist. There’s no such thing as bad guys. Truthfully, I fail to comprehend how anyone who has studied human development and understands trauma can still believe that some people are just inherently evil. (For the record, neither do I believe that anyone is inherently good.) It is surely a byproduct of Christian fundamentalism and its devastating interpretations like “original sin," but those of us who consider ourselves members of liberationist movements ought to know better. We judge people’s behavior as death-making or life-giving, not their personhood.
In our household, there are no arbitrary rules. As the parent, “because I said so” counts for nothing. If anything is prohibited or restricted, everyone knows why and buys into the rationale. If we disagree, we discuss it and seek consensus, or at least shared understanding. We developed a list of family values years ago, fastened it to the wall, and periodically reconsider and refine each component - these serve our individual and collective self-accountability. Nothing is a violation of rules; it’s a matter of consistency with our shared values.
Principal among them is consent. I cannot touch my children without their permission. And the notion has sunk in: my kids say “I do not consent” and ask “do you consent?” all the time. It’s repetitive and may seem excessive, but it strikes me as entirely necessary in order to respect each other’s bodily autonomy the way everyone deserves. Related to this is a reexamination of power. I am not in charge. Any authority I bear as a parent has more to do with my deeper experience navigating the world than any inherent superiority gained from having procreated. We seek to disrupt hierarchy and paternalism, share power and decision-making as much as possible, and value each other’s perspectives and analysis. Normalizing these principles has engendered an allergic reaction to retribution and punishment.
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I almost didn’t post this article because anyone bragging about their parenting victories on the internet is obnoxious. I sure wouldn’t enjoy reading anything so self-aggrandizing as the preceding words and usually roll my eyes at Instagram’s representations of parenting techniques. So I hasten to assure you that I continuously fall short of my own values. Literally while taking a break from reading We Grow the World Together, for example, the kids and I ran an errand, and for reasons I don’t recall, my oldest, whining, wouldn’t get out of the car, to which I responded “you’re going to lose privileges.” What?! In what sense does that address the root of the discontent or foster reconnection? Notwithstanding the fact that I didn’t do what I threatened.
Not long ago, the kids were arguing, and while I don’t always mediate their melees anyway, I sure didn’t this time as I juggled pots and pans preparing dinner, my mind still clocked in at work. It escalated to the extent that my only interjection was “Genevieve, just stop!” to which she replied, “you guys hate me! I’m leaving this family forever!” Triggered and manic, I said “Fine! Leave!” as she stormed out of the house.
Just this week, with the outline of this article composed on the phone in my pocket, and in the midst of an otherwise magical Valentine's date at a touring Broadway performance, the same daughter’s fear of heights made her insist we abandon our still-expensive nosebleed seats and go home. Frustrated, I whispered “you’re making a scene.” (I’m harder on my oldest because she’s more like me.) I’m ashamed of my cruelty. I failed her and fell short of our family values.
But it's the end of these stories that reinforces the point: I apologized, acknowledged why my behavior was hurtful and contradicted our shared values, and asked for forgiveness, which they always offer without hesitation. And I eventually forgave myself: self-compassion is crucial to the worlds we dream up. Abolitionist parenting does not mean we never hurt each other: it means when we do, we seek healing and repair. I remember the lines Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn repeat in the aforementioned anthology: we try, fail, try again, fail again - fail better.
I do not mean to extract abolition from its origins and misappropriate activists’ analysis: abolitionist parenting isn’t politically neutral. Just like “decolonization is not a metaphor,” so too must abolitionist parenting also include engagement in movements to dismantle state violence and carcerality. If you aren’t tired of caveats, moreover, I’ll add that my economic security and amalgam of privileges contribute to my capacity to foster these values so rigorously - emotional presence can take a backseat to survival.
But the more imminent argument is this: my children could do nothing to which I would respond by casting them out of our family. I would never cage my daughters. Indeed, if they were imprisoned at any point of their life, even if they were culpable for harm they caused, I would fight like hell for their freedom.
I am not unique. If you’re a parent, I suspect you love your children the same way. So, when we zoom out to the macrocosm, and if we acknowledge that turning 18 (or 25, or 40, or 60) scarcely enhances the ability of retribution and confinement to repair harm and conflict, we might find ourselves asking: does everyone deserve what your children do?
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Read: We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition | Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, Haymarket Books (2024)
