What are We Doing to our Kids?

And how can we show up differently?

An offering: So much of what I’m talking about in our post today requires that we do our own inner work so we can better show up in our relationships. I’m a true believer that our inner work happens best in community. In that vein, I’m offering to lead another 6-week inner child meditation cohort starting in the new year:

• When: January on Thursdays from 11-12:30 PT via zoom for six weeks

• Cost: sliding scale of 30-45 dollars per session (180-270 for the full course).

Drop me an email if you’re interested in participating. I’ll need 4-6 folks to make it happen so feel free to ping a friend or partner or email letting me know you have a gaggle of folks interested.

If you can’t make the time happen but you’re interested in the course, you can access the self-paced coursework here:

Let’s get to it.

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I got a text from my friend on Monday: “There’s a mass shooting in Madison. High school. Hope your family and community are safe.”

My heart dropped as I checked the news, my mind flashing back to code reds at my high school decades ago, at the fear I felt hiding under a table we’d pushed against the back wall in history class, at crouching down next to my best friend as he talked my anxiety down, at my teacher shutting the lights off and drawing the shades until we were all cleared.

This time, the news said that it wasn’t my community—my loved ones were safe. But by now, we’ve all had decades worth of experience to know that, unless we fundamentally shift something, a next time is inevitable. Until we shift something, we’re all just maniacally careening along on this nonconsensual game of roulette with each other’s children.

I write Folkweaver as a radical imagining of the world we dream. As a parent and educator, my main lens of that dreaming is radically reimagining how we are to be in relationship to our children. I write about liberatory education, about connection, about disrupting power hierarchies between adults and kids, about trusting children and their capacities.

I see this vision so palpably in my brain, and get such strong glimpses of it in my kids and in our communities: this world that treats kids with dignity, respect, humanity. This world that lets kids feel safe and known, supported and encouraged, seen and delighted in.

And then, I hear of another child with another gun and a hurt so deep in them that they unleash that hurt so violently onto others and my breath just catches at the seismic schism between what I envision for our kids and the dangerous reality of what we are living with as our baseline.

What are we doing to our kids, you all?

Garrett Bucks wrote a searing piece this week, about his own kids’ code red that happened on the same day as the Madison shooting, just an hour away. In it he says:

The kid who caused the code red at my son’s school was no doubt in a great deal of pain. And that kid lives in a country where pain is often not healed, but balled up and passed on to somebody else. We are a country where some sleep on the streets so that others can sleep in comfort. We are a country where chanting “mass deportations now!” can win you a multiracial electoral coalition. We are a country where “it takes a village to raise a child” has been repeated enough to be trite, but where we forget its twin proverb:

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

I don’t think we’re fully reckoning as a society with the massive implications of the collective hurting of our children, who grow up to be collectively hurting adults.

We are a country that has allowed far too many people—to many children who grow up to be too many adults—to get to a place where they are so alone and hurt that they see no other recourse than to violently hurt someone else.

At a fundamental level, what are we doing as a society when we let our children get to a place where they carry so much hurt? When we have so little regard for their wellbeing that we can no longer guarantee their fundamental right to basic safety, or their basic right to have their hurt tended to so they don’t hurt someone else? When it becomes this commonplace for a child to pick up a gun and turn it on their peers? When it becomes our norm to hear stories of a second grader calling the police to report a shooting? When we let so many people fill up with so much hurt that the hurt is bursting at the seems, looking for a way out?

We can be so much more for our kids, you all. We have to be so much more for our kids.

Fundamentally, every child is asking us some version of:

Do you see me?

And every child desperately wants to hear the world say back:

I see you. I’m here for you. I’ll work to keep you safe.

What if we created a society around that notion? What if we centered our parenting around that notion? What if we centered our education around that notion?

Instead, we are creating a society of collectively lonely, hurting adults raising lonely, hurting children.

Loneliness can feel like numbness, or an aching. It can feel like watching the world like an observer, not sure how to break back in. It can feel like having no friends at school. It can feel like living on your screens at home. It can feel like working remotely for hours out of your living room, or nursing a baby alone, sleep deprived. It can feel like not having anyone in your life who understands you. It can feel like scrolling through your social feeds watching people across the ether, but finding none of them to connect with here in real life. It can feel like losing your tethers to the world here in front of you, your neighbors, your friends, your parents. It can feel watching your once sturdy tethers weakening until you’re wholly untethered, alone and hurting, with no one to see you in that hurt, no one to lend a hand to pull you out.

How many people, adults and kids alike, are living out some version of this experience?

Mia Birdsong talks about the state of American loneliness in How We Show Up:

There is a wide and growing body of research on how lonely and disconnected people in America are from their friends and from their neighbors. A 2018 survey from Cigna found that a quarter of us don’t have people in our lives who we feel understand us. Only half of us have daily meaningful interactions with others. ‘At least two in five surveyed sometime or always feel as though they lack companionship (43%), that their relationships are not meaningful (43%), that they are isolated from others, (43%), and/or that they are no longer close to anyone (39%).’ Only 26 percent of us know most of our neighbors. A third of us have never interacted with our neighbors.

Not having deep connection is causing us mental and physical harm. Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon general of the United States, wrote in Harvard Business Review that ‘loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.'

That was all before COVID. Our young people have lived through so much. And they desperately need us adults to connect with them. At a basic, fundamental level, they need to be seen. They need to feel safe. They need to feel soothed and comforted. They need to feel encouraged. They need to feel delighted in.

Yes, we have a violence epidemic. Yes, we have a gun epidemic. Politicians are infuriatingly doing nothing to stop that.

But driving the violence, beneath the access to the guns, what we really have is a hurting epidemic. What we really have is a loneliness epidemic. We have a collectively lonely society full of collectively lonely children who become collectively lonely adults all just desperately needing to be seen and held, comforted and supported by loving, connected others who can hold their hurts with them before they burst.

Our kids deserve so much better from us. And we deserve so much more support from each other and our society in order to show up in the ways they need: We deserve to feel seen. We deserve for our hurts to be held. We deserve to feel safe. Everyone of us deserves that.

We may feel powerless against it all. But what we all have access to, right now, is the capacity to pause to really and truly see our children. We all have the capacity to start practicing: I see you, I’m here for you, I’ll work to keep you safe. We all desperately need to build the capacity to start to practice that with each other. We need to begin that work together now.

How might the world be different if we could show up for each other in that way?

In seeing you,

Sara

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While we’re officially sold out of our winter solstice zine, our digital zine is still available in abundance. We’re donating 10% of profits to MECA (middle eastern children’s alliance) for Emergency Gaza Relief Efforts.

My dear friend Emily and I co-created this Inner Child Meditation Series as a tangible meditation tool to help us do the inner work of reparenting that allows us to access connection to each other more readily. Check it out as a tool to support your inner work.