How to Practice Social Justice Parenting and Inner Child Re-Parenting?
I know that your schedule is already too full to add anything else, especially deep, messy healing work like inner child re-parenting or social justice advocacy.
But I also know that you want to raise your child by your own values. So how do we start?
We begin this liberation and healing work by coming back home to our bodies, coming back to our lineages, and coming back to care. To say it with neuroscience, we begin this healing work by learning to be emotionally regulated. We come back to that space in our nervous system where we’re not in fight-flight-freeze-people-please self-protection mode but instead we’re in that space where we have the bandwidth to care…to connect with ourselves, the land, our ancestors, and others… to be curious and courageous… and to be compassionate. Siegel and Ogden, two leading researchers and clinicians, called this space the Window of Tolerance. I prefer the Window of Capacity, or you’ll sometimes hear me refer to it as your “bandwidth”. Inside this bandwidth is where we’re regulated.
When your child is regulated, they’re alert, curious, and present. They’re so ready to connect with you and play with you. As you can see it’s the best place for your child to learn. When we talk about child development, we often see development sliced into pieces like cognitive development, language development, social and emotional development, and so on. Like slices of pie. When, in fact, development is more like a layered cake. The bottom layer or the foundation of this entire cake is regulation. The other layers of developmental domains are stacked on top of regulation. So, it’s safe to say that without regulation, it’s hard to learn. That’s why it’s so hard to teach our toddler not to bite their friends when they’re already crying and in full meltdown—when they’re completely dysregulated emotionally.
For the layered cake of child development, the base layer or the foundation is regulation. The layers on top are cognition, motor, language, and social-emotional development.
For our layered cake of parental development- yes we grownups are still developing- the base layer is the same. Because when we’re regulated, we have the bandwidth we need to practice other adult developmental skills like boundary setting, accountability, interdependence, and nonviolent communication.
Applying that to our context of parenting, to be the parent you know you can be…the caring, compassionate, curious parent… you need to come back inside your neurological bandwidth, come back to your homebase.
This is a perfect place to clarify that being regulated doesn’t mean stress free, or seeing rainbows and cupcakes. Regulation doesn’t mean calm either. Regulation means connected. You’re connected with yourself enough to be present with what you’re thinking, feeling, and going through without going into fight-flight-freeze-people please mode. Maybe you’re in a meeting and people are talking about the weather and it’s so boring. You’re likely not going to be too bored that you check out or shut down or fall asleep, right? You might take a sip of water or play with your hair or doodle to stay alert and stay present and, you know it, stay regulated.
In our context of parenting, you’re juggling deadlines and competing parenting demands…the to-do list keeps getting longer. To say you’re feeling stressed is an understatement. And to get through the to-do list and accomplish what you need to, a little stress is needed to give you the push you need to get through the day. Now I’d love to walk you through 2 different scenarios.
In the first scenario, you’re really stressed and really focused on the task at hand. Your child keeps asking you to play with them and oh, how they can be really persistent. When you’re regulated, you’re able to stay anchored while getting things done. You hear your child saying “play with me, play with me, play with me.” You also feel your irritation rising. You catch that irritation before it bubbles over into a screaming match. You take a breath, sigh, and do it again and this time feeling your feet on the floor. You’re resetting that activation in your nervous system so that you don’t have to go into your fight mode. Then, you turn around and tell you child “I know waiting is hard. I need to finish cooking. Why don’t you have some snacks right here so you can still watch me? Would you like crackers or apples?”
The second scenario is similar. You catch your irritation but it’s too late to make a u-turn now. You snapped at your child so that they will give you some quiet time to finish cooking so you can go play with them. But now they’re upset that you yelled. You also feel terrible for yelling because it’s an inner child wound pattern you’re trying to break too. In this second scenario, you lost your regulation. Your parenting button got pushed and then you automatically reacted to your child using an old coping strategy you’ve over-learned which was yelling. Remember? When we react, we revert back to our old habits. To say it differently, when we react, we react as if the pain from the past were happening right here, right now. That’s why when we react, we’re no longer in our bandwidth where we’re curious, connected, compassionate and caring because we’re in fight, flight, freeze, people please self-protection mode. In this survival mode, there’s no time to reflect, decolonize, or strategize. That’s why you revert back to your old strategies like controlling or coercing your child, or checking out, or cutting off. Even though your brain knows that these things aren’t so great in parenting, in survival mode your nervous system is very either-or: either fight or be overwhelmed. Either control your child or be controlled. Either numb out or feel incompetent.
Instead of automatically reacting to our children from a place of survival, we want to anchor in regulation so that we can intentionally respond to our children like in scenario one. You still get things done and stress is still there. But instead of staying stuck in stress and survival, you can come back to your bandwidth where you’re connected, compassionate and curious enough to ask: “okay my child’s wanting attention and it’s so irritating. What’s their unmet need so I can meet them where they’re at instead of repeating the cycles of yelling?” When you’re regulated, you have the capacity to hold both-and. Both what you’re feeling and what your child is feeling. Both what you need to get through the to-do list and what your child is needing from you.
Regulation is where we shift from automatically reacting out of old habits to intentionally responding based on our values.
Regulation is where we start our healing and liberation work.
It’s certainly one of the most important adult developmental skills in your development as a parent.
From this space of regulation, as a parent, you can decide how you’d like to raise your child using liberatory concepts like solidarity, power-with, accountability, harm reduction, and so on to guide you. You can use a combination of liberation values and child development science to design your own parenting playbook that fits with your style, your child’s development, and your culture.
From this space of regulation, as a social justice advocate, you can show up in social justice advocacy ready to take risks, make mistakes, take up space when you take a stand, or step back and hold space for others instead of reverting back to urgency, perfectionism, and other oppressive behaviors.
Becoming the parent you want to be starts with addressing unhealed inner child and internalized oppression wounds. And that healing work starts with strengthening the adult developmental skill of regulation.
If you’d like to cultivate your regulation skills and work with your triggers so you can practice decolonized parenting and inner child re-parenting, I'd love to invite you to join a community of decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational families in the In-Out-N-Through® Program. An online 7-week, cohort-based social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting program.
I know this work can seem overwhelming. The beauty of equity and liberation work is you can start where you are and start with the smallest action. In your next breath, right before you engage your child, you don’t have to repeat those automatic habits you’re trying to break. Because you can let social justice values like solidarity or accountability guide you. And even when you miss that window and slip back to old habits, there’s always that next breath where you can try again.
As my classical Chinese medicine teacher, Lillian Pearl Bridges, said quote "The Purpose of Life is to be yourself as much as you can be, by combining your innate talents and abilities with the wisdom from your life experience and merging them with your intrinsic spirit. Then give yourself back to the world as a gift." End quote.
You are shifting our culture. You are doing the healing work your ancestors couldn’t. You are the future ancestors.