There’s a facebook meme making it’s rounds in unschooling circles that reads
I practice the new, extreme parenting…
I call it treating me children like human beings.
It’s only new to Western domination culture. New and extreme.
But for many cultures – treating children like human beings was/is a norm. It was the march of ‘civilisation’, courtesy of colonialism and western imperialism that came and killed off this way of living and learning with children replacing it with a particularly savage form of parenting and relating to young people.
See this quote from part of a longer piece by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
“If children learn to normalise dominance and non-consent within the context of education, then non-consent becomes a normalised part of the ‘tool kit’ of those who have and wield power… This is unthinkable within Nishnaabeg intelligence.”
I do wonder what kind of status children lived with prior to the European mass murder of women (witch hunt doesn’t convey the horror of that period adequately).
#DecolonisingParenting #DecolonisingChildhood