This essay was originally published on Sara’s Radical Matriarch substack and we’re excited to share it with you all here at Rearing Humans.
Today, I dropped my youngest off in the woods for her first day of Forest School. Unlike with my elder, where I had so much of my own separation anxiety at her first drop-off, with my youngest, I had a deep knowing that she would be okay. And she was! We hugged, I gave her a kiss on her nose, she said, “see you later alligator” like we practiced, and off she went.
You’ll note that I dropped her off at a forest school. I’ve been reticent to post about schooling lest I unintentionally wade myself into a polarized public/private school debate, but I guess I’ll just come right out and say that part of what makes me identify as radical in my parenting is my uncompromising belief in doing what is in my power to raise free people.
And I don’t mean just raising my kids to be free at the expense of everyone else’s kids: I mean I want all our kids to be raised in freedom and co-liberation.
By freedom, I mean that I want them to:
have a deep understanding of their feelings and needs, and the feelings and needs of others
have agency over their bodies, minds, hearts and spirits. Respect the agency of others’ minds, bodies, hearts and spirits
be able to drive their own learning: to decide what excites them, what motivates them, what they’re curious about, and what they want to put their time and energy into—with loving, caring adults supporting them along the way
understand that their freedom is interwoven with the freedom of every being around them, and to work toward co-liberation in anything they do
And, here’s the mirror: I actually want this type freedom for all of us adults—especially so for Mothers.
I want us to:
have a deep understanding of our feelings and needs and understand those of others
have agency over our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits and respect the agency of others’ bodies, minds, hearts and spirits
drive our own learning—to decide what excites us, motivates us, what were curious about, and what we want to pour our time and energy into
know that our freedom is interwoven with the freedom of every being around us, and that it’s our responsibility to work toward co-liberation
In the last two years, as my partner and I navigated the school choice conversation, we zeroed in on what makes our current construct structurally impossible: we are perpetually having to trade off who gets to be free in our family. I found myself repelled by the public/private school dichotomy. I wanted an option C.
When our eldest was little, I started out home with her as her primary caregiver, raising her in a countercultural parenting community, which we evolved into a forest school cooperative, bypassing traditional preschool to forge an alternative cooperative before Pandemic microschools were a thing. We homeschooled her through the first year of COVID, had a miserable try over at a Waldorf school, tried her out at public school for all of two days, then finally landed her at an alternative independent school that gifts her the agency she needs to thrive. My youngest has been home with me with a two-day-a-week forest-nanny share up until today, and then off she went into the woods for forest preschool.
Because I am uncompromising in raising free people, I’ve landed my kids in environments that protect their agency, their autonomy, their self-knowing, and their wider connection to others and the planet.
One cost to my uncompromising parenting is that my partner and I have traded some of our agency for our kids’ freedom. We commute across the entirety of the city of San Francisco to get them to and from school. We have to make significantly more money than we would have if we didn’t send them to these programs. And we’ve at times mortgaged where our passions would take us if we let them unfurl unencumbered, compared to the work we need to do to earn a living to pay to send them to these “free” environments.
I’m going to pause here and just acknowledge the privilege of what I’m saying: that my kids get to go to programs where they have their agency fiercely protected, every day. Most kids don’t get that. Most adults don’t either. And I also recognize the inherent incongruence in my politics: I am giving my kids environments that make space for their autonomy, while many other children are not afforded the same.
But I’m actually going to push back on the word “privilege” here, because damn y’all, shouldn’t living in freedom just be granted to us all as a basic human right? I am going to uncompromising lengths to protect my kids’ autonomy and respect, but shouldn’t we all just be granted that agency simply for existing? Shouldn’t all schooling environments give our kids that?
Since becoming a mother, I’ve been on a sort of deschooling journey of my own, and find myself increasingly unwilling to bend toward institutions that strip me of my agency. I hadn’t quite named it as such until I started listening to Akilah’s Fare the Free Child podcast, and particularly her episode about deschooling for ourselves and not for our children. But I think its apt to describe the transformation of pulling out of traditional work settings to raise my children in community as deschooling: I’ve found myself at times almost allergic to the idea of relinquishing my agency again, and honestly I think more of us would feel the same if given a breath out of the rat race.
But the trade-off I made when we chose for to kids to attend programs that let them be free is my commitment to earning enough money to pay for them to attend said “free” programs. Which, isn’t great. Because it compromises my agency. Which brings me back to the question of, free for who?
The alternative? I could send them to our industrial-model public schools, and honestly for both my own agency and my values, I really wanted this to be a yes for our family. But not only do traditional public schools feel harmful for their neurodiversity, but they also just feels like mortgaging my kids’ freedom for my own. And that doesn’t feel right either.
I could also homeschool/deschool/unschool them, which, a) my eldest isn’t down with after COVID isolation and b) the math actually doesn’t work on: it would cost me more to unschool them than it would to send them to their alternative schools and use that time to earn at least the cost of their programs and help cover our other expenses.
Who gets to be free?
In case you’re wondering, it’s definitely not mothers. Yesterday, I opened instagram to see Reshma Saujani’s post sharing that, “According to a new report, the percentage of women in the workforce with young kids is higher than it's ever been. In June, 70.4% of women with kids under 5 were in the workforce — compared to a peak of 68.9% before the pandemic.”
Reshma framed this with a hat tip to flexible work, but in the comments, so. many. mothers. said that they wouldn’t be working if they didn’t have to. To me, this statistic isn’t about flexible work. It’s actually about families not being able to afford living on a single income. Mothers don’t have the autonomy to choose not to do paid work on top of their unpaid work of mothering.
And honestly, this is where the second-wave feminist movement misstepped: we should be giving women the choice of career or mothering or any configuration in between, but *not* the obligation to do both simultaneously. I don’t hear many mothers these days celebrating their current load and finding it sustainable. Do you?
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Can we all just agree that we should not have a zero sum game within our family units or within society, trading off who gets to be free? That no one should be obligated to enter the workforce while mothering a child under five in order to meet their family’s basic needs, if they don’t want to? That we mothers also deserve our temporal autonomy? That we all do?
Needless to say: this conversation—who gets to be free in our family—is still very much in process in our household.
I’ve been on leave from work and from my consulting practice since January, and as I think about what it looks like to re-engage in earning income this fall and winter, I know I want to do it in a way that keeps my agency, my values, and my financial safety all intact, without compromising the agency, values, or safety of others in the process. As I build toward that dream with my own heart-aligned projects and collaborations (like writing here on Radical Matriarch), I can’t help but think about what it would look like if society had policies that actively prioritized our children’s’ freedom and our own. What if instead of our current constructs:
Our laws actually protected women and birthing people’s agency over if/when/how to become parents? (what!)
Parents were given three full years of leave plus subsidized parenting education and support in how to consciously raising free people?
Public schooling was modeled on constructivist, self-directed education steeped in co-liberation, and not on an antiquated, industrialized form of schooling?
Universal basic income covered adults’ basic needs so that we could choose where and how to direct our energies?
Anyone doing the work of mothering received additional guaranteed income to care for small humans?
In getting us all free,
Sara