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Raising humans together

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The strain on consumer families

July 18, 2019 By Miki Dedijer

The strains of sustaining the central family fire in a consumer family are more often signs of these trying times than our inadequacies or inexperience as parents. Until a century ago, and in many places far more recently, the family depended for its health on continuous exchanges with extended family, neighbors and a local community. […]

Overparenting and social monoculture

April 26, 2019 By Miki Dedijer

Parenting implodes in a social monoculture. The social ecology we’ve depended on as parents until recently, is today many times frail and tattered. There is little social cohesion around our homes, few of us have a living community in which to plant our children. In a few generations, the communal life that held our children […]

Becoming a family servant

July 28, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

In a few days, a dozen or so men are gathering at our farm around a man about to become a father. So I’ve spent some time pondering what this moment asks of us, now that his life seems to be taking him away from a certain singularity awash in endless possibilities, towards an obligation […]

Home as a place that doesn’t exist

July 21, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

The global village tends no fire around which the children can gather. Its sophisticated arrogance is politely to sneer at domesticity as a lovely ideal, but ultimately a naive and inevitably temporary undertaking. It announces to anyone seeking to grow roots, that home is to be found everywhere, making sure that it is nowhere to […]

The spell of potential

July 13, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

There are a few spells around, beliefs that are so common we hardly notice their insidious impact on how we lead our lives. Like when we tell a child “You can be anything you want to be”, without us actually having any way to know what that child’s potential truly is. Potential has no definite […]

Your child’s spiritual doctor

July 10, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

Your child’s nature unfolds like an oak from an acorn. Once she has tumbled onto the ground from some mysterious height, it is the soil and the wind and the rains that give her ultimate expression its particular form. Who she becomes when she’s well rooted and fully extended has painfully little to do with […]

Playlist of your ancestors

February 2, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

Music is a bridge to our ancestors You can wander on the arch of a tune towards the loved one’s you’ve lost. For me it’s Marian Anderson’s “Coming through the rye,” a song my father would theatrically sing to us as children. Or my grandfather’s songs that he learned in Sweden’s endless spruce forests, during […]

Making humans who serve life

January 28, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

There was a time in your ancestry, either within living memory or well beyond depending on your particular lineage, when a child was raised not to be all that she could be, but to serve life. Raising a child like that takes a lot of cultural savvy. The songs, the stories, the games, the rituals, […]

Attachment beyond mom and dad

January 14, 2018 By Miki Dedijer

Attachment theory places a child’s sense of belonging at the breast of the mother, or in the lap of the father. But we’re all born with a need for attachment to a home that is far vaster than the nuclear family. Imagine instead an attachment theory that knows the pain of being uprooted and adrift, […]

Respect trumps understanding

December 5, 2017 By Miki Dedijer

I just spent twenty minutes in the car with a sullen son on the way to school. We didn’t speak a single word the whole ride there, until we said goodbye with a long hug. I had no idea why he was mad–maybe something to do with his mom and shoes that were too warm. […]

How to plant your child in community

November 29, 2017 By Miki Dedijer

I’ve heard from many parents who dream of planting their children in community. Like them, maybe you too have raised your head and looked around and seen nothing but fragments of a village, shards of a tribe, threads of an ancestral tapestry. You think at times of moving your family to where community seems more […]

Lifeline

November 16, 2017 By Miki Dedijer

A ship trails a lifeline in its wake for the safety of its passengers. It’s a precaution wise captains take, drawing on thousands of years’ experience with the high seas. The latest breathing technique, meditation video, yoga posture or  parenting tool is of little use when your 8 year old is sulking, your 4-year old […]

A child’s identity is forged in community

October 22, 2017 By Miki Dedijer

There’s this cartoon from the New Yorker I saw a long time ago. A man at a cocktail party is kneeling in the corner of the living room. Someone asks, What’s Larry doing? And the response, He’s trying to find himself. I laugh at that one every time, out of recognition surely. Spending our adult […]

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