Miki Dedijer

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The strain on consumer families

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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.

In consumer society today, the family purchases most of its sustenance to the best of its ability from professionals, specialists and experts at schools, institutions, corporations, agencies.

We entrust our children to others while we’re at work. We rely on doctors and chemistry for our health. We rely on supermarkets to supply our food. We rely on social workers, retirement homes or care units to tend to our vulnerable ones. We rely on mortuaries and undertakers for our dead.

Consumer society–where our basic social needs are up for sale and local community thus made obsolete–consumes the family by replacing most of its social functions, making it more prone to dysfunction.

Here, family easily becomes fraught with isolation, loneliness, disconnection and the consequent stress of one or two adults doing their utmost to hold it all together. Trying to sustain family vibrancy, loving relationship and a nurturing environment for our children in this setting is a sisysephean task.

Autonomy is a managed existence dependent on purchased services flying a false flag, leaving us oddly and suprisingly in an interminable search for home. We depend on an impersonal system to provide us what we once provided for ourselves, with the help of community.

Family is not a sentiment. It’s a function. It is shaped, formed and sustained by the ways in which we come together, how we share chores and work, and the web of mutual dependence and vital relationships that bind us to one another.

Personal wholeness and well-being depends entirely on communal wholeness.

And so health for our children asks that we as parents devote ourselves to tending a family home of co-dependent people who are also dependent on the place in which we live, on our neighbors for our social life, and disciplining ourselves to the craft of knowing our place well enough to meet our basic needs.


Overparenting and social monoculture

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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 even in cities has been replaced by single-parent households, frequent divorces, forced schooling, estrangement from neighbors, urban sprawl into forests and meadows, booming traffic, repeatedly moving homes, scattered blood families, exhausting work-schedules, urban commutes, globe-trotting teenagers, business travels, busy or absent grandparents, rampant digitalization.

Overparenting is an understandable response to communal collapse–we anxiously attempt to control our children’s lives to shield them from a world that seems increasingly fragmented, erratic and hostile.

Surrounded by communal disarray, we try to be all we can for our children, serving as fathers and mothers, as grandparents, as playmates, as teachers, elders, supervisors, guides, protectors, confidants, supportive listeners, storytellers, personal assistants.

Maybe you recognize something of that. I’ve certainly heard from enough parents now to know this is not uncommon, not unknown. Yet overparenting is too much to ask of any one of us.

And it’s not healthy for our children. Our conscious or unconscious attempts to compensate for communal erosion deprive our children of their need of failure, frustration, discomfort, disappointment, adversity, uncertainty as well as free play, timelessness, aimless wandering and all other ways we learn to become resilient humans.

The quick fix? No, there isn’t one. But if you’re the parent of a young child, or an expectant parent, mending community is good parenting. You still have time, just.

Cultural repair mends the family, and lessens the stresses on all, but it’s a long haul. Few of us know what we’re doing, or how to proceed. Yet the signs are there, and the obligation is upon us. And so we must proceed, not knowing how.


Becoming a family servant

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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 to be tethered to the bundle of ties that is family.

Now there’s a word, family, pregnant with hidden meaning, fully birthed only by a willingness to wonder some about its ancestry.

Family, from the latin famulus, is originally an adjective meaning servile, or a noun signifying a servant or slave. We may receive this as a negative, this posture of submission, but I suspect that there’s more to it then what the knee’s jerk suggests. As the verb famulur, it indicates someone who ministers, tends to or waits upon someone or something.

And so there is an action concealed within the pale lifelessness of the noun, something being done that is of consequence to the one being acted upon.

The servant here is not a single person submitting to the will and command of others of higher standing. Nor does it ask of us that we resign ourselves to tending to the whole without recompense, agreeing to become gradually impoverished by our  ministrations, forever bound to an insatiable hunger.

When we first tread across the threshold of parenthood, we’re not entering the vaguely heroic realm of sacrifice, rising every day to lay our gifts down at the altar of the child. Not as I understand it. It’s more relational than that, less ridden with resignation.

It seems that as you become a parent, you take on a relational obligation and mutual agreement to serve whatever and whoever needs sustenance. Not sacrifice. Surrender.

For this man coming to our farm, his heart expectant, this may be his pregnant partner. It most certainly will be their newborn child. At times a grandmother or uncle and others of the fold. The family requires the attention of all members onto all members. It ceases to be without this collective willingness to serve.

And in entering this web of relations with the stance of a servant, we soon discover that it extends far beyond our child, our partner, ourselves. For what sustains us, is serving us, is family.

So I wonder if family is only born from our willingness to bow our backs and kneel together in servitude to all that calls on us for nurturance. As a man then, we marry into family by a pledging our allegiance to matrimony, the condition of the mother. This is the honor bestowed on the one entering wedlock, to become a servant, not master, in the household of life, human or otherwise.

Our children are not exempt from this daily practice of family-making.  They too are asked to learn this willingness generously to serve, so that they may one day come of age, knowing that beyond the immediate family, there’s a larger community fed by their willingness to give what they are able to part with, and some of what they relucantly know they must give up for life to continue.

Home as a place that doesn’t exist

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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 be found.

No wonder then that many of us are part of a deracinated throng that for generations has wandered towards an elusive somewhere we are told is both here and there, homeless people forever on our way towards the rumour of a village hearth.

The denigration of the homebody and the dismissal of a place-bound life has ripped into the fabric of most lineages, leaving its bloodied mark on the words once spoken there.

If you doubt whether this is so, and has been for centuries, consider the old Latin word villain, which means ‘inhabitant of a farm,’ or ‘the scoundrel in thrall to the villa for his life’.

The Swedish word ‘hemsk’ today means horrible, terrible, frightening. Follow it back in time to the 1800s, and you find the meaning changes slightly to anxious and gloomy, even stupid. Further back yet, and it speaks of a person who spends most of his or her time being at home.

Of all the myriad challenges parents grapple with as they raise a child in a culture such as this, one of the more common ones is the feeling of being unsettled, literally without a seat to rest on.

Many fathers and mothers are overcome with the experience of being adrift and isolated. Wanting to pass on a greater sense of stillness and belonging to their children, they wish for their lives to be held with more groundedness. But even meditation or its equivalents offer a weak medicine for the affliction of endless perambulation.

The path that meets these needs passes instead through the willingness to stay put long enough for the whole family to become so enthralled by the intimacy of a place, that they may one day proudly reclaim their role as villains.

Then home becomes truly irreplacable, a somewhere not found anywhere else but here, and that alone is enough to kindle a fire that draws others towards an actual hearth.

The spell of potential

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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 shape, nor a given end. It’s amorphous and limitless.

Under the spell of potential a child will always fall short, growing accustomed to never being all that she has been told she can be. She loses sight of her true value, and her natural capacity for belonging slowly withers.

You, I and our children cannot be anything we want to be. That’s good news.

Because once we recognize the spell for what it is–another expression of a culture that has fallen ill from all kinds of abstraction and excess–we can begin to accept who we actually are.

Most of us are quite ordinary, we suffer and we struggle, we are gifted in ways that bring us joy and some kind of income to help meet our needs, and if we’re fortunate, we have a place where we know the land and the people in it well enough to feel at home.

If we can accept the confines of our selves, we can more readily value our child for who he or she actually is. Then the child’s gifts, such as they are, become surprising treasures, tended through discipline, and complementing the gifts of others.

Your child’s spiritual doctor

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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 who you are as a parent.

And yet, we readily take it upon us to be our child’s spiritual doctor, to provide the way for her to become what we envision she ought to be.

This is too big a burden for someone as inconsequential as a father or a mother to the innate calling of the child. It’s also a position we don’t have the qualifications or skills for, whatever our ambition, unless that child is someone else’s. If she is, then we might serve her as an elder, a mentor, a trusted uncle or aunt.

Our own child’s spiritual path is laid down by her encounter with the world, what we used to know as the village. And if this village is now unknown to you, as it is to most of us here in the west, you might have placed the full weight of your child onto your weary lap. If you’re a single parent, you will know the strain of this burden all the more.

Parenting this way is an impossibility masquerading as a responsability.

If we take it as our task to be the spiritual doctor of our child, we close the door on the main generational work before all of us fathers and mothers, which is to tend to the threadbare remains of what was once the village, so that it may begin to remember why it came to be in the first place.

This is why parenting today as always before is village-making, not the spiritual doctoring of our own kind. It’s a gathering in of people and beings around all our children, so the world in which they come of age has the willingness and capacity to welcome them and steward them in ways we on our own cannot.