It's Political

This is the last chapter (eeek!) of my book, Expanding Consent. If you’d like to start at the begining, you can find all the remaining chapters here.

In the end, consent is political.

I started writing this book in May 2023, and in October 2023 Israel declared war on the people of Gaza, following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Just last month, President Trump brokered a tentative ceasefire of what became a genocide and mass starvation inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the Israeli government.

It has been two long years of us watching this pan out on our phone screens, which of course is nothing compared to the unimaginable pain, irreversible loss and trauma inflicted upon the people and land of Palestine.

When I spoke to my children about what was happening in Palestine, one of them said, “There is no consent there.” It struck me that they could recognise this; that they could transfer what they know about consent-based-ness between people to a completely different scenarios where it is equally, if not more, relevant.

What we have witnessed live, in a dystopian exercise of genocide livestream, is perhaps the biggest violation of consent.

Because consent might begin at home for many of us, but it doesn’t end there. It continues, and spreads, and ripples out, and we practice it wherever we are and whoever we are with and whatever we are confronted by.

Consent is preservation of wholeness. We want this for our children. We want it for ourselves. And want it because we recognise we are humans, and deserving of wholeness.

If we want this for ourselves and our child, we must also want it for other humans and their children. Not wanting this for every single human is us saying, You are not as deserving as us. You are other. You are less than. You are not fully human and you do not deserve wholeness.

In this simple way, consent becomes political. We see ourselves in others and we bring consent-based-ness to the groups we are part of, the communities we are members of, the relationships we’re in, the politics we practice.

To echo what I wrote in the Introduction to this book, consent expands outwards from the relationship with have with ourselves and our child, to the one we have with our community, our institutions, our larger systems.

Consent is at its root, a preservation of wholeness, of sovereignty.

What I really mean by this is that it is metaphorically representative of the uncolonized.

I want to remind you that we all know this, because we were all children once and we were all at one time, uncolonized.

I want to remind you that children are born into this world untarnished. By this I do not mean that they are somehow pure or innocent or any of the constructs we have imposed on them so that adults should be compelled to control them under the guise of protection. No, that’s not what I mean. Children are born untarnished in the sense that they have not been subjugated by us.

They are born bonded to a mother, but not dominated by her, in the same way that perhaps at some point us humans, as indigenous inhabitants of a land, existed with the land rather than extracted from her. For a few brief moments, and perhaps days, months and years if they’re in luck, a child remains in this bonded cocoon where it is uncolonized, and in partnership.

In a myriad of ways, Western structures of power, from Psychology to schooling to corporations that prey on parents, to the advent of a class of parenting and education ‘experts’, have encroached upon the child. They have “created ‘children’ as the perfect objects of Empire, those who would be defined, described, known, and controlled,” write Gaile S. Cannella and Radhika Viruru.

Western institutions have created the concepts of ‘normality,’ and the binary of normal/abnormal; that fine line many of us find ourselves walking throughout our lifetimes, that fine line we surveil our children for, holding our breath lest they cross over to the ‘wrong’ side of it.

But at one point, we were all young children and we must have a memory of feeling the initial encroachment, the initial violation of consent.

Because we were all children, we have all felt colonized. It’s just that many of us don’t remember it. I remember being touched in ways that felt uncomfortable beyond my comprehension as a young child, and experiencing them as a physical invasion, a taking over of my will, a breach of my sense of agency. All of these words, these images, are ones of being taken over, being colonised. I have memories of food - something that I now revel in and enjoy, but that was for so long a literal battle ground. I remember being forced to eat a food I didn’t like, and to which I had a really strong physical reaction to. I remember being sick afterwards from how much I hated it. It felt like an invasion. It felt like a part of me had been governed, settled. All of the imagery of my youth takes me back to a recognition of the fact - and I really believe it is a fact - that we use the tools of colonization on our children and young people, that we colonize them.

That they are born uncolonized, and exist as such only briefly.

I recognise that ‘colonized’ is a strong word, and that the violence of imperial and white supremacist colonization endured by Indigenous populations is not the same as the breaking of something that felt whole within a child. But I think that on a very deep, existential level, there is a parallel to be drawn. And I think that if we are to make the personal political, this could be a place to start.

I don’t see another way around it.

Also, I’m not the first person to say this.

Akilah S. Richards has named schooling as a “colonizing force” and Iris Chen writes about parenting often lending itself to colonizing urges by using power over, when we need to reckon with the idea that, as bell hooks taught us, love and domination cannot coexist (or, in any case, their co-existence might mean one will eventually chip away at the other).

In her beautiful Master’s thesis titled All the Children are Indigenous1, Ieishah Clelland-Lange posits, among other things, that children are innately tapped into the infinite stream of unschooling (for lack of a better, more recognizable word), of living outside of the confines of othering or subjugating forces. She skillfully traces the way unschooling, or “an ‘old new way’” existed within her ancestral path even before her family’s decision to unschool. She writes, “We can trace the genealogy of unschooling/the ancestral way in the body, first.. this implicates children as a site/cite of refusal/resistance.. reindigenization.”

So, what does this all mean for us?

When we refuse to engage with the fact that everything is political, that the way we engage with consent is political, that our conceptualisation of children and of the way we practice consent in their presence, and beyond, has been warped and co-opted by Western ideals, then we ultimately end up divorcing ourselves from our shared humanity: we split ourselves apart from the essence of ourselves, from what we perhaps were and are meant to be.

When we shy away from naming dominating behaviours for what they are, from routing so many of our beliefs, patterns of behaviour and systems back to the scourge of colonization, back to the fundamental belief that the group with more power is justified in wielding it over others, in dehumanising and othering others, in invading and extracting from others, then we begin the process of losing our collective memory for what imperialism and colonization has wrought on humanity.

It is radical because it goes to the root of human relationships and provides an antidote to the cycles of domination and power over that have engulfed us in the form of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and ableism.

I am loathe to pretend like I have a magic formula for something called consent-based parenting, and I will say it clearly here: I don’t think consent-based parenting is a ‘thing’, because I believe we need to divest from the institution of parenting, and simply centre consent in our homes and lives and communities.

Perhaps it is frustrating that I cannot provide clear steps.

But here’s the other thing I believe: no one person gets to tell us what to do, and no one person has the solution. Mariame Kaba writes that all of the best solutions are co-created by the people actually involved in organising and bringing them to life, and this rings true to me.2

Centering consent in our homes, in a sense, is the beginning of a practice that searches for belonging, love, connection, and engagement, and gives you the agency to figure out what that means to you and how you’re going to put it into action.

It is a radical act of love, and of hope for a future where children, and all people, might live uncolonized.

It is hard to end a book like this, because the of the open-endedness of it all.

You all know I shy away from one-size-fits-all solutions to all of the world’s problems, because there simply are none.

But I do love a good list, so I will leave you with one.

Build a consent practice, imperfectly. Let me tell you a secret. Or perhaps it’s an open secret at this rate, since you probably know me by now. I mess up big time, sometimes daily. My connection with my children often feels really hard. At times, I feel I shouldn’t even be writing about mothering and unschooling because I am simply not worthy of it. And then I remember that actually, it is my deeply flawed humanity that makes me worthy. It is the fact that almost every day, I wake up and I re-commit to practicing consent-based relationships, even knowing I will probably mess up.

Some days, I wonder whether I’ve messed up in ways that it’s too late to make up for - and perhaps I have. And even so, I am committed to not giving up. I will never be a perfect parent, and I will probably use my power in ways that I’ll later look back on and recognize were colonizing. We all do it, because it was done to us, because to an extent we are still deschooling, decolonizing, deconstructing our beliefs and behaviours.

It’s never too late to start a consent-based practice. Start small. Do one thing. Have one family meeting. Find one book about bodily autonomy at the library. Have a conversation with your child about autonomy or decision-making and what they think or feel about it. Follow their lead. Always put your child above pedagogy, above schooling, above unschooling dogma, above metrics, above parenting methods, above what other people think you should be doing. Stumble, fall, fail. Pick yourself back up again. Find a support network.

You may need to find something or someone to pray to (not in a religious way, necessarily, but just in the sense of finding hope in something.) Recently, I put a have Wendell Berry quote up in my kitchen, and it serves as my daily mantra: “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

It’s been a while, so go back and check out my chapters on why we need consent, brains and bodies, why children can and do consent, building cultures of consent - just a few to get you started, if you missed them or need a reminder!

Find a place to belong.

Violations of consent impede us from feeling we belong. Consent practice pathes the way for true belonging, community and interdependence. Consent is about maintaining our wholeness but ultimately it’s also about belonging. Because as much as we are told we need to be independent, the truth is we are not – we all, always, depend on one another.

Consent pushes up to look upon everything from a lens of relationship, connection and mutuality. And all we are ever looking for as humans, is a purpose and a sense that we matter. In order to matter, we need to matter to someone. So ultimately, what we are looking for is a sense that we belong. Model this for your young people, they are watching.

Reach out to your neighbour. Get to know them if you don’t. Host a potluck or a clothes swap. Offer to watch their child or invite them over for a playdate. Join a local group, or start one - and turn up, even when it’s hard. Heal, in community. Be consistent, if you can. Start small. I’m constantly buoyed by Adrienne Marie Brown’s emergent strategy: it’s about noticing the way small actions, over time, bind together and create connections and more complex patterns and ecosystems. Remember, we are in it for the long haul. We are so fixated with accomplishing within our lifetimes, that we forget that perhaps not much will be.

Read and educate yourself.

Maybe you feel a sense of urgency and that it’s past time for reading: it is not. This is the time for reading books. This is the time for keeping on educating ourselves so that we are equipped for whatever is needed of us. If reading is not your jam, I love a good audio book and I have learned so much from podcasts too. My top recommendation would be to join a local, in-person, book group that is open to reading books that you want to go deeper into. Or else, start one! There are plenty of online offerings, if that’s your preferred option (my book group will re-group in the New Year, pun intended!!) Meanwhile, check out my post on the 18 Unschooling Books you should read, and the post below had a great selection of books too.

Become politically active.

Find a group, or a party. I am a fan of the the Working Families Party but there are so many groups to rally behind. Write letters, call, email your representatives even when you don’t think they’re listening. Don’t tune out. We need to stay engaged. Support worthy causes and do your research. Remember that we, the people have a lot of power when we come together, and that politics is just that; people, coming together and making decisions. Talk to your children about how this is what politics is and how it happens at home and at school and at the library and the dental office and the supermarket and the street corner and in the White House. My kids have loved this book, and this book, to explain complex topics. Kids can handle big issues, and they want to engage with real-world stuff.

That’s my condensed and non-overwhelming list, people!

In the end, perhaps this whole book was an extended exercise in over-sharing what I hope to do with my life, who I hope to one day be, how I hope to one day care for myself and my children.

Thank you for riding along with me. Thank you for supporting my work through all of the ups and downs of this wild and wonderful life.

I love you all.

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