Chapter Eight: Let's talk about Power.
Part III, Ch 8 of my book, you can read it all here for free.
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Part III
Cultures of Consent; The Outer Landscape
Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love.
bell hooks, Feminist Parenting
Chapter 7
Let’s talk about power
Society is built on power hierarchies
Some time ago I bumped into a friend of my daughter Phoebe’s. I knew that she’d just started a new school, so I asked her how it was going. “It’s great!”, she replied, beaming. I said, “Really? That’s amazing, so happy for you!”, and left it at that.
Later on that day I told Phoebe that her friend seemed to love her new school and Phoebe said that actually she wasn’t loving it at all. I was completely baffled - why did she not tell me?
“Why would she say she liked it then?”, I asked, and Phoebe replied simply, “You’re an adult, that’s why.”
This seems like a benign interaction on the surface. Does it matter that a child didn’t tell me she disliked her new school? Not really.
But I think it illustrates pretty simply that when there is an imbalance of power between an adult and a child, and it isn’t openly critiqued, then the child may not feel safe enough to be honest about even the most benign of things. Even if the adult and child have a fundamentally good relationship (as was the case here).
In order to create a culture of consent, we need to explicitly talk about hierarchy, power dynamics and oppression with our young people. We need self-awareness around our own position of power as the adult in the relationship, and the other ways we may hold more or less power in relationships and groups and society at large. We need to pick apart and understand the ways holding more power can impact children, and people’s, autonomy, choices, sense of self and relationship to others.
Because if you are seeking permission from someone, and you hold a lot more power than them, they are more likely to override their own autonomy, needs or desires and give you what you want, right?
If Phoebe’s friend felt she needed to gloss over the truth over something as low-stakes as whether she was enjoying her new school, then would she be willing to compromise other, more important things, when faced with an adult in a position of power?
We can’t know this for sure, of course. This is simply one of many anecdotes. But what we do know is that we live in a society that is literally built upon power imbalances and depends on them to continue to exist. Think elected officials, CEOs, the military, and others in positions of power, whether those they have authority over are many or few, whether the stakes are low or high - the dynamic is similar.
From an early age, we are taught to respect authority - and there is a distinct reason for this. Because the parent-child authoritative dynamic will replicate itself elsewhere, too: in school, in the workplace, in our interactions with government institutions and with law enforcement.
Paulo Freire writes, “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.” Replace the word education with the word parenting, and we can see this process begins at birth.
How do we know power differentials exist?
If you’re in relationship with someone or a group of people in a space, those who hold more power in the group are more likely to feel they can speak up and be heard. Saying yes, no or maybe freely, and making collaborative decisions from a place of autonomy, is highly dependent on our own sense of the power we hold in a relationship and in a space; it is also highly dependent on the power our various intersecting identities hold in the spaces and societies we inhabit.
Erica Baczynski and Marcia Scott write, “Sometimes there are power differentials that make it almost impossible for people to say no,” and so, they continue, if you hold a lot more power than somebody else (for example, you are their parent, teacher, or other authority figure, or you hold more privilege or social capital) should you even be asking?
And that is such an important question: if we want to be honest about the ways power impacts consent, we need to understand that sometimes, asking is not appropriate.
When we are the ones with the higher status or power, or at the top of a hierarchy, and we ask our child something from this position – can they really say no without fear of repercussion of any sort? Can they really participate in decision-making from a place of full autonomy, and can they really show up in the space as their full selves?
When I speak of repercussions, I also mean things like: a shift in the way we feel about them, an internal judgment on them from us, a feeling on their part that our opinion of them will somehow be influenced by their decision. Skewed power dynamics create a complex web of interactions and back and forth assumptions that many of us are unaware of, until they are named.
I find this wheel of power and privilege really helpful in illustrating the areas we may hold a lot of power in, and the ones we may be more marginalised. It’s important to understand that we can both be privileged in some ways, and oppressed in others. (I will write more about Crenshaw’s concept of Intersectionality below, keep reading!)
Let’s name it
Our child may not be consciously aware of this, until we choose to bring it up. This needs to be addressed, and for some of us, it might look like thinking hard about how our power as adults impacts our children, and what we can do about it.
In a podcast interview, Akilah S. Richards said this: “There were environments where I was the oppressor and that children, all children, not just mine are the ones over whom I will have the most power. It doesn’t even matter whose child it is. If I’m in the room with just that person, those dynamics are there. Just to be able to deconstruct that for myself, just to be able to unpack that” was an essential part of establishing a trust-based environment.
It is crucial to become aware of the fact that power differentials exist. Not only do they exist on an interpersonal level, but they exist between people who hold identities that have historically been or continue to be marginalised to varying degrees. The interpersonal and the social are in fact often inextricably linked.
Researcher Nicola Gavey talks about “cultural scaffolding” in the context of misogyny, which essentially means the understanding and employing of cultural knowledge and skills in order to reinforce systems of oppression. In the context of our home and adult-child relationships, this might look like adults benefiting from greater knowledge and experience of how a culture and a society works, and using it to reinforce the existing oppression of children and young people.
We often aren’t aware we are doing this, and so awareness and the ability to give this dynamic a name, is the first step. Often, it looks a lot like: “I understand this topic better than you, therefore I can make better decisions”, or “I’m older and wiser and so I know best.”
A recent example of this in our family, have been conversations around how much to share of my children on social media. I don’t have any blanket answers here, but some questions I have asked myself are:
Are my children able to understand what they are consenting to?
What does informed consent actually look like, and who gets to decide whether they are informed or not? Does the adult version of “informed” become the benchmark here? How do we (the adults) know that we truly know best?
Is consent over sharing on social media even a question I should be asking my young children?
This is such a complex topic and everybody will do what works for them, of course. But I think asking ourselves some big questions around the power dynamics inherent in posting information or content that regards our children online, is an example of the way simply asking for consent is not enough: we need to recognise the power hierarchies inherent in the context where decisions are being made.
Oppression does not have to be the default
Many researchers and scholars have located the beginning of systems of oppression in patriarchy, and to the ways power dynamics became historically entrenched, as opposed to fluid and easily changed, and created entire systems where one group historically held, and continues to hold, more power than another. There is debate around what the start of patriarchy looked like, if it even was the first system of oppression, and so much more - and I’m not about to enter this debate!
But for the purpose of this book, I’d like to work on the premise that domination is not necessarily the default for humans. That perhaps, at the very beginning of human communities, we lived in partnership with one another, and with the world around us. We had an idea of consent and collaboration baked into our everyday lives, into our DNA. Researched Sarah Hrdy has looked at the ways humans are hardwired for connection and co-operation, and how these traits evolved as a result of a degree of egalitarian living.
There is plenty of research around the ways that our brains and bodies changed to reflect a period of relatively egalitarian organisation, as well as examples from some Indigenous communities around the world that continue to exist in collaboration rather than domination.
Many archeologists and researchers believe there did come a point when fluid partnerships became fixed, oppressive hierarchy. This leads me to believe oppression is not our default as humans. We just aren’t raised to see this, because many of the narratives we are exposed to are written by Western men, and therefore skewed in ways that serve to justify the dominance of one set of men over everyone else. And because most of us, at this point, were born and raised under a culture of domination.
And of course, history is about a million times more complex than this – not only that, but there might be a million ways to tell it. The point is not that that’s how things went. The point is that the ways we see children, parenting, motherhood and education arose from Western men’s constructed need to manage children, to shape future adults, to assign limited roles to women and other oppressed groups, and to have something for all these humans to do, and somewhere for them to go, while the white men ran stuff.
Our entire society now operates on the assumption of domination, on the assumption that might equals right. As anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow write in The Dawn of Everything, “Domination begins at home.”
Home is where we need to begin.
We’ve got to name adultism
Adultism is the systemic discrimination and oppression of children based on their age and status as children. This happens on a personal level, between an adult and a child, but is also baked into all of our institutions, structures and societal norms.
Underlying adultism, is the idea of adult supremacy: adults are inherently better, superior, more capable, more complete than children. Adultism is adult supremacy put into practice in the form of human prejudice, discrimination and oppression.
Adult supremacy is a system of oppression, much like white supremacy or the patriarchy. It is a system that is designed to oppress and marginalise children. We have seen how adult conceptions of children create a picture of what children are considered to be, and what our expectations of them are. Adultist conceptions legitimise the discrimination of, and inferior treatment of, children and young people by adults.
In fact, I’m constantly projecting it myself. I see my children through it, often, in spite of how aware I’ve become of it. Just a few weeks ago my son remarked, matter of factly, “You’ve been adultist five times today!”
He can spot it, now that we’ve talked about what it looks and feels like. I probably felt it as a child, as did you, but we just didn’t have the language for it. What perhaps felt “not fair” was actually a much more organised, systemic assault on us. Often adultism, much like any of the -isms, is unconscious. We have all been socialized to believe that children do not deserve the same treatment as adults.
We honour our children’s inherent power when we give them the tools to point to adultist behavior, even in ourselves.
Adultism is not a new word. In fact, it is probably over a century old, mentioned in 1903 by Patterson Du Bois, and then popularised by psychologist Jack Flasher in a 1978 article. It is also not one single concept, but has various manifestations. Adam Fletcher, a writer, youth advocate and organiser, describes the ways it can show up as attitudes, as institutional discrimination, and as a social or cultural phenomenon.
Attitudinal adultism might look like the ways we relate to children and young people on an interpersonal level and the beliefs, preconceptions and attitudes we hold about them. These are often unconscious, and even children and youth might have internalised them.
Institutional adultism is the prejudice and discrimination we find within our institutions and systems, such as the use of power over tactics towards young people that we see in schools, medical care and the legal system. It might show up in the form of legislation, patterns of behaviour towards children, systemic bias and the routine denial of children’s rights.
Cultural adultism is perhaps the least concrete and most pervasive kind, and it refers to the way our ideas, beliefs and conceptions of children have seeped into the wider culture and society as a whole. They might be reflected in the attitude of adults to children existing in public spaces, to our assumptions about what children need and how they must be parented, to the lack of inclusive events and spaces, to the outright discrimination by public and private entities. The more we look, the more we begin to uncover more of how cultural adultism is baked into almost all of the spaces we inhabit.
Adultism contains an awareness of systemic oppression in all its forms, because children can be oppressed in other ways too (for example, disabled children will experience adultism and ableism). This means that we begin to see how consent-based relationships benefit from an intentional culture of consent that recognizes and questions power.
These systemic inequalities are “intersectional”, a term coined by Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw, which means that power imbalances will be influenced by the identities held by the people involved. So for example, a child who is Black or Indigenous, will be impacted differently by adultism than a white child. A child who is white and queer will again be impacted in a manner that takes into account their intersecting identities: being a young white person, and being queer.
Naming how different identities intersect and come together in this way, matters for our children and our relationship with them, but also for our child’s relationship with others out in the world, and for the way they might be treated by others (and treat others).
We need to consider how their ability to consent will be impacted by their intersecting identities; and also, how their understanding of another person’s ability to consent should take into account the identities that person holds.
My children are neurodivergent AND they are white and economically privileged. One of my children is a girl, and one a boy. All of these things, and more, matter in how they will be perceived by others, in their ability to stand up for themselves and have a voice, and in the ways they do and will relate to others.
We can’t talk to our children about adultism without also talking about intersectionality, and how children with marginalized identities will be increasingly impacted by adultism.
Consent works both ways and all ways. When our children inevitably interact and share space with others whose identities are different, they will need to understand the ways power has historically been used to dominate, and the way power and identity impact our relationships now.
Is all power bad?
How can we work to be in solidarity and equal partnership with all children?
I don’t believe there is one right way to do this.
It will not always look like dismantling all power dynamics. I don’t think ALL hierarchy has moral connotations – sometimes hierarchy is helpful! Like when I’m trying to get my children through an airport and onto a plane, being in charge of passports and of where we need to go and what we need to do, helps.
The key, perhaps, is that hierarchy should be fluid and everchanging. Once we reach our destination, I don’t have to keep track of where everyone’s belongings and where everyone is all the time, and hierarchy is not that necessary. Also it might shift. Perhaps one day, one of my children will want to lead the rest of us through an airport.
There can be leadership that is consensual and that is empowered by everyone else’s consent. In the airport example, everyone is happy, I’m holding the passports and tickets and keeping track of time so they don’t have to. There can also be times when something closer to equality works best.
But recognising the systems we operate in, and the role that systemic, default power hierarchies play in our relationships and in society, matters.
I want to say this clearly: hierarchy is morally neutral. Power too, in itself, is morally neutral.
Because power too can be used in multiple ways and dynamics. Power over is used to dominate and control, power with is the power we share and grow in relationship, power to is the personal power we need to affect change for ourselves and others, and power within is the sense of agency we feel that we inhabit. The first kind of power can be harmful, but the last three are forms of power that we may well need, and that we can respect and honour in our children.
When things get hairy is when hierarchies become fixed and create hierarchical, powerhoarding and power over systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, anti-fatness, and adultism.
Things become non-consensual when power is hoarded, withheld, routinely skewed in one direction, or used to control, manipulate and coerce, such as in the current mainstream parent-child relationship.
“Empowering” children
When we are centering consent, we are looking to create environments of power with, to and within rather than power over. This is different to “empowerment”.
Empowerment is us, somehow, giving our children power. It is still a top-down, somewhat saviour-like notion. Our children already possess power. They are born with it, and it is the world that gradually strips them of power and consent and autonomy in many ways. That conditions them to believe they are powerless.
Our role, as I see it, is not to empower them, but to rest in our own power, and honour their need to inhabit theirs too. Our role is to not dominate or crush their existing power.
It is to understand that they too, need power with, to and within; and that they, too, may resort to power over when they feel disempowered and controlled.
I don’t see us as eradicating all power, rendering us all entirely powerless. I see us all inhabiting our own sense of personal power, and speaking and acting from it, in ways that do not dominate or enact power over others.
It is building relationships that don’t seek to control, override and dominate, but seek to connect, collaborate, and build a sense of trust, inter-dependence and belonging. Imagine how powerful we could be if we used our personal power, collectively.
We can go too far in the other direction
I think it’s important that we find our own personal power because we risk falling into a trap: the one that tells us that giving back power to children means stripping it from ourselves.
This understanding comes from a scarcity mindset (closely tied to white supremacy and colonial-capitalism!): we believe power is a finite resource, a zero sum game. If my child has power, that means I must give up mine. As if my child and I were two counterweights on a scale, and the balance has to tip one way or the other. As if power were a magic weapon and only one person or group could possess it at any one time.
When we strip ourselves of our own voice, body, sense of agency and ability to consent, we are recreating the same hierarchy we were seeking to dismantle: except that now our child is at the top.
In her book, Amanda Montei writes about this very thing. “Domination, moving from parent to child, replicates a patriarchal understanding of power,” she writes, and goes on to quote Adrienne Rich: this “insists on a dichotomy: for one person to have power over others – another must be powerless.”
Power is not a finite resource within our families, and out in the world. We can all hold on to our personal power, and allow it to be curtailed by other people inhabiting their own personal power. We do not need to recreate domination. Consent comes from a sense that we know who we are, we have agency over ourselves, and we are able to protect our own personhood.
Consent doesn’t look like us, the ones doing the mothering and parenting, giving away all our power. Not only are we responsible for our child’s safety, but we also deserve to be held, respected, and seen. Mothers and carers have historically faced erasure, disempowerment and a devaluing of our labour at the hands of patriarchy and capitalism. This has been and continues to be particularly severe for mothers and carers who are already marginalised in other ways.
Centering consent in our homes may mean healing our inner wounds and trauma, doing the inner work of parenting, and detaching ourselves from our egos – but to me, it does not mean stripping ourselves of the inner power that, as humans who mother, the world does a pretty good job of slowly chipping away at.
Montei speaks to the way that “much of American society was.. built around a complete disregard – almost an intentional erasure! – of women’s work in the household and the fact that it bolsters and makes possible all other work.” This is so skillfully arranged that young women, she writes, don’t quite realise the extent of it until they become mothers, and then it hits them. It hits them that “every aspect of society was designed by men with wives.”
In her book Essential Labour, Angela Garbes writes that it “may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his,” referring to her husband and his work outside of the home.
Radically mothering
Resting in our power as mothers and carers matters. It matters because it is a form of resistance to our capitalistic society, to a society that undervalues the unseen work of caring for a family.
And it matters because I want to raise a daughter who sees an autonomous, powerful mother, who sees a mother who is not a ghost of her former self. Who sees a human who is flawed and always striving, but also knows they are worthy. I want my daughter – but really, both of my children – to see that the work I do matters. That I matter.
But also beyond that – to see my work as a form of resistance, a radical choice.
I owe this viewpoint to Black and Intersectional feminists and the ways they have always centered mothering as the locus of power.
White feminism (which is a particular current of feminism, in opposition to Intersectional feminism) wants us to leave the care work behind (probably to another, more marginalised woman), and enter the workplace. It has often found a tension between motherhood, mothering and women’s liberation. bell hooks spoke about the way motherhood was never an obstacle for Black women’s freedom, nor an obstacle to paid work since Black women have always worked. The dehumanizing labour, for them, was not the caring labour of the home but the paid (and unpaid) work performed outside of the home.
By recognizing this, we can also begin to recognize that the patterns of domination we recreate within our homes are harmful. Domination of children needs to end; but our domination by patriarchal forces, also needs to be resisted. Working in the home to mother my children is not any less valuable than working for our patriarchal, capitalist economy. As bell hooks wrote in All about love, “Whenever domination is present love is lacking.”
Consent & systemic barriers
Becoming aware of and letting go of the structures, values and systems that hold us captive to certain assumptions and habits, and working to set ourselves free from them, might bring us to a place where we feel more comfortable with our children’s right to consent, and are able to create a consent-based environment.
Many of the barriers we encounter are located within ourselves, and others are firmly found within our wider culture. Coercion is not only an individual dynamic, it’s also a social problem. I think it’s important to mention because while creating consent culture is something we can all do, and while retrieving our sense of self-worth from the wreckage of our non-stop busyness, we also live in a society where systemic and societal structures are often outside of our control.
Yes, we need to take personal responsibility.
And yes, we need to place the onus on societal systems and structures when it is due.
Next, I will go deeper into the role of autonomy and boundaries in building a culture of consent.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I’m always happy to discuss and hear feedback and comments!!
Fran x
References:
Raising Free People with Akilah S. Richards on Living Joyfully Podcast: https://livingjoyfully.ca/eu293-transcript/
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
The ingredients of hierarchy, in What is Politics? Find the video here.
Paulo Freire, (1997). Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Gavey, N. (2005). Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429443220
Amanda Montei (2023), Touched Out
Angela Garbes (2021), Essential Labour
bell hooks, All About Love
Patterson Du Bois, Fire-side Child Study: the art of being fair and kind
Jack Flasher (1978). "Adultism". Adolescence. 13 (51): 517–523
Fletcher, A. (2015). Facing Adultism. Olympia, WA: CommonAction Publishing
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2011) , Mothers and Others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding.
Even less-formed and more rambly: The implied power dynamic in saying “my child”
I have a lot of love and affection towards the human being who would be conventionally labelled “my child”. But, why is that? Is it because he carries some of my genetic material? I am not concerned about my genetic material propagating in the gene pool and I don’t think my affection would be any different if we had adopted. It may have been different for my wife - but it is not necessarily the case that a mother loves the child that she gives birth to (eg in cases of rape) so even pregnancy doesn’t guarantee love. I consider that the love that we have in our family arose out of a series of interactions and expectations, and likewise the love in every family with offspring - with some aspects in common because we have certain expectations in common (Families don’t necessarily have to have offspring but this is about children so I’m ignoring families without children for this)
Some of these common social expectations are a narrative of the nuclear family. It is the only form of family that most of us know. Perhaps if we lived in extended families / tribes without an expectation of property inheritance defaulting to biological offspring, and without a hierarchy between adults and children, there would be a different relationship between offspring and the others around them? Maybe a default breastfeeding role for the biological mother but apart from that the offspring is nurtured and supported by the entire family (and also if the biological mother is unable to breastfeed for any reason that is also provided by the community) - and then the offspring is seen simply as a member of the tribe rather than the child of the biological parents. There would be some recognition that at certain stages certain members need specific assistance (an infant human would need assistance for mobility, but so would someone with an injury; a toddler may need food to be provided to them, but perhaps also the warriors who protect the tribe from attack need food to be provided to them) but without ageist discrimination.
I don’t want to disown “my” child. But I would like to move away from the concept of owning a child at all. I don’t know what that would look like, but “my child” conveys on parents an authority that I wish didn’t exist - it always allows to fall back on “I am your father and you must do as I say”. No matter how much we try to avoid resorting to that, we all know that the possibility of that exists.
Some semi-formed thoughts / ramblings:
On hierarchy; I wouldn’t consider the example of the airport as a hierarchy - that is perhaps a role you performed where you were in service of others. There was a period where my son was in service of making tea for the family and I wouldn’t consider that a hierarchy either.
When humans interact, there will always be some means of distributing the tasks that the community needs done. If all participants freely consent to the distribution, even if it is largely a static distribution, then I suggest it is not a hierarchy.
But if someone can impose on another a task that the other does not consent to, that is due to having authority over the other. And when you organize all the authority relationships together, you have a hierarchy.