My Violent Youth And The Systems That Made Me
***Content Warning: Violence, Killings, Child Abuse***
Ahhhhh!!! I’m burning!!! My body is on fire!!! Ahhhhh!!!
It was the fall of 2001. I had returned to Wilkes-Barre, Pa. to fulfill my student teaching requirements at a local elementary school after graduating from Kings College with a degree in elementary education that May.
My boys and I were at a local club kickin it when some dude we didn’t know approached and starting talking to a girl that one of my homies was connected to. My homie felt disrespected so he approached the other dude and had some words with him. Things got heated quickly!
We pulled my homie away and tried to cool him down so that we didn’t get kicked out of the club. That’s when I noticed that the other dude was with a crew of his boys as well. I’d been in situations like this many times before…I was ready for what was about to go down.
As we exited the club a young teacher from the school I was student teaching at stopped me and said “You’re better than this. You have a future”. He witnessed the initial confrontation and spoke to me with a tone that reflected the weight of the fact that he and I were the only African American males in the school we taught at in a predominantly European American town.
My crew and I left the club and loaded up in my homie's car. Still heated, he pulled up near the club exit instead of leaving. The other dude and his crew exited, saw us in the car, and threw a bottle that shattered upon impact with the car.
We all hopped out the car immediately and a brawl ensued.
I squared up with one dude, landed a few punches, and ended up on the ground on top of him. At this point, I’m heated and trying to destroy this dude. Then, in an instant, I was rendered defenseless after a bouncer pepper-sprayed my face. A friend came to my aid, helped me to her car, and drove away before the cops arrived. As she drove me to my apartment my face was on fire! As soon as I got home I hopped in the shower to rinse out my eyes and face.
Big mistake…
The shower water moved the pepper spray from my face to my entire body. Still full of adrenaline from the brawl I yelled in pain “Ahhhhh!!! I’m burning!!! My body is on fire!!! Ahhhhh!!!
It felt like the pain would never end but eventually, it did. It was after that ordeal, at the age of 22, that I decided…never again.
I’m never. fighting. again.
Fighter
The other day I looked at my 8-year-old son…grateful for his innocence and I thought to myself,
“Damn…when I was his age I was already doing gang shit”.
As a child, I attended Martha Washington, a K-8 school located next to the Mill Creek housing projects on 46th street in West Philly during the height of the crack cocaine era of the 1980s. Every day my schoolyard was littered with broken glass, crack valves, and intravenous needles from the drug activity from the night before. For my classmates and me, it was just a regular part of navigating the very large fenced in concrete terrain that we played on each day.
During those days we had free reign. We could “leave the gate” and come and go as we pleased within our 45 minute lunch period. We’d leave and go to the playground, a friend's house in the projects, or we’d walk up to Lancaster Ave to buy lunch from a local diner or Chinese food spot.
There were also times when we’d leave the gate just to go fight.
Violent fights seemed like a daily occurrence at my school. Fights between one another as well as fights with kids from nearby schools. Once, I even witnessed a parent walk across the schoolyard from the projects, confront my 2nd-grade teacher, and slap her in the face while every class was outside and watching.
During my 3rd & 4th grade years I was apart of a crew that would walk to nearby elementary schools to fight. We’d literally walk into their schoolyard and start swinging on the first group of boys we saw. We didn’t care who it was. We’d strike, exchange some blows, and then run back to our school before any adults could nab us. Of course, this led to retaliation so we always had to keep our head on a swivel when we left the schoolyard.
During my time at Martha Washington, I got intimately acquainted with violence at an early age. From teachers using violence as a form of punishment when they smacked my hand with a ruler to the time when I was 7 years old and a kid named Sam punched me in the face and took the little bit of change that I had in my pocket.
That was the first and the last time that I ever let anyone intimidate me in that way without me defending myself. I didn’t like the way that felt and I carried a chip on my shoulder from that day forward. Throughout my time at Martha Washington and back home in my neighborhood I would go on to get into many fights.
Eventually, I craved them.
My ACE’S
ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children’s developing brains and lead to changing how they respond to stress and damaging their immune systems so profoundly that the effects show up decades later. ACEs cause much of our burden of chronic disease, most mental illness, and are at the root of most violence.
“ACEs” comes from the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, a groundbreaking public health study that discovered that childhood trauma leads to the adult onset of chronic diseases, depression and other mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, as well as financial and social problems. The ACE Study has published about 70 research papers since 1998. Hundreds of additional research papers based on the ACE Study have also been published.
The more ACEs you have, the greater the risk. People have an ACE score of 0 to 10. Each type of trauma counts as one, no matter how many times it occurs. You can think of an ACE score as a cholesterol score for childhood trauma. For example, people with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholics.
Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of an attempted suicide by 1200 percent. People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more autoimmune diseases. People with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years.
(Reference: AcesTooHigh.com)
I took the quiz and my ACE score is 3. My score is rooted primarily in the normalized physical abuse that I endured growing up. You know…the good ole fashion whupping’s or beating’s that many parents dished out in the name of “good discipline” and teaching respect. My parents and extended community of aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, and an elementary school principal all had a hand in “disciplining” me as I grew up.
Hitman
Yo, Sundiata used to be my hitman, straight up. He was crazy!
I flew home to Philadelphia for the Thanksgiving holiday this year so that I could spend some time with family and friends. I have a huge family but this year only a small group of us met due to the Covid19 pandemic. Inevitably during dinner, we began to reminisce and share stories from our shared past.
One cousin, who’s one year younger than me, shared how I used to fight the kids who bullied him when he first moved to 53rd street in West Philly. He told the family that I used to be his hitman and shared that I had bloodied a few noses.
We were super close almost since birth and I always had his back.
At the age of 15, he was convicted as an adult for a violent crime that I won’t mention. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and went on to serve six. I was devastated. I wrote him letters, sent books, and even took the long 4–6 hour road trip out to the middle of the state to visit him a few times. I carried some guilt that I wasn’t able to influence him from going down the path that led to his incarceration. We had been so close and spent so much time together during our adolescence but not as much during our teen years due to me going to high school in a different part of town.
As I was coming of age I was the cousin, sibling, or friend that everyone knew they could come to when there was an issue because I was protective and I was fearless. To this day I still have a large and distinctive scar on my right arm because it was cut with glass when I threw a kid through a window on his porch for disrespecting a female cousin of mine.
In most instances my fights were a result of me defending myself, defending someone I cared about, or being loyal and helping a friend handle a beef. However, I’m embarrassed to admit that there were a few instances when I lost my cool and punched someone in the face over something petty or if I felt like they were disrespecting me.
I believe that I retaliated with violence when I felt disrespected, in part, because that’s how the adults in my life responded when they perceived disrespect from me.
Love is…Violent?
“We were taught to beat you because we loved you”.
My cousins and I were joking during Thanksgiving 2020 about the fact that our children were lucky because when we were growing up one of us would have been “beat by now”. That led to some light-hearted jabs at our parents for, from our perspective, taking out their frustrations on us and competing to see who could dish the most humiliating beatings. In empathetic defense, my aunt replied, “we were taught to beat you because we loved you.”
Both my mother and father’s families were/are deeply devoted Christians where “spare the rod spoil the child” is a foundational principle for parenting found in the bible. For generations, many well-meaning and loving parents dished out corporal punishment and beatings in an effort to avoid raising “disobedient” and “disrespectful” children. I often found myself on the receiving end of this well-meaning yet twisted form of love.
My mother and father separated when I was very young so my father didn’t live in my home when I was growing up. However, he was only a phone call away when it was time for “disciplining” my siblings and me. When I’d get into trouble at school or at home it was mentally torturous waiting for him to arrive to beat me.
When he’d finally arrive, sometimes late at night awakening me from my sleep, he’d make me go into the basement, drop my pants, put my hands against the wall, look away, and then proceed to strike me with his belt. Yelling and pleading for mercy only caused him to strike me more while yelling,
“Stop crying! You want to cry!? I’ll give you something to cry about!”
Like most harmful social constructs, this belief system and practice disproportionately impacts African Americans.
A 2015 Pew Research survey found that black parents are more than twice as likely as white and Latino parents to use corporal punishment on a regular basis, and they are far less likely to never spank their children. But while hitting children is prevalent in black communities, contrary to popular belief, it is not an intrinsic cultural tradition. (Reference)
Prior to the agricultural revolution approximately 12,000 years ago, and for the first approximately 290,000 years of our species (homo sapiens) existence on this earth, our pre-historic ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived and organized in small bands around egalitarian principles. Principles that many indigenous cultures who’ve never been influenced by colonization and religion continue to live by today.
It is well documented that prior to European colonization, Indigenous cultures around the globe did not use corporal punishment or authoritarian parenting practices. Due to complex social and environmental factors, which I explain on episode 3 of my podcast, Europeans were the first to organize their society around principles of power-over and control (authoritarianism).
African-Americans adopted the practice of beating children from white slave masters (Patton, 2017). Europeans brutalized their own children for thousands of years prior to crossing the Atlantic to the New World and colonizing Africa. Historians and anthropologists have found no evidence that ritualistic forms of physical discipline of children existed in precolonial West African societies prior to the Atlantic slave trade.
West African societies held children in a much higher regard than slave societies in the Atlantic world, which placed emphasis on black bodies as property, not as human beings. West Africans believed that children came from the afterlife, that they were gods or reincarnated ancestors who led profoundly spiritual lives and held extraordinary mystical powers that could be harnessed through ritual practice for the good of the community.
In fact, it was believed that coercion and hitting a child could scare off their soul. Indigenous people of North America held similar beliefs. As colonization, slavery and genocidal violence made life harsher for these groups, parenting practices also grew harsher. (Reference)
My aunt was correct, the act of loving African American parents beating their children evolved as a survival tactic for surviving white supremacy and systemic racism.
Their reasoning was simple: Prepare black children to deal with the chronic stresses they would face to keep them alive. If black people had the luxury of 20 or 30 years after slavery — being able to parent without fear of lynch mobs, indiscriminate police violence and unyielding racist discrimination — then perhaps the practice of “whupping” might have become less widespread. But when you belong to a group of people who are in constant fear of their lives and those of their children, then it is understandable how that trauma can cause parents to interpret cruelty as love, protection and responsible parenting even when proven counterintuitive.
(Reference: American Psychological Association. “Corporal punishment in black communities: Not an intrinsic cultural tradition but racial trauma”)
Killing All Around Me
Growing up in Philadelphia, the city with the highest violent crime and poverty rates among large cities in America, I don’t remember a year during my adolescent and teen years that I didn’t get the news that someone I knew was murdered or in some instances…when someone I knew committed a murder.
There’s one that sticks out and still hurts the most.
As a 12-year-old, during my 8th-grade year at Martha Washington, my friend and classmate Eric and his younger brother Rock were shot and killed on a corner near their home just down the street from our school. There was talk that Eric may have been dealing drugs but I don’t know if that is true or if it was related.
In my adult mind, I still can’t wrap my mind around how a 12-year-old kid and his 10-year-old little brother could be gunned down at such an early age. Even if it were drug-related or just on some “street shit” it boggles my mind that in certain environments and conditions that someone the age of my 12-year-old daughter, can find themselves in the crosshairs of a murderer’s gun…a murderer probably not much older than they were.
Eric was a really bright and talented dude who lived with his mom and dad one block from where my dad lived at the time on 42nd & Wallace St. On days when I’d visit my dad’s after school, we’d hang out from time to time. When we were in the 5th grade we began to get access to the school gym in the mornings before school for pickup basketball games. This was the time when I fell in love with basketball and began to realize that I was a really good player.
Eric was just as good.
I’d go on to play high school and college basketball and I have no doubt that Eric would have done the same had he lived to reach his full potential. I’ll never forget the day that my parents took me to Eric’s home after his death to offer our condolences to his mom and dad. They were devastated.
Eric was the closest person to me to be murdered due to gun violence up to that point in my life. But unfortunately, he wasn’t the last. Not even a year later, I got word that another classmate and morning basketball buddy, Deshawn, was shot in the head and killed at the age of 13.
A few years earlier at the age of 10, I witnessed my 6-year-old cousin, Antoinette, get killed after I helped her off of her school van. My mother and I were leaving my aunt's house when she arrived so we were there to greet her. As Antoinette walked in front of the van to get to our aunt’s house the driver drove off before ensuring that she had made it to the other side…hitting Antoinette and dragging her to an early death.
I’ll never forget looking down the street and seeing my little cousin lying one hundred yards away in a pool of blood on a blistering cold winter day in Philadelphia. My uncle ran out of his house with a blanket to cover her up while yelling for someone to call an ambulance. I just stood there helpless and in disbelief.
A few days later I found myself in a police station being asked to give my recollection of the killing.
My Other ACEs
The picture above depicts the interconnectedness of The Pair of ACEs.
- Adverse Community Environments (ACEs), the soil, represents the social conditions and systems that many children’s lives are rooted in.
- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), the branches, represents the family environment from which many children bud and grow.
The Pair of ACEs Tree is planted in soil that is steeped in systemic inequities and dysfunction, robbing it of nutrients necessary to support a thriving community. Adverse Community Experiences, such as lack of opportunity, limited economic mobility, fear of discrimination, and the associated effects of poverty and joblessness contribute to — and compound — the adversities experienced by individuals and families.
(Reference: Aces Connection: “The soil in which we’re rooted; The branches on which we grow”)
The trunk of the tree represents the person, the child. A child like me and millions of others who grew up navigating adverse experiences and circumstances inside and outside of our homes.
There have been hundreds of studies done on Adverse Childhood Experiences and how the trauma they cause drastically increases the possibility of negative social outcomes for so many people. However, I was unable to find any that test or measure the impact of Adverse Community Environments. I wonder what my ACEs score would be if there were one?
Murder Missed Me
Thinking back on it now, I realize that receiving news about a murder or killing involving someone I knew was far too common.
I had a neighbor who I looked up to growing up, we’ll call him Quan. Quan was one of my older brother’s best friends. I always enjoyed the rare times he’d let me tag along to Quan’s house with him. I looked up to Quan because he was cool, confident, and he was one of the best basketball players in my neighborhood. His game was tough!
I was in middle school when in a matter of weeks I learned that Quan had been shot and paralyzed during a drive-by shooting and then convicted of a murder that he had committed prior to being shot. Quan is currently serving a life sentence in prison while being confined to a wheelchair.
When I think back, I realize how fortunate I am to have avoided being in the wrong place at the wrong time when there was a shooting. I could have easily been on one of those corners, in one of those houses, or in one of those cars when a shooting occurred.
There was a time though that I came pretty close to meeting that fate.
I was with some of the old heads from my neighborhood one late night and we took a trip down to the Tasker Homes housing projects in South Philly because one of them had to handle some business. One old head, we’ll call him Boo, had a cousin who was a drug kingpin in Tasker Homes. When we pulled up to a dark corner in Tasker two dudes came out of nowhere with machine guns pointed towards us. Boo, immediately yelled out his cousin's name and said he was his family. They didn’t shoot.
As I reflect back I can’t help but wonder, what if? What if they had mistaken our vehicle for an enemy’s and shot first and asked questions later?
During my senior year at Kings College, there was another situation that I put myself in where my hot-headed temper could have cost me my life.
Wilkes-Barre Pa. was about 90 minutes from both Philadelphia and New York City making it a prime spot for drug dealing crews looking to expand their territory. So, that was the year when a crew of bloods (gang) from New York came to town. They let their presence be known immediately and we began to see them around town and in the local night clubs with their infamous red bandanas.
At the time I was dealing with a local young woman who had also recently been in a relationship with one of the leaders of this crew of bloods. He was a really cocky dude and the locals were intimidated by him and his gang for obvious reasons…
But I wasn’t.
So one night I was at the club with my crew and this dude and his crew of bloods came in making a scene, I assume, to get attention from the woman and intimidate the men. I never liked bullies and their whole vibe bothered me.
To this day I don’t know why, but I decided to step to this leader dude in the middle of the club and tell him that I didn’t think he was as tough as he thought he was. Admittedly, I was drinking alcohol that night so I’m sure that it altered my best judgment. As I’m preparing to square up my homies grabbed me and intervened. By the time we got outside, my homie Dame had already spoken with another leader of the crew and squashed it.
I don’t know why things didn’t escalate. I don’t why they didn’t grab their guns and come for us. Yeah, we were just a crew of college students but we were from inner-city places like Philly and Newark so we were accustomed to situations like this. I didn’t carry a gun…but some of my homies did.
I asked Dame about this situation recently and I asked him why it didn’t escalate. He said that he didn’t really know but that the other leader told him that they didn’t want any beef with us. Dame also told me that the same leader dude that I had stepped to that night in the club was shot in the head and killed years later.
The Other Side Of The Coin
“When processing trauma some people feel homicidal, and some people feel suicidal…it’s two sides of the same coin”
— El Hajj Ra’id DeVeaux
I had tears rolling down my face and emotional pain in my heart on the day that I was a slight decision away from ending my life. I was 10 or 11 years old on that day when I put a large knife to my chest and contemplated putting a period on the final sentence of my life story.
I was angry, frustrated, and emotionally drained. I was SO tired of getting into trouble, being put on punishment, and getting beatings. I was tired of my mother threatening to send me away to a facility for “bad kids”. I felt like something had to be wrong with me, like… I must be broken or something because I just couldn’t escape this cycle of punitive consequences for simply being me.
I often received praise for how “intelligent” or “smart” I was from adult family members and teachers. They would say stuff like, “you’re going to be a lawyer or engineer someday” as a compliment because I was curious, assertive, and a critical thinker. However, when I used that same curiosity, assertiveness, and critical thinking to question an adult decision all of a sudden I was “talking back” and “being disrespectful”.
Between 1991 and 2017, suicide attempts among black adolescents increased by 73%, while attempts among white youth decreased, according to an analysis of more than 198,000 high school students nationwide. Other studies have shown an elevated risk of suicide among African American boys ages 5 to 11.
Black youth are also less likely than their white peers to receive care for depression — and when they do enter treatment, it’s often through the juvenile justice system. Breland-Noble says that white children with behavioral problems such as irritability and belligerence are often diagnosed with mood disorders, while black children exhibiting the same behaviors are seen as disruptive and requiring discipline.
(Reference: American Psychological Association: “Sounding the Alarm on Black Youth Suicide”)
I’ve learned that some people internalize and some people externalize their trauma. Internalized trauma often leads to depression, anxiety, poor self-esteem, negative self-talk, self-mutilation, and/or suicide. While externalized trauma often leads to someone being verbally abusive, physically abusive, committing crimes, and/or committing murder.
Like most things, these examples are two ends of a spectrum and they will manifest differently in each individual. Aside from that one instance with the knife, I primarily externalized my trauma by fighting and being short-tempered with others.
Trauma
I just won
I was on the corner with the reefa
And they got us warring for our freedom
See my brother blood on the pavement
How you wake up in the mornin’ feelin’ evil?
Uhh, trauma
When them drugs got a hold of your mama
And the judge got a hold on your father
Go to school, bullet holes in the locker
(Artist: Meek Mill. Lyrics from: “Trauma”. Released in 2018)
I often hear many people say or comment on social media that they “turned out fine” in spite of getting beatings growing up. In turn, I think to myself that “fine” is relative.
We live in a culture where, for so long, admitting that something is unbalanced with us mentally or emotionally was perceived as weakness or an excuse for not achieving “success”. It’s only been within the last 5 years or so that I’ve started to see people openly discuss mental health and trauma in ways that destigmatize and clear a path for healing. However, we still have a long way to go towards creating the trauma-informed society that we all deserve.
In 2016 Clinical Psychologist, Dr. Noel Hunter penned a beautifully scathing article about the ways in which trauma is systemically embedded in American society.
Excerpt:
Men are told from the youngest of ages to “stop being such a sissy” and “learn to be a man.” They learn to swallow their tears and mask their pain lest they get beaten by their peers or marginalized as being “a girl.” Forget about actually being a girl. When “acting like a girl” is a mortal insult, it becomes quite clear the less-than human nature of femininity and womanhood. And if a woman dares to be more “manly” she is viewed as “butch” or its close cousin, “bitch.” Women who are sexually assaulted are blamed, and if they suffer years later are told they are “playing the victim.” Black people and other minorities are told they are “too sensitive” for demanding the end to systematic racism (as are advocates from many civil rights movements). If someone cannot hide their pain or scream in agony, they are shipped off to be “dealt with” by mental health professionals. There is absolutely no room for empathy or compassion in our modern society, let alone an acknowledgement of grief, sorrow, oppression, and trauma.
(Reference: Mad In America “What would a trauma-informed society look like”)
Systems
I imagine that many of you reading this grew up getting beatings and experiencing violence in your schools and neighborhoods as well. I also imagine that it did not cause many of you to be violent or get into trouble at home or in school as often as I did. Some of you may be thinking that if you could stay out of trouble, then I and others should have been able to as well.
I can relate.
For the majority of my life, I believed that some people were just bad people, who did bad things, and therefore they got into trouble. That was before I became trauma-informed…and that was before I became a systems thinker.
As a young adult, I became aware of an innate passion that I had for deeply understanding the root causes of the social ills in communities like I grew up in. So, when I was introduced to Systems Thinking it was life-changing. I now understand that everything is a system*, we live in a world of systems and subsystems, and all systems are interconnected and interdependent.
*Our world consists of :
- Natural systems: Lakes, trees, birds, humans & other animals, stars, planets, insects, forests, galaxies, atoms, sun, oxygen, etc.
- Human-made social systems (a.k.a. social constructs): Capitalism, languages, patriarchy, gender, democracy, religion, corporal punishment, countries, laws, race, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, etc.
- Human-made industrial systems: Houses, cars, machines, computers, phones, highways, stores, clothing, buildings, etc.
Understanding this informs SO much.
In the book “Thinking in Systems”, author Donella Meadows explains the following
A system is an interconnected set of elements — -people, cells, molecules, companies, beliefs, or anything — — organized to perform whatever functions are required to achieve something.
A system must consist of 3 kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a purpose. The human body is a great example of a complex system. The human body consists of integrated, interconnected, & self-sustaining systems that all work together cooperatively to maintain life. We have the respiratory system, nervous system, neurological system, skeletal system, digestive system, and many more.
In the book, Donella Meadows explains how she uses a Slinky when teaching about systems. She stands before her class with a Slinky perched on one upturned palm and with the fingers of the other hand she grasps the slinky from the top part-way down its coils. Then she pulls the bottom hand away.
The lower end of the Slinky drops, bounces back up again, and yo-yo’s up and down, suspended from her fingers above. “What made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?” she’d ask her students.
“Your hand. You took away your hand”, her students would say.
So then she’d pick up the box the Slinky came in, hold it the same way, and repeat the same actions. When she removes her bottom hand from the box nothing happens. The box just hangs there.
So what made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?
The answer lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it either suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the Slinky.
Once we begin to see the relationship between structure (how a system is designed) and behavior (the results a system consistently produces based on its design) we can begin to understand how our social systems work, what makes them continually produce dysfunctional results, and how to shift them into healthier behavior patterns.
As the Slinky example illustrates, a system may be manipulated or triggered by outside forces, but the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of the system itself. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior. An outside force or event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system (i.e the Slinky box) is likely to produce a different result.
This logic also applies to you and me because we are two different natural systems. Two natural systems that are wired differently so therefore the same outside forces and events (i.e. beatings) are likely to produce different results in how we respond.
Systems-thinking has taught me that, yes, we can design and create new social systems that create conditions for each of us to self-actualize and reach our fullest potential while producing social and environmental sustainability.
Who I Am Innately
Here is what I’ve learned to be true about myself…
I proactively confront problems, I love helping people, I fight for what I believe in, I don’t back down from challenges, I’m not afraid of failure, I challenge the status quo in the ways that I think and live, I speak up when I perceive unfairness, I speak-up and take up for marginalized and underprivileged people, I crave doing purposeful impactful work, I don’t like authoritarian control, and I love to learn and think deeply about things that interest me.
As an immature adolescent and teen, “who I am innately” combined with my adverse experiences and environments resulted in me fighting a lot. It also resulted in me hating school for being forced to do work that didn’t interest me and getting into trouble for defiantly challenging rules rooted in fear and control in school and at home.
As an adult, “who I am innately” combined with my healing, personal growth & development, and freedom to do what I’m passionate about has resulted in me being asked to lead teams and initiatives, a risk-taking serial entrepreneur, a vocal advocate against all forms of oppression, a conflict resolution specialist, social and environmental sustainability conscious, extremely purpose-driven, and an insatiable learner about the things that interest me.
I’m literally the same person as an adult, that I was as an adolescent and teen. I’m just one of the fortunate people who grew up with adverse experiences and environments that had the chance to evolve past the ignorance and immaturity of my youth. The exact same ignorance and immaturity that results in so many young people where I’m from ending up dead or in jail.
I’m fortunate that I had enough positive supports and resilience factors during my coming of age journey that protected me enough so that my innate qualities could blossom into the person I am today. I credit my parents and other caring adults in my family and community for that as well. I don’t blame my parents for how they raised me because I understand that they did their best with the tools and knowledge that they had.
However, I decided that I was going to do things differently.
Doing Things Differently
I began transitioning away from adultism practices like using physical force, intimidation, and coercion, to try to control my oldest child when she was a very strong-willed, inquisitive, and assertive 4 years old. After initially parenting “the old school way” I knew that there had to be a healthier way that was aligned with my values. My online quest for solutions led me to two books (“Raising Your Spirited Child” by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka and “The Conscious Parent” by Shefali Tsabary) that accelerated my personal healing and growth and impacted every area of my life.
My daughter is now 12 and my son is 8. They are both loving caring people who have space to have a range of emotions, have bad days, learn, and evolve without fear of being stigmatized or punished for simply being human and making mistakes along the way. They don’t do things that I ask of them because of fear and control…they do things that I ask of them out of mutual respect and reciprocity within a loving relationship where we openly communicate our needs and boundaries.
In short, my children show me respect because I model it by respecting them.
My children’s mother and I also decided that we were going to do schooling differently. When I was a frustrated elementary school teacher prior to having my own children I started seeking knowledge about alternatives to conventional schooling. I learned that conventional schooling thwarts much of the natural curiosity and creativity in children so their mother and I decided that we weren’t going to put them in conventional schools. I went on to learn about and embrace unschooling and now I actively facilitate and organize in that space as apart of the Raising Free People movement.
I’ve been able to heal many of my childhood traumas by how I’ve chosen to parent my children. Through my conscious parenting journey, I’ve learned that
“Every time you allow your children to be who they are you are helping to heal your own inner child”
Thank you for reading and going on this journey of reflection and evolution with me.
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I love yall, Peace!!
