It is, anyone who says it’s not is naive as hell in my opinion. Your beliefs, or lack of even, will affect the way you parent and our abilities to self reflect, articulate and critically question ourselves and the world around us will only benefit and hopefully empower our kids to do the same. I’m feeling quite torn here when it comes to considering the stakeholders of my project. Initially my focus was on tween girls and their parents. As the research and interventions have gone on it’s become increasingly evident that the parents are the tougher crowd here and that the difference in approach and concern between men and women (or mums and dads) is vast and feels quite difficult to bring together to be honest. Despite mums wanting to be involved, worrying about what to do and say and very willing to participate the dads just don’t and getting men to open up, especially about such things is going to be hard. The old ones are stuck in their ways, think they know best and aren’t really that open to listening despite thinking they are.
The part in this quote from @parentingispolitical about “prepare the young people” opens up to me (and was also brought up in class actually) the idea that maybe I need to shift my focus to younger men if I going to get any to engage with this subject matter at all. On the one hand I am happy to engage with almost anyone on these kinds of subjects because I personally find them so interesting and I am happy to try and engage especially with men who are open to these ideas in particular I also need to consider what changing a stakeholder group like this means for the project.
My compass originally was trying to point at changing patriarchal norms through parenting. Trying to align parents and their kids together in this liminal space that exists in ever increasing grey area created by new ideology, technology and communications that deepen the void between the generations. The older parents have more power and therefore any change on their part would hopefully wield greater change outside of themselves too but I just don’t know anymore. It depends on what I am trying to achieve I guess, lasting change, a better generation, a world less stupid and shit for my daughters? Supposedly you can’t change someones’s mind by talking to them but I just don’t know if that’s true or not.