The Art of Imperfect Parenting

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Just don’t expect them to hew precisely to the path you’ve so carefully prepared for them. Teenaged Maia Gore doesn’t like being dragged to protest rallies anymore (though she did participate in an antiwar walkout at her school last spring); O’Mara’s daughter embraced the Nike swoosh as a teen, even after her mom told her about the sweatshops; Lavender’s kids won’t watch the news with her, for fear of yet another political lecture. (“When I get my knickers in a twist about current events, my daughter tells me to calm down.”) Heidi Vogt was a Peace Corps volunteer, but has serious doubts about her ability to effect change-a concern not uncommon among even the most activist parents. “If I were told I could save the world by sacrificing myself,” she writes, “I might just decide that the world wasn’t worth saving.”

And my kids—unschooled, organically fed, and thrift-store clothed—exhibit no particular proclivity toward radical activism. Like most kids, they understand intuitively the concept of fairness (racism and homophobia never made any sense to them), but as much as they may understand on some level how screwy the world is, they seem to have no particular interest as yet in committing their lives to changing it.

But maybe the real issue is how we define the revolution we’re all so intent on making with our kids. It is, after all, convenient for moms and dads to extrapolate the goals of movements past to the social change possibilities of the future. It’s what we know, what we’re comfortable seeking. The next generation, however, may have a totally different idea of what tools and strategies can push the forces of injustice off the map (like, duh, the Internet). Maybe it’s not about barricades and tear gas anymore; maybe it’s about poetry slams and gender-shifting, or things we can’t even imagine.

And maybe we shouldn’t be so intent as parents to manufacture social change through our offspring at all. As Ariel Gore notes, it can be a painful business. “Being radical often requires a radicalizing experience—and probably not a pleasant one,” she says. “The natural thing is to shelter our kids from painful experiences. There’s a conflict there.”

The conflict isn’t simply internal, either; it’s cultural and political as well. We live in a society that values children chiefly for their ability to consume and their potential as future compliant workers. “Society mostly looks at kids’ deficits, not their strengths,” says O’Mara. “It’s a culture of crisis all the time; everything’s a problem. There’s not a lot of modeling of just trusting the way of things, just trusting them to be children.”

Changing those societal values is everyone’s job, O’Mara says. It starts with raising healthy children, of course, but extends to teaching them civics, educating them about politics, encouraging them to vote. “In this time particularly, we need to educate kids about democracy,” she says. “We need to stress civic education and media literacy.”

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