Parents Leading Parents Outside of RC
Recently Marya Axner, the International Liberation Reference Person for Parents, led a workshop Parents Leading Parents Outside of RC.
We were thirty-three parents—from Israel, Wales, England, Canada, and the United States. We were immigrant parents, parents of the Global Majority, Indigenous parents, Jewish parents, LGBQT parents, working-class parents.
Groups that met during the workshop included parents eliminating white racism, parent allies to Jews, dads, parents who work in the “mental health” field, parents of children with special needs, parents of adopted children, parents of teens, parents leading parents on climate change, parents leading parents in their children’s schools, parents bringing family work to the wide world.
We looked at how parents’ oppression intersects with racism, anti-immigrant oppression, and anti-Jewish oppression. And Marya kept holding out that we must not let anything divide us.
She talked about Israel and did a demonstration with an Israeli parent that showed the effects of war and isolation on parents raising their children in Israel.
We looked at the climate crisis. We thought about how and at what age we should share information about it with our children and how to follow their minds and let them stay in charge as they take action. Marya held out that the future of the world rests on each of us being able to tell [see] how significant we are.
Regarding leading parents outside of RC, Marya talked about holding out policy. When we bring RC to the world, we bring (1) ourselves, our love and caring, and our ability to build good relationships; (2) our understanding of listening and the discharge process; and
(3) good policy. She said that at this stage in the collapse of society, people need policy and guidelines. They need a new framework for understanding the world—because the current frameworks aren’t working, and they are hungry for what will work.
She talked about how as parents we hold out policy, guidelines, and limits for our children all the time. When we do this, they have something to bump up against and discharge off of to find their thinking. And we figure out how to stay and listen to them. We need to do something similar in the wide world. We need to put forward our thinking and policy and then stay when people don’t agree with us.
Marya talked about the resilience we’ve acquired in dealing with attacks. Our children get mad at us and take sessions at us all the time—in the places where we feel the worst about ourselves—and we take our feelings about that to sessions. It is the best possible training for dealing with attacks in the wide world.
Marya reminded us that we are big and make a huge difference. We need to get our voices as parents, and what we know as parents, out into the world.
At the workshop I battled with feeling insignificant. But for the first time I could connect the feeling with parents’ oppression and the ways we’ve been invisible and not valued in society. Knowing our significance will move everything forward.
Leaving the workshop, I saw more clearly than ever how important it is to see ourselves as big and significant, as agents of communication and change—particularly now.
New York, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
discussion list for leaders of parents