Terri Nilliasca, 2012 with an updated preface from 2023
10 years later:
As any parent will tell you, the days are long but the years are short. Ten years ago, our children were 9 years old. When I wrote the essay below, we were still holding hands, helping with bath time, and answering innumerable questions about the world. Now they are young adults, nineteen, and in their second semester of college. Parenting teenagers through late stage capitalism, looming climate catastrophe, and a global shut down caused by a life threatening pandemic, is challenging, terrifying, heartbreaking and joy filled all at the same time. Parenting teenagers taught me so many additional lessons in the stories we must tell each other to resist capitalism. Also, watching my children start to incorporate their own narratives gives me insights if our anti-capitalist framework had any impact. When we text a picture of ourselves at a Palestine march and a child replies “From the River to the Sea”, or our other child explains why they identify as non-binary, we hear our words but also their new narratives. Re-reading the essay below, I decided to leave it mostly untouched, written for the parenting of young children to resist capitalism, but I did add one of the most profound lessons I learned from our teenage children at the end.
Parenting and Resisting Capitalism: Creating A New Narrative
As parents, we are usually the first people to explain to our children the world around them. Of course, they are also independently seeing, observing, and creating narrative, but we help shape and build that narrative. We are often the first ones to answer fundamental questions about why the world is the way it is. We explain what is “normal” and what is not. We draw the lines into the broad expanse of color and light that is the world. We provide the first rough sketch, the first set of bones, the nuts and bolts to our children’s internally created world. It is a daunting and scary responsibility but also the place where we can really make a difference in giving our children a counter-narrative to the capitalist mythologies that surround us.
So much of our parenting to resist capitalism lies in where and how we draw those lines or how well we can explain that these lines are not immutable. Can we even acknowledge that we are the creators of those lines and boundaries so that our children understand that they have the power to change them themselves? Do we explain that these lines can be erased, that we can choose to live outside the borders and in opposition to the laws that our society has created to reinforce our boundaries and borders? In some cases, it is making the invisible visible, like revealing that workers’ hands touched and made everything we use, or erasing the false line between citizen and immigrant or between 1st world and 3rd world.
If our narrative is like the skeleton of our world, in our family we try to give our children a new set of bones with which to play and build. In this essay, I explore the challenges and dilemmas that we face as parents trying to help our children resist capitalism. We want our children to envision a different possibility in the ways humans relate, produce, and build community together. We hope that these new stories or perspectives will help them be part of future resistance. Capitalism and the system that keeps it in place is a deeply complex set of norms, values, and economic orderings. We seek to give our children the tools to see capitalism for what it is, and then to resist it.
We are not alone in this quest. We are very lucky to have fabulous chosen family who are struggling to be radical, queer, conscious, anti-capitalist parents/aunts/uncles/goddess mothers. We talk, we share resources, and we commiserate. We absolutely need each other – where else can we discuss what works, what doesn’t work, and the different choices that we make? The various strategies that I offer below emerge from our collective attempt to raise our children in this monstrous, killing, capitalist system of the United States.
We pool and share our resources with chosen and blood family.
The small, individualized nuclear family is a bedrock of capitalism. This tiny unit lives or dies alone. It creates tremendous pressure on the two parents who must somehow earn enough money to feed, clothe, and educate their offspring. In a heterosexual relationship, inevitably the bulk of the child-care and unpaid work of keeping the house together falls on the woman, even if she works for wages outside the home. In a neo-liberal economy, this reproduction of labor, the raising of new workers, childcare and education is a “private” problem, to be solved one family at a time, with the state bearing no responsibility. Family resources become something to hoard and guard, lest other people “steal” them.
We are lucky to find people with whom we can live cooperatively; we struggled with isolation when we first became parents. I felt incredibly lonely as the person responsible for much of the childcare and domestic work.
Now, we live in a communal way with seven of us in our home. My partner, our two children, and I share a home with my aunt and her daughter and grandson. We all contribute to the household differently. My partner and I are currently the only wage earners, so we shoulder the expenses, while my Aunt does the bulk of domestic work. My cousin is a college student, so she mostly studies. In some ways, you could argue that this is not resisting capitalism at all, because we have two wage earners and one person who stays home and does the household work. I think the difference is in the distribution of status and power in the household. We don’t consider earning wages to make one’s contribution to the household to be more valuable than other “unpaid” contributions. In addition, we always have a steady stream of loved ones who stay with us from time to time, sometimes for two years, sometimes for a month. We treat them all, blood or chosen, as family.
We strive to not enforce the idea of private property for our children. We teach all the children that all toys belong to everyone, except for their special stuffed animal companions (aka “loveys”) or projects that are still in progress. But even the most fantastic Lego creation goes back into the communal soup for sharing after some time has passed.
All items of value are recycled, either given to the next person who can use it in the house or sent to our family in the Philippines. This is presented not as charity, but rather as obligation to the members of our human family.
Retelling the America Creation Myth – We Tell Our Children “This Land Was Stolen”
Language is indispensable in re-creating a capitalist norm. Children quickly learn the building blocks to a capitalist narrative. The first step in countering the narrative is changing our language and using truthful words, rather than the imperial fairy tales we were told. The need to challenge the dominating stories that justify colonization and genocide arrives fairly quickly once the kids get to school. Columbus Day and Thanksgiving are still told from the perspective of the colonizer. In kindergarten, M. came home with a Santa Maria ship made out of popsicle sticks to celebrate Columbus Day and the so-called “discovery of America.”
When our kids came home from school with “Indian” headdresses, we were faced with a dilemma. Our urge was to ban the offensive items, but kids naturally love dressing up, so we didn’t ban the wearing of them. Instead, we explained that it is not an actual First Nation article of clothing and we discussed the difference between dressing up and stealing/making fun of a people and their culture. We offer a counter-education and read about specific nations like the Lakota Sioux, so they can see the complexities of each different nation. We also read a wonderful series of children’s books by native author Louise Erdrich about a family of Ojibwa that must leave their island due to white colonizers. As my friend described, “it’s like the non-racist version of Little House on the Prairie.”
Author Andrea Smith, in her essay Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy, explains that a racist “logic” had to be maintained in order to justify genocide and colonization. It is essential to the capitalist narrative that this country was “settled” by brave, white explorers and that the previous inhabitants were just monolithic, extinct peoples. This is because capitalism needed the “free” land to survive and expand past Europe. New “undeveloped” land was necessary for the capitalists/colonizers to expand from land-poor Europe. Thus, it was also essential that the First Nations of this land were erased as non-owners and merely inhabitants. Racist constructs depicting the different nations as undifferentiated “savages” with no political system was necessary to justify the genocide of the millions of people that lived in the United States before the colonists.
So when we refer to the first Europeans in the Americas, we don’t call them settlers or Puritans or colonists, but rather imperialists, colonizers, and land grabbers. This contradicts the capitalist, creation myth that white settlers founded this country through brave exploration, rather than mass murder. We refer to the original nations that first lived in these lands as First Nations and then we explain that there are many peoples of the First Nations and they all have their own names, like Chippewa, Lakota, Ojibwa, and Powhatan. We seek to re-draw a complex and respectful narrative about the people of the First Nations to reveal that they still exist, still struggle and they have not been exterminated as the capitalist myth asserts. If our children know that the people of the First Nations still survive, then their continued oppression is much harder to justify. This new “creation story” creates a bridge to talking about European imperialism throughout the world.
When our children started school, they also began to bring home imperialist myths about the world beyond North America. The children learned that Egyptians are just mummies, Cleopatra, and pyramids – they are ancient and dead. This narrative was especially ironic during the Egyptian uprising in 2010-2011. Our children watched with us as we were riveted by the struggles in Tahrir Square. They were astonished when we told them it was Egypt and they wanted to know where the pyramids were, but since we had discussed Tahrir Square, A. brought it up in school when the teacher asked what they knew about Egypt.
From Lion King to the Discovery channel, Africa is presented to children as one giant safari of animals and dark-skinned peoples who occasionally help out with the animals. A racist logic that dehumanizes, simplifies, and erases the complexity of an entire continent into one, monolithic “place” without countries, political systems, cities, and languages helps to justify a capitalist practice of genocide and colonization. It also serves to justify the global status quo where 1st world countries hoard the majority of the world’s resources while people in the 3rd world starve. We remind our children all the time that Africa is not a country but a continent, and so we don’t let them say “so and so” was speaking “African.” We ask what country and then remind them that thousands of languages are spoken on the continent of Africa. We look at the map of Africa and explain that Egypt is in Africa, we look at pictures of cities in Kenya and talk about the struggles of resistance in South Africa. We listen to K’naan, a rapper from Somalia, and then find Somalia on the map.
Our challenging the language of genocide and colonization leads me to the other tenet of challenging capitalism as parents, another bone in the new body of narrative that we try and create for our children.
We Talk About Class & Economic Inequality
In a capitalist narrative, class differences don’t exist, wealth disparity is “natural”, and if you work hard enough, you will have enough money to survive. Furthermore, wealth is created by bankers, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs. Workers are invisible and poor people are lazy. This is all normalized under capitalism.
In order to counter this, we teach our children to see that we are part of a human created economic system rather than a “natural” order of things. We discuss our values versus the values promoted under capitalism. We discuss the unfairness of capitalism. We say that we believe that everyone should have what they need to survive: a home, food, and education, enjoyment without having to work for wages to pay for these things. We tell them that people are paid less or more than others but not because they work harder or less hard. We say that our own income is unfair and that people who work much harder than us get paid less than us.
We work to make the workers visible to our children, to un-erase them. We teach them to see workers’ hands in everything we touch and see and use. It surprised me actually; A., at the age of 3, asked me, “How does water get into the house?” I answered, “Because workers put in the pipes to bring us the water.” Under a traditional, capitalist narrative, I would have unconsciously answered “from the pipes” and left out the workers who laid those pipes. After that first question, I realized how workers are erased from our consciousness; we are taught to celebrate lawyers, politicians, doctors, but never the people who build the tunnels for our subways or take our trash or lay down our roads. In fact, we are trained not to notice workers – to step past them, to look past them. So I take great care to point out the workers as they work, to talk about the ones who died building this city, to notice out loud for my children how our trash is taken away by workers and doesn’t just disappear. I notice out loud for my children the domestic workers and park workers in the playground, the janitor at the school.
We explain that because we hold values other than capitalism, we share our income with everyone in our house, and with our family and with the domestic workers at the Filipino worker’s center, DAMAYAN. We don’t perpetuate the myth that hard work through wage labor will lead to a good life. We talk about money, we tell our children when we can’t afford to participate in something or purchase something. We try our best to resist stoking the fires of addiction to consumption. When they were 4, we had our first and only big birthday party, and we had a book exchange, and asked everyone to bring a book. At the end of the party, everyone got a book from the book bucket. Since then we have tried to center birthday celebrations around a fun activity, with each kid (they are twins) bringing a friend and going to the museum together or having a sleep over.
Some of our family is Christian and I was raised Christian, so Christmas time brings some of the hardest challenges. From the endless commercials, to the catalogs in the mail, to the questions – “What do I want from Santa this year?” – it is very hard to resist this festival of over-consumption. In fact, I felt a deep sadness over our choice not to have an orgy of gifts at Christmas because I remember the joy of getting gifts, stacking them, counting them, anticipating them. And suddenly, I realized: that pleasure feeling that I remember was an early beginning to my addiction to consumption! So I was able to keep on with our plan – gifts are kept to a minimum. M. got pads of paper and pencils. We got a new Wii game for the family. Then we had a big, Filipino meal. One year, we went camping on Christmas.
We Discuss & Challenge Racism and White Supremacy.
Critical Race theorists explain how capitalism and white supremacy are intertwined and assert that one cannot be dismantled without dismantling the other. Radical theorist Ruth Gilmore offers us this definition of racism: “an unequal distribution of life chances and opportunities based on a socially-constructed definition of race or ethnicity resulting in premature death”. Capitalism is an economic system that relies on inequality and unequal distribution of resources. Therefore, racism and capitalism operate together to increase the wealth and life chances of certain populations through the appropriation of labor, life chances, and wealth of other populations.
We are a family of Filipino and Jewish background. Our children are adopted from the Philippines. Three of our clan just immigrated here in the last five years. My mother emigrated here from the Philippines and was undocumented until she married my US citizen dad. I am light-skinned, my kids are darker skinned. It is complicated and deeply personal, so how do we resist racism?
We try and communicate an anti-racist value system. First, we don’t pretend the world is colorblind. We will discuss race and ethnicity and we openly discuss the privilege of being white skinned. When Trayvon Martin was murdered for being a black child in a hoodie, we talked about it at the dinner table. We talk about the concepts of race, ethnicity and heritage as complex, human created concepts. I share my personal, individual experience of racism and my partner shares his stories of anti-Semitism. We try to take these personal, individual stories and link them to a larger, political discussion, but our children are only eight and six. For us, this means that we have to talk about it all the time, simplified, imperfect, and developing in complexity as they get older.
When we talk about laws that we protest, we explain the racism behind many of these laws. We explain that immigration laws are racist and aimed at separating brown and black families from each other and we point out that people from European countries are treated much differently than people from our home country, the Philippines.
Maybe because of this openness to discuss race, our children bring up their own observations about our racial caste system. M. who is a lovely shade of nut brown, said to me that in her observation of the world – clearly being white was better, white skinned people were beautiful. At first it broke my heart that she said this at the age of four, but then I realized that OF COURSE she learned this lesson of white supremacy in our society. It is just because we talk about race all the time that she felt free to say what she had been taught. And even though it was painful to hear, it gave us the opportunity to dispute this narrative and offer her our own values of anti-racism.
We Try To Bust Through Gender Norms and Encourage Our Children to Create Their Own Gender Narratives
Hetero-patriarchy is another cornerstone of capitalism. Strict gender constructs are an essential component of a developed capitalist economy. When European societies transitioned from a feudal economy to a capitalist one, a division between wage labor and unpaid “domestic labor” was created. Work that is necessary to the reproduction of a worker or a laboring class became unpaid work, subsumed and erased in the home and gendered as “women’s” work. This tiny family unit, standing alone, is quite fragile in a capitalist economy, and wage labor becomes necessary for survival. The state is able to claim that it has no responsibility for the reproduction of labor, even though it needs this work in order to have access to a replenished labor supply of willing workers.
Many feminists, radical theorists, and queer theorists have asserted that a gender binary system and the patriarchal, heterosexual family is a building block for capitalism. It is in the heteropatriarchal family that children first learn much of their ideas about a gender binary system. It is in school that these ideas about gender, gender roles, and sexuality become cemented even more.
We have two children for whom we are the primary caregivers, one who may or may not be a “girl” and one who may or may not be a “boy”. They both get the “Dora sheets” or the “train” sheets, depending on the laundry situation. We don’t link gender to a particular color. But capitalism relies on a specific set of gender cues, rules, and strict division, and children learn these rules early on, even outside school. These are enforced through other people, mothers, children, and advertisements.
For instance, A. loved pink and he specifically picked out a pink scooter and rode it proudly until age 4, when other boys on the playground made fun of him for riding a “girl” colored scooter. He refused to ride the pink scooter again. Another time, when my children were 4, they went to a birthday party where the party was divided into a “girls” room filled with princess and pink clothes for dress up and a “boys” room filled with knights costumes and other warrior type clothes. When my daughter M. tried to go to the “boys” room, the mother steered her towards the girls room, saying “Don’t you want to try on some princess clothes?” Our friend, who had accompanied them to the party, protected M. and took her to the boys’ side, explaining to the mother that our family was not into reinforcing traditional gender roles. M. quickly grabbed a sword and ran off.
In kindergarten, the schools begin to divide children by gender; girls in one line and boys in another. At this age, many children may still not think in gender binary terms and will float from line to line, only to have the teachers steer them into their “correct” line.
One of our children, M., who was assigned female at birth, has begun questioning her gender. She will now only wear “boy” clothes and we celebrate her in all her glorious, emerging butchness! We asked her if she wanted to use different pronouns or to rename herself with a different name, but for now she is still using “she” pronouns –we made it clear that she can change her mind some day if she wants. She attended a Sylvia Rivera Law Project meeting where she saw people that reminded her of her own gender-questioning self and we are grateful that she has that supportive space. She often states that she feels like a boy inside and we tell her that she can be as “boy”/“boi” as she wants to be. She is now in 2nd grade, and the other children sometimes ask her if she is a boy or a girl. She has now proudly started saying she is a tomboy. We have never used that word in our discussions, but if she feels good about it then it is enough. Once, when I was in the classroom, a girl asked me why M. never wore dresses, I said “Well, because she doesn’t want to, so why should she?” The little girl nodded and said, “My mom would never let me get away with that.” This was a revelation to me – I had assumed that this little girl was singling M. out for her choice in a bad way, but actually it seemed she admired M. and wanted to know how “she got away with it.”
Challenging compulsory heterosexuality is also a priority for us. When we talk about our children’s possible partners, we don’t limit their choices of gender. We refer to a wide range of possibilities, women, men, or the choice to have no partner. “One day you may be with someone, a boy or a girl. Maybe you will choose to be married, but you don’t have to.” I have explained to our children that even though I am with their dad and want to be just with him, if I was single, that I would date boys OR girls. I explain that I think that all genders are pretty. It’s funny coming out to your children, because they don’t care. They love you no matter what, so my kids just nodded ok, no big deal.
These conversations are challenging because our culture equates biology, gender and sexuality all the time. We lack the vocabulary to discuss complexity when it comes to gender. The English language just has this binary system – girl or boy. But as a family, we try to create a big enough empty space so that they can fill it themselves. We admit it is hard.
We Try to Encourage Emotional Openness and Emotional Bravery
Capitalism also relies on our own personal alienation from our human nature to cooperate, socialize, and the desire to do meaningful work. The factory, the retail chain store, the nursing homes are necessarily places where we have to leave much of our true selves at the door. Many Marxist theorists have discussed the alienating nature of work in an industrial society. Prior to a wage-labor economy, many people worked for subsistence – in the fields to feed themselves or in their homes to clothe themselves. In many places work was about personal or community survival, not creating profit for an employer. Convincing people to work for pay and abandon any sense of personal ownership was hard. Farmers didn’t want to work in the factory. Mandatory education was implemented in order to get children who were raised on a farm acclimated to a type of learning that was divorced and alienated from their everyday life. Capitalists also needed to get children used to responding to a set schedule, responding to bells and an outside authority. In other words, capitalists needed to create disciplined workers. A step to that creation is normalizing wage labor devoid of any personal meaning to our whole selves. Under capitalism, we are emotionally divided, trying to find meaningful work that we care about while subsuming our desires and emotional needs in order to go into the factory, or fast food chain restaurant, or retail store and earn wages.
Another facet of capitalist logic teaches us to ignore our human instinct to help and cooperate with other living creatures. In our society, people are understood as “naturally” competitive and individualistic. But in reality, humans throughout history have clustered together to survive. Children have to be taught to ignore a stranger who is homeless or suffering on the street. In fact, children have to be taught the difference between family and strangers. In school, children are encouraged to strive and achieve as individuals. My kids come home bragging when the teacher promotes one of them to a new reading level. Children are not rewarded for the success of the group, but the success of one. Their emotions are rarely, if ever addressed. Gold stars are not given for emotional bravery but rather for obedience to the teacher, sitting still on the rug or perfect attendance.
Learning to respect and honor our full selves and learning how to communicate these selves and cooperate in a community is central to what we are sharing with our children. This may be the hardest lesson because we are still learning this one ourselves. When M. was just 6 and in kindergarten, she began to have full-blown panic attacks at school. We found her a therapist to help her with her anxiety. Through her own journey, we have all learned a lot. We learned how important it is to talk about our fears and anxieties and if we don’t face our fears, we still find them waiting for us around some corner. We all try to practice emotional bravery. And by bravery, we don’t mean a false, stoic bravado that is actually alienation, but rather being brave enough to be true to our feelings and ourselves. We hope to make it possible for them to question authority, to critically examine the different narratives presented to them and to be brave enough to create their own.
We try hard to create a sense of community between the children and we try to encourage them to think like a team. For instance, from the beginning, we said no telling on each other, unless it was something dangerous. We didn’t want to create an atmosphere of snitching and punishment. Our nephew moved in last year with us, and our children are terribly jealous. We try and give them the space to safely express these feelings, through talking about their strong feelings without retribution for them, drawing about their feelings and giving them alone time. We also have many spontaneous dance parties, which really seem to help us all come together. A year later, we still struggle with jealousy, anger and resentment, but in between those hard moments, there is love and laughter and community.
It Is A Work in Progress
In the end, we know that we are deeply entrenched in a capitalist society. After all, we haven’t left the “grid.” We work for wages, our children enjoy getting new consumer goods, they watch endless commercials and see advertisements all around them. Every day our children are subjected to violent lessons of capitalism – racism, ableism, homophobia, sexism, and state violence through police oppression and the caging of people.
Nevertheless, we hope that if we can peel back the layers of the capitalist narrative, we can help them construct their own narrative of resistance. We hope that we provide them a sense of their own wholeness so they won’t need to strive to “be” someone or to acquire their sense of self through consumption and private ownership. We hope to replace the bleak capitalist picture of a world of limited resources, merciless individualism, normalized economic violence, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia with one of hope and optimism. We hope to give them a few new bones for their body of ideas and the understanding that they can create and add their own. Hopefully, our children will be the next builders and creators of an anti-capitalist resistance.
Postscript:
Our teenagers taught me that there is no success story at the end of childhood, that the launching into independence is impossible and it is just enough that they are alive.
“Parenting teenagers is an extreme sport” are words I uttered a lot in the last 5 years. Teens are still children but in the bodies of almost adults. Their body proportions are off kilter like puppies, with their emotions naturally swinging from highs to lows. They see the world with new, adult eyes and they realize they have been betrayed. Adults make bad decisions, we marched in the street for Eric Garner when they were children, only to watch an unending stream of Black men and women be murdered by the state with no consequence. They are taught in school that the civil rights movement was victorious only to see an openly racist, misogynist elected president. They also see me, the parent, as a fallible human being. Teenagers see through our own lies we tell ourselves. They see our Facebook posts bragging about our child’s accomplishments, what high school they got into, their soccer score. They know innately, as parents, that our stories of their success makes us look good.
As our child descended into the hell of depression during the Covid shutdown, I learned that I needed to let go of the capitalist narrative of a successful parent – where your child goes to school, finishes their assignments, goes to college, or even in the alternative, goes to trade school, gets a job, becomes independent. He challenged me – he said “You want me to go to do these things so you can brag to your friends.” And no, that is not entirely true. but yes, it is partially true.
It is also true that I desperately wanted them both to become independent of me because I am terrified that I won’t be able to protect them anymore. But in truth, we can never truly protect our children from the violence of a market economy. Or from the violence of hetero-partriarchy or white supremacy. And in the end, none of us are truly independent. We need each other, we need community.
In a narrative of resisting capitalism, we must acknowledge our co-dependence because independence is an illusion, part of the capitalist myth. The billionaires are dependent on stolen labor in order to accumulate their wealth. My child’s worth is not about what he produces or achieves, they are worthy even when unable to get out of bed, even if he never finishes high school, or goes to college. I learned to let go of all of my stories for him in those terrifying months of loving someone in deep depression. The deep, quiet, darkness challenged me to stop trying to “fix” him. And just to love them. And maybe that is our best resistance to capitalism.