How our world views affect our children

Regenerative Culture Birthing & Caring for Children
#21

Hi all,

I’m new here and first read about this thread on “The College of Mythic Cartography”.
My son is 8 and I’ve also had to witness the ruthless onslaughts of the civilized world on him.

I’ve recently started to tell him more in detail how the school system and society in general is working at molding him into a obedient, hard working citizen and so on. I definitely feel like I’m not doing enough. I also try to not leave him with a sense of doom about living in today’s world. I sometimes improvise bedtime stories that the civilized parents would frown upon. I try to make the stories funny as much as possible while at the same time make him think about the world - civilized and non-civilized.

I urge him to think for himself and not just believe what I or anyone else tell him. And that it’s ok to have a different view, although it would probably enrage me if he’d be overcome by the machine.

Most often though, I feel like I’m offering so little compared to the constant and limitless shit that civilization is throwing his way…

#22

I’ve been working at an alternate school. School for kids who have been kicked out of the other schools.
These are mostly 14, 15, and 16 year olds. One 13 year old. Some are addicts, some have been to treatment, some are still active users. Some have been in jail already. Very short tempers, quick to resort to violence.

Some of the guiding philosophy that we work with comes from Dr. Martin Brokenleg. http://www.reclaiming.com/speakers/?action=1&ProductID=6

I was able to attend some presentations given by him on friday and saturday. Really good stuff. A lot of what he has to say comes from traditional Lakota family structure and child rearing practices.
He talked quite a bit about how the nuclear family as a social unit is a recent N. American notion. And the traditional family in Lakota society is an extended family that might include a hundred or even two hundred people.

I have seen this on the Pine Ridge reservation in S. Dakota nowadays. We have “family” there and they operate in just the same way that Martin Brokenleg describes.

Anyway, don’t let the fact that he is an Episcopal minister get in the way of hearing the important stuff that he has to share about parenting or working with youth.