Walk With Me (#51): Parenting, The Remix

An advice column for folks who don’t like to be told what to do

In case you hadn’t heard, I am moving this column over to my Substack newsletter, Let Your Life Speak, and rolling it into the work I do over there. Please, join me!

I’ll still be re-posting material from the newsletter over here on Medium intermittently, but it won’t be such a regular thing. The newsletter appears magically in your email inbox every Monday and Friday, so if you want regular access to my writing you should come on over and subscribe.

Writing this column has been a labor of love, and there is little in this world that I love more than my kids. Answering questions about parenting is one of my favorite things. Quite honestly, being a mom is one of the only things I have managed to do in this life incredibly well. Not perfectly, mind you. I have made a slew of mistakes along the way. But I’ve learned from every single one and that learning process has made me a better parent and a much better person.

Here are some of my favorite questions and answers from the last year about parenting. I hope they are of use to you in your own parenting journey.

Walk With Me (#1): Advice, Sympathy, Humor, Authenticity

My very first column was about screen time. It’s also about how to connect, sometimes without screens and sometimes through them. Screens can be used strategically to accomplish unexpected, teachable moments, which is lucky since we all have screen addictions these days.

There is no denying that our kids are addicted to screens, and sometimes I despair at the state of their poor, saturated brains and teeny, tiny attention spans. I worry that they’ve lost the ability to allow for boredom, which is fruitful both creatively and emotionally. As a kid I came up with so many ideas simply because I was listless and bored and got tired of feeling that way. As an adult I mostly get bored of my own bullshit, which is not too terribly different. I have taken steps to improve my life and try new ways of being just to get relief from being bored of myself.

I have also spent weeks worth of time, cumulatively, bingeing Netflix and scrolling through Facebook to avoid dealing with my bullshit, which I try to remember when I decide to wade into the issue of screens with my kids. My kids aren’t the only ones with an affection for screens around here.

Walk With Me (#6): Teen Girls and Sex

I believe, based on my own experience, that teen girls need and deserve the space to experiment with their sexuality without shame or fear. As parents, it is our job to fight for that, even if it means confronting our own emotional material around sex and shame.

I believe the first thing you have to do to raise cis-girls to be powerful, impactful, vibrant cis-women is to do your own work around sex and shame. In this country, I’d call it wading through the lasting effects of Puritanism. It is so deeply ingrained in our Puritanical culture that sex is bad, bodies are sinful, and women are inherently a danger to everyone through their irrevocable wantonness. Though lots of Western religions teach these lessons, Puritanism really perfected that toxic misogyny in what is now the United States.

When our girls start to express sensuality or desire, when they start to experiment with what it is to feel “sexy”, we are trained to recoil. If we acknowledge that young girls can be and feel “sexy” then we must be monsters and pedophiles. They must be on the fast train to being whores or tragedies. We rush to cover them up and shut them down, lest they become targets for predators, and lest we have to confront the ways in which we respond to their sensuality and end up feeling like monsters ourselves.

Walk With Me (#9): Raising Feminist Men

As a feminist and a woman with sexual trauma history, the question of parenting boys is complex and important. We’re all swimming in a sea of misogyny. Getting realistic about that and how to navigate the water consciously is how we raise feminist men.

You want him to be a feminist? Don’t teach him to try never to be sexist, as if such a thing is even possible. Teach him that he is sexist, like all of us, and when he encounters sexism in himself he needs to acknowledge it and be accountable for it. It’s not a reflection on his essential nature that he has absorbed sexism. Encourage him to never take it personally, but to always take it seriously.

Teach him that with introspection and accountability he can be anti-sexist. The work to be anti-sexist is the work of a lifetime, for all of us. There is no shame in it.

Walk With Me (#10): Breaking Cycles of Abuse

Parenting, for many of us, involves confronting generational trauma and cycles of abuse. It’s hard work, but what is the alternative? Seeing our own traumas and abuse history relived by our children, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Abuse, like addiction, often has at its heart generations of family patterning. Our parents grew up watching one of their parents abuse the other, so they learned to choose the role of the abuser or the abused. We watched them play out that dynamic and then manifested it in our own relationships. Our children will, through no character flaw of their own, likely confront those same dynamics in their own relationships. That’s how generational trauma persists.

The only way we break those cycles of abuse and trauma is to confront them, openly and honestly. I’m not saying it’s an easy conversation, but I have to believe that not having it and then finding out our kids have inherited our abuse and trauma baggage is harder.

Walk With Me (#18): Let Her Grow Away

Middle school is the absolute worst, as a kid and as a parent. Our sweet, cute kids become moody, defiant, awkward little monsters. How do we set boundaries while also honoring their developmental need to individuate?

Always remember that she isn’t an extension of you, but her own particular mystery of a person. She will not always make the choices you would make. She won’t always want the things that you want. She will not always make sense to you. That’s not her job. Her job, for her whole life, is to become her most full, authentic self. Your job is to provide a safe, loving container for her to do that at the beginning, and to cheer like hell until the end for whoever she is becoming.

Walk With Me (#26): My Kid Is Trans And I Am Lost

Parenting my trans kid has been one of the most intense, growthful experiences of my life. Finding resources for good information so that I can support him unconditionally has been a challenge. There’s so much I can’t do to change the world he is moving into, but I can help other parents of trans kids. If you or someone you know loves a trans kid, this one is for you.

…trans youth don’t attempt suicide because they are trans. They attempt suicide because their families and communities don’t accept and protect them, which leaves them isolated, frequently homeless, and drowning in self-hatred. I am not being histrionic here. If you want Jay to survive into adulthood then you and her dad have to step up and do whatever you have to do to educate yourselves and process your emotions so you can love and support her, otherwise, she may not make it.

Everything will feel rocky and hard for a while, but transformation is never easy, and all of you are transforming. I believe you can become something beautiful together. Just take it all one step at a time. Have some mercy for your imperfect, in-process selves. Focus on loving Jay and keeping her safe. She is so lucky to have you.

Walk With Me (#43): Let Him Fly

When our kids take non-traditional paths out of high school it can be tough to let go or know how to support them, especially if we had a more conventional experience. We can’t hold their hands anymore. We have to trust them and let them fly.

Maybe your son has truly found his calling and will live in the world of cars and engines all his life. Maybe he’ll move on to other things that are related, or maybe he’ll head off in a completely different direction. Maybe he’ll have the kinds of adventures that you did, and maybe his adventures will look completely different.

I think the important thing is that he’s taken the initiative to head in a direction that doesn’t involve being hand-fed experience, as you so aptly put it, by a college experience, or, wonderful mama, by you. He’s using his hands to grasp onto the life that he wants, and you can’t hold his hand while he does that. It’s busy.

Join me over at my newsletter, Let Your Life Speak!

Thanks for walking this journey with me. Love to you and yours.

XO, Asha