Feminist Parenting by Rama Salla Dieng

Author:Rama Salla Dieng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Thinking and Practicing Parenting; or How to Do Right by My Child … and Me

Elena Damma

Becoming a Parent: Reflections about Self and Others

When my daughter turned one year old, an acquaintance asked me if I shaved her hair because I did not want her to look like a girl. Perplexed, I asked her why she would think that. In all seriousness, she answered, “You remember how you told us not to buy you presents for your baby shower that would make her look like a girl, so I figured…” It was not difficult to remember that my colleague was referring to the fact that I had asked them not to buy her princess dresses. My wish to have my daughter wear a diverse range of clothes, not only stereotypical pink ones, was translated to me not wanting her to “look like a girl”. It was, hence, logical to assume that I had shaved her hair for the same reason.

How to deal with societal expectations regarding visual represen-tations of gender is only one of the many choices parents have to make on behalf of their children. Others include the way we encourage and support our children, the activities we encourage them to take up, how we discipline them, the expectations we place on them, and the way we make them understand these expectations. Others still concern the way we teach them about their identity, including their physical and behav-ioural boundaries, and how we teach them to define these for themselves.

Part of feminist parenting is the theorizing and the thinking, whereas the other part is the practical doing. In that vein, beyond attempting our best to educate our children, I believe that they learn from the way we live our lives as parents. When we have children, we do not suddenly acquire new identities as parents that are isolated from our identities as people. And I believe that the way we parent our children, beyond our conscious choices, is deeply rooted in who we are. Fundamentally, I believe that our parenting is informed by how we relate to other people, particularly to the ones who surround our children the most, including our children’s other parents. As a white, European mother of a child whose father is a “local” in the African country we live in, and who arguably was socially and economically less well-positioned than me, I was privileged. This privilege was informed by many features, including gender, “race”, culture, and class. Having lived with my daughter’s father for many years before she was born, we were acutely aware of many of the implications that this intersectionality had on our lives. Although personal characteristics arguably shape some of the differences between individuals, I believe that our views on the most important aspects related to becoming parents and to parenting are largely influenced by socialization, education, and exposure, which act as a prism through which these intersections are reflected. Many parenting issues concern the question of who does what and why, and, hence, relate to ascribed rights, responsibilities, and duties in the family.

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