5 Ways Capitalism Influences Your Parenting

(and why it’s time to let go)

Exciting news!! This week I’m sharing a post by Kel, who writes on Swimming Upstream. Kel is an insta-friend of mine, and we’ve been following each other’s unschooling journey from afar, and connecting in so many ways. I’ve been inspired by Kel’s openness and vulnerability in exploring difficult topics like the role of whiteness and colonialism in the systems we inhabit. I am endlessly in awe of Kel’s talents in weaving and zine-making and their writing around anti-capitalism and mutual aid. Definitely go check out Swimming Upstream after you read this. Enjoy!

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5 Ways Capitalism Influences Your Parenting (and why it’s time to let go).

I often use the term Mother Culture to talk about the way our cultural upbringing and surroundings subversively influence the decisions we make. The term comes from a well-known book, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn uses the term to try and show all the ways that this unspoken bias of cultural context influences our lives in ways we might not recognize. In the book, he shows how deconstructing this bias can help open up new ways of thinking about the world.

The parallels to unschooling and the deschooling process are obvious. “Schoolish” thinking (as per Akilah S. Richards) influences so much of our lives, especially our parenting. When we first enter the world of unschooling, it takes time to really unpack and reprogram our brains to realize that life without school is not only a possibility for children, but it can actually help kids to thrive.

The concept of Mother Culture goes far beyond the education system. If we take a moment to start unpacking all the pieces which make up our cultural influence and define our way of living, there are many factors that play a role. Our environment, our government, our family and peers, mass media, our economic system… the list goes on. A culture is comprised of a web of factors and each of those plays a part in forming the unconscious biases that we live with.

For many unschooling parents, once you start to deconstruct the influence that the modern education system plays on our way of thinking, there is a natural progression to start questioning what other cultural biases we hold, and how they might also affect our relationship with our children. For me, colonialism and capitalism were both huge areas of influence that, once unpacked, opened the door to seeing how Mother Culture was shaping my perspective, not only of my relationship with my children but the way I was living my life. You could say that unschooling was a gateway to better understanding the impact of Mother Culture and how she was telling me to live my life.

Whether you believe that the capitalist system is good or bad or somewhere in between, there are still ways that colonial based capitalism influences our parenting practices. Unpacking these influences helps us be more intentional about how we parent and can go a long way towards forming healthy relationships with our families, breaking generational trauma-causing behaviours, and finding purpose in life that brings us joy.

Success depends on the type of job you have.

For most of my life I was raised with the sole purpose of getting a good job. Yes, yes, marriage and children were part of the story but I was made to believe that the reason that I spent all this time in school, studying, focusing on education, and even my extracurriculars was to prepare me for the workforce. 

The narrative that was woven for me goes something like this: in order to succeed, you have to have a job with prestige that pays well enough to allow you the freedom to buy anything you might want. Post secondary prep was the goal throughout highschool. Job prep was the goal throughout post secondary. Each job I took was a step on the ladder to something greater. Success (™ patent pending) was achieved when I had enough money in the bank to not have to worry about money.

I will admit that money is required for survival living in a capitalist economy. But to define one’s life by that sole measure of success is incredibly limiting. Yet this is what we do to our children almost every day. In the school system, they are fed the same story I was. As home educators, we still fall into the same trap, pushing our children towards activities or hobbies that might translate to a good job.

“John likes to play piano, maybe he’ll be a concert pianist some day!”

“Suzie loves to draw with crayons, maybe we should enroll her in an art class and see if we can turn that into something.”

“Jessie loves taking things apart - I bet they’ll go to school to be an engineer when they’re older.”

The truth is that we can all have hobbies and interests that are just that - hobbies and interests. The intention to turn everything into a career - to monetize our interests - is incredibly harmful and for so many of us, ends up killing the passion that drove us to find the interest in the first place. 

If we widen the parameters of success to include enjoyment, community connection, strong family bonds and friendships, we give ourselves space to simply find reward inherent in our passions rather than striving for the constant goal of capitalist success. Extending this definition for our children means that we can give them space and freedom to explore their interests and help them recognize that joy and happiness are their own types of personal success.

And if they don’t have that high paying job? That’s okay too. Money doesn’t equate to happiness, only joy does.

Power over dynamics are inherent in all human relationships.

There are a lot of things that Mother Culture tells us about the way we live. The truth is that many cultures live without capitalism as the economic model and have done so for thousands of years. Capitalism in its current form has really only been around since the early Renaissance period in the 15th century. It can be exceptionally hard to see outside of one’s current culture to observe a behaviour that is heavily influenced by the cultural context and imagine how things might be done differently.

In recent years especially, there have been ripples and waves moving through our current culture that have caused many to question the nature of power dynamics between different groups of people. Racism, classism, sexism, and yes, even ageism have started to come undone. This is because we are starting to see power dynamics for what they are: a culturally influenced behaviour that many falsely believe to be inherent in human relationships. We are told that someone always has to be on the bottom and someone always has to be on the top.

When we start to explore other cultures, we can see that these dynamics are fabricated. So it is in the world and so it can be within our families.

As parents, when we remove the belief that we need to have control over our children, we can start to build stronger relationships built on mutual respect. Power over dynamics are structured on fear based relationships and only serve to cement the culturally dictated belief that children can’t be trusted to make good decisions on their own.

The truth is that most people, children and adults alike, will make good decisions when they have all the information required to make that decision. Often, children’s needs are swept under the rug in the name of efficiency with their parents making those decisions for them. When we take the time to help our kids understand the effects and impacts of their decisions from a place of trust, openness, and honesty, we start to build stronger relationships that are not founded on power over dynamics. By witnessing this type of relationship together, we can build a model for them in their adult lives that removes the requirement to control other people, a foundation of the current systems of oppression that cause so much harm to so many.

People who are lazy and waste time aren’t valuable.

Capitalism requires labourers in order to function. In order to keep labourers in the workforce, one of the biggest messages capitalism sends is that people’s value is based on their ability to produce labour in the workforce. This idea that the only people of value to our society are the ones who are part of the workforce ignores the reality that there are so many other folks who share their gifts in ways that don't always get to have a monetary value attached.

Likewise, when we explore the ways that our children spend their time, the myth of laziness creeps in. A massive part of my ongoing deschooling process has been to stop viewing specific activities as inherently better than others because they are more likely to be valuable in a capitalist marketplace. Interests that translate to jobs take priority. We view other activities as a waste of time; activities that don’t have value.

The reality is skills might not always qualify for an hourly wage like caregiving, nature connection, or self-care but provide an immense value to our communities. We likely wouldn’t be able to function without them. Activities like internal reflection, observation, and self-discovery can’t be measured or observed so often when we see our kids “wasting their time”, the reality is that they are doing the crucial work of being human, growing and changing, and discovering the world around themselves. The act of resting is important not only for their growing bodies, but also to fight against a system which claims they are only of value when they are being productive by capitalist standards. This goes for our kids, but also for us!

There’s only one path from A to B.

When we set out to accomplish a task or meet a goal, our desire is for there to be a clear path on how it can best be accomplished. This is a very colonial mindset: it assumes there is one direction, one way and that way is the right way. Taking a different path is to take the wrong path, even if it happens to get you to the same solution. Think high school path and the need to “please show your work”.

The truth is there are often many approaches to get to your desired solution. None of those ways is the right way or the wrong way - they are just ways. Colonialism and capitalism want you to think that there is only one way so then it can be packaged, sold, taught, enforced, and monitored. Too many paths becomes hard to manage; difficult to control. It can also demonstrate that different people with different perspectives from different cultures can use different tools and still find success.

The modern education system is horrible for abusing this approach. One path becomes ideal, again, because it can be taught, measured, and controlled. Alternative approaches are rarely encouraged and only in specific instances. Thinking outside the box, while being touted as an admirable life skill, is rarely used and often punished.

Even as homeschoolers, we often wish to impart our experience on our children, help them learn the things that were important to us or the knowledge that we wish we’d had when we were younger. The truth, though, is that our children are not us: they have different experiences, different thoughts, different feelings, and are growing up in a largely different world than we did. While we may look back at our own lives and clearly see the path we wish we’d traveled in hindsight, it’s so unlikely that this is the correct path for our kids to travel in their own lives.

Giving our kids space to take their own path throughout life will only serve to help them develop into more resilient adults who find their own direction and their own happiness.

Asking for help means you’re inferior.

In late stage capitalism, we’ve experienced the advent of an era of hyper individualism. The result is that we feel more isolated than ever, disconnected and exhausted from trying to do all the things individually when historically, we would have done all the things together. Instead of being in constant competition with each other, pre-colonial culture would have been working together in community to achieve mutual goals.

This change in human behaviour patterns has far reaching effects: mental health problems, financial challenges, the hoarding of goods, materials, and personal wealth, and many more. But when it comes to how this affects our children, this culture of hyper individualism pushes them to be more and more independent. We expect them to be able to do things on their own without help from adults. In some ways, this can be beneficial - our kids can feel empowered to learn new skills and do things on their own, but in other ways, we can inflict deep-seated damage by inferring that they are no longer supported.

The reality is that humans thrive when we live cooperatively. We are able to accomplish more with less effort, distributing tasks among community members and sharing the workload. There is a careful balance required when we challenge our kids to do things on their own, especially when they’ve specifically asked for help. Yes, independent learning can help with skill development and personal confidence, but when we constantly tell them “no, try on your own”, we reinforce this message that it’s wrong to ask for help or seek support and this can further strengthen the culture of hyper individualism.

Alternatively, working together to accomplish tasks until they ask to do them independently can help alleviate anxiety or fear of failure. Demonstrating and assisting until they feel confident can strengthen bonds and let them know that they are supported and cared for. Our kids can then carry these values into their adult lives, reciprocating in turn with others they interact with in the world, fostering a stronger sense of community where folks know they can rely on each other and not feel ashamed to ask for help.

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Whether you’re a fan of the capitalist system or not, I think it’s important to act with intention and there are so many ways in which our cultural context subconsciously influences our behaviour and decisions. In western culture, both colonialism and capitalism play such a strong role in the cultural context and it’s helpful to unpack those truths that Mother Culture tells us to be true because they may not be serving us as well as we think they are. 

Unpacking our cultural biases, especially those based on capitalism, can help be more intentional about how we interact with our children. For unschoolers that have committed to doing the work deschooling around the modern education system, these ideas won’t be new. Colonialism and capitalism have heavily influenced the structure of this school system but if you needed an extra nudge to dig a bit deeper, I hope this has helped. 

Unpacking the myths of Mother Culture with an open heart helps us to ensure we’re making decisions aligned with our values. Whether your kids are going to school or home educated, whether you practice gentle parenting or consent-based learning or really any style of parenting, I believe that living with intention and being honest about the decisions we make every day can be the biggest game changer in living rich and fulfilling lives with our families and in our communities. 

Kel Smith is a community organizer living in Grey County, Ontario, Canada with her family. A software designer by trade, Kel’s interests shifted to helping design stronger communities with a focus on relocalization, mutual aid, and resilient food systems. Kel writes at swimupstream.substack.com and shares more at subsomatic.com.