EPISODE 2: Re-Imagine Parenting: Deeply Decolonized & Intentionally Intergenerational
[EPISODE]
[00:00:15] NV: Sawasdee ka and welcome to the Come Back to Care Podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner and founder of Come Back to Care, a dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. If you’re on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child’s development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you’re here.
On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting and family systems intersect with one another. If you’ve been looking for ways to align your parenting with the social justice values, you’re in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. Come curious and come as you are. Let’s move at the speed of care and let’s do this.
Before we jump into it, if you’re new to this podcast, warmest welcome. The Come Back to Care Podcast is available on all major podcasting outlets, including Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast and Amazon Music. If you enjoy the show, please be sure to subscribe and consider leaving us a rating and review. It helps us grow our community of liberation-minded family.
[EPISODE]
[00:02:11] NV: Welcome to the second episode of the Come Back to Care Podcast. In today’s episode, let’s explore what decolonized parenting and inner child wound healing actually are. Why we address both of them at the same time at Come Back to Care and why they are incomplete when they don’t send our equity and social change. We all want to give our children the best childhood we know how to give and be the best parent we can be put in practice. What actually informs our parenting practice, though? Who is raising your baby? Your inner child wound? Your trauma survival strategies? Your parents? Your social cultural conditioning? Or you? Are you gifting your child the intentional care you’ve always wanted to provide or are you regifting your child with outdated, painful family patterns from previous generations? Let’s take a closer look.
Okay, please indulge me. If we want to raise kids to be good members of society, but we are beginning to understand that our social norms only value one group and dehumanize the others. In other words, that white bodies, supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism are in the water that we swim in and the air that we breathe. Then, shouldn’t we reexamine our parenting just a little bit, perhaps? It’s true that there’s no parenting manual, because parenting is about moment to moment, trial and error with plenty of error from what I’ve heard. But we have a family playbook that has all the invisible and unspoken rules about how each family should be, act, do and talk.
The silent code of conduct that runs on autopilot often without us knowing it. This playbook has many authors, our ancestors, historical trauma, current and pervasive oppression, epigenetics, you name it. Your parenting style isn’t yours alone. For example, you want to pick up your crying five-month-old up at 1:00 AM, but the sleep “expert” says, “No, because inconsistency would ruin the sleep training.” So, you forced yourself to turn away from your intuition to perform parenting for a cultural norm. The next morning you rush in to check if your baby’s mad at you to see if you “permanently” ruined your baby’s development. Another example, the knee-jerk or cringe when your child’s hug reminds you of your own unmet need for physical comfort as a child or the automatic rage at your child’s tantrum, which is a legacy from your relationship with your own parents’ temperament.
This unfinished business from the past seems to bypass right under your conscious mind’s radar, the parenting goals on your vision board and the self-compassion affirmations you taped on the fridge. No matter what professional had eyewear, I have always witnessed the unintended and unconscious consequences of intergenerational family trauma and internalized oppression un almost all the families who may have served, no matter what their race, gender ability, class, age and parenting intentions were. These two invisible roadblocks work so well together. Yet, most of the parenting resources out there are so fragmented.
For example, you can find resources on child development over here, which by the way, is full of biases towards Euro-American values. Then you talk to your therapist, if you can afford one, over here about your inner child wounds, attachment injuries, depression, trauma, anxiety, what have you. Then, when you are healed, you go do your social justice work over there. So here we are connecting the dots between child development science, intergenerational family healing and social justice in our parenting. We cross-pollinate all of these fragmented fields to address these two invisible roadblocks to parenting that affect so many of us. I know it sounds like a lot addressing both intergenerational family trauma and internalized oppression at once. In this episode, my mission is to break it down with you so that we can break through together.
I often find my strength to continue doing this politicized intergenerational family healing work in my ancestors, of course, and in the land that I’m on. I always find it in Audre Lorde’s work as well, especially in her 1982 address at Harvard University, which is called Learning from the 60s. It’s my favorite. I printed it out long time ago and just color-coded highlighting pretty much the entire pages. In that address, Audre Lorde said, “There’s no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single issue lives.” Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this. So, let’s compassionately agitate or challenge the single-issue struggle of traditional family healing and look at both intergenerational family trauma and the internalized oppression in our parenting together.
Let’s start with parenting for social change, also known as decolonized parenting. It’s essentially about getting free as a collective. It’s about raising our child to be free, known in the sense that they can do whatever they want. Because, I mean, police brutality, gender violence, and other forms of oppression, which are alive and well out there on the streets. They’re still here. Being free in this case means, I want our kids to know that being exactly all of who they are is how they step into their power, and stand in the light of their own truth, because they learned as early as two years old, from social norms and media that what types of people are valued and what types of people are disposable. For our children to get free, we have to do the work first and break free from internalized oppression. Just like our children, society hands out a script to play along and perform our parenting for.
Take a moment to complete this sentence: “To be a good parent, I must…” I invite you to see if you respond sounds like you, or your caregivers, or what Chopra and Oprah recommended about parenting or the current parenting trends or capitalism. “To be a good parent, I must…” As a decolonized parent, you practice parenting for social change in the home and on the streets. Both ends, because what’s the point of doing all of this healing and equity work if you walk outside of your home and it’s the same old, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and white body supremacist culture. And unsubscribing from the oppressive norms that aren’t aligning with your parenting values can look like this. You can’t take your baby to a music class at the library because your double shifts never give you that luxury of time or choice. Instead of feeling like you’re a terrible parent who deprives your baby of “good parenting,” you remember to step back from that self-blame to look at the bigger societal picture. You have the clarity you need to see that you are doing your best to survive under a capitalist system. You don’t have to perform to the gender expectations, society demands of you. You redefine what good parenting looks like and you do what you can do best to show up for your child with presence and intention most of the time.
In this example, stepping back from self-blame, and acknowledging the larger societal picture is a way to decolonize your parenting, to decolonize is to detangle for self-worth from the inequitable norms of capitalism that value, productivity and labor over care and connection. We decolonize our parenting and detangle the knots of oppression so that we don’t end up colonizing ourselves and worse, colonizing our children. Well, again, most of the time because life is real and profession isn’t. That’s decolonized parenting or parenting for social change.
Now, I’d like to flip the coin to explore the other side of it, which is reparenting your inner child wounds for intergenerational family healing. Okay. Inner child wounds or clinically speaking, attachment injuries. As children, most of us wish we were loved in ways that we wanted. Sometimes our caregivers could meet us where we needed them to. Other times, given what they knew and had, they couldn’t and that leaves a gap. To survive, we adapted and adjusted to keep our caregivers close by so that they were available to care for us. If your caregiver didn’t like it when you work expressive and real, they might tell you that you are too much, so you adapt it unconsciously by toning yourself down or ignore your own needs to people please.
I’ll use myself as an example here. When I was little, my parents really valued academic success. I pushed hard to over deliver and over prepare, only to be met with passive aggressive comments, which is a signature style in my family lineage. Comments you could call motivating or manipulative. I’ll leave that up to you. We’re adapted to what my parents valued to gain their approval and to protect myself from their disapproval. If you’re wondering, “Well, Nat. What’s the big deal about your parents’ disapproval? Why care so much about what other people think?” I hear you. Here’s the thing, though, when you’re 43, a loved one’s disapproval might hurt like a papercut. Plus, you have in your purse disinfecting wipes, ointment, healing balm, or even a gel or two to help soothe this cut. But when you’re three years old, however, a loved one’s disapproval is likely to be a threat to your survival.
You might have already guessed it. As an adult, while functioning most of the time, parts of me still people please, over deliver and over prepare like there’s no tomorrow. The past lives on because my childhood survival adaptation is alive and well in my body. At Come Back to Care, we call it pain from the past, pickle in the present. But before I continue, I just want to invite you to step away from the good bad binary. When you think of what you had to adapt in order to protect yourself and survive. As a transgender woman and an Asian immigrant, if I hadn’t learned to scan the room for threat and people-please to disarm people’s discomfort, I wouldn’t be here speaking to you right now.
If you haven’t gone through customs and immigration as “the other” on both fronts of race, ethnicity and gender, whoa! I’ll save that story for another time. If I hadn’t over delivered and over prepared, I wouldn’t be this far in my academic career, doing consulting work with leading organizations and teaching graduate students. Instead of categorizing your coping mechanisms or survival habits as good or bad, I invite you to look at them as adaptive or outdated. Whether they are adaptive or outdated, many of us intuitively know that we don’t want to pass this rejection, pain, abandonment and harm to our children. That Apple, we want it to fall really far from the tree.
At Come Back to Care, we don’t just focus on healing our own inner child wounds, so that we don’t mess up our kids. That focus on future generations is important. What we do a bit differently is, we also bring an intergenerational lens to it, to bring the focus on our caregivers and ancestors too. This way, we weave the past with the present and the future. Then, with this intergenerational lens, we intersect this inner child work with social justice, because my liberation is bound to yours and we have to get there together. We look at the past generations through the lens of privilege and accountability. We acknowledge that we have more privileges to do this healing work our ancestors could not have done. We hold ourselves accountable to see where our caregivers were coming from, or hashtag, contextualize not condoned.
Not to prematurely forgive or get stuck in the blame and shame cycle, but to understand they’re versed in the context of their systemic oppression that they were trying to survive. Michael Kerr said, “Think of your mother as your grandmother’s daughter and get to know her that way”. Intergenerational family healing is basically knowing that you are the future ancestor who has an option to do the healing work that your ancestors couldn’t, and pass down a legacy of compassion and liberation. That is my very long invitation for you to both end intergenerational family trauma and internalize oppression. So that together, we can embody parenting for social change and reparenting our inner child for intergenerational family healing, so you’re no longer unknowingly parenting by other people’s playbook that you didn’t even get to write, so you can become an active author and editor of your unfolding family stories.
Holding all of the nuances and complexities with you, I’d love to leave you with two questions. Whose voice do you hear when you think, “Oh! I should do X, Y, and Z to be a good parent”? How would it be to play with the idea that Michael Kerr shared, perhaps for 1%, 1% only to try to see your parent as your grandparents’ child, and get to know them that way? If you’d like.
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[00:18:20] NV: Before we jump off here, who needs to hear this episode? I invite you to think about the people in your life that are also looking to align their parenting with social justice values and share this with them. It might be just the thing they’re needing to here today. This helps us get the word out about the show, but my hope is to really support as many people as possible to transform from autopilot to bold, conscious and decolonized family building. You already know, it does take a village. With your help, together, we can make that happen.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, and have the energy to share with another person you love, I appreciate you so much. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. You can find all the resources, links and complete show notes over at comebacktocare.com/podcast. If there’s something you want to check out, you can find it at comebacktocare.com/podcast. As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, take care.
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