Episode 13 Decolonizing Discipline: Replacing Punishment with Boundaries & Accountability
We are going to explore the ways that our society’s obsession with violence and punishment can get played out in our parenting unknowingly, especially when we discipline our children.
Episode Summary:
This episode is part two of the discipline series.
Discipline can be an opportunity to flex your social justice action muscles and practice power-with and accountability instead of control, coercion, and dominance that you might not want in your own home.
What You’ll Learn From this Episode:
Discipline is a teachable moment for children to practice navigating their intense feelings.
Discipline is an opportunity for us to practice power-with, boundaries, and accountability instead of colonial violence of power-over, control, coercion, and dominance.
The textures of violence, dominance, and coercion throughout history: genocide, land theft, the prison industrial complex, and cancel culture.
The social and historical contexts of how systemic oppression has been disempowering and devaluing parents.
Dr. King’s Nonviolence and transformative justice’s take on harm, conflict, and punishment.
A trauma-informed and compassion-focused view on addiction & harm reduction.
Ways that “the water we swim in” seeps into our home, especially during discipline (i.e., time out and taking toys away reflexively and without considerations for the underlying unmet needs).
Our desire for calm and control as a form of conformity and it looks like blind, fear-based obedience.
How children are taught to conform to race, class, gender, and other socially constructed identities.
Decolonized parenting isn’t individualistic; it’s a communal liberatory work. It’s a shared struggle and communal re-imagination.
Three reflection questions to decolonize discipline and replace violent, fear-based punishment with developmentally informed compassion, accountability, and power-with.
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