We are at the intersection of an old paradigm of power and a new paradigm of power, and there are three key places where we can see this – in politics, in partnership and in parenting.
For so long in politics, it’s been about those with the most economic power using power-over others. We know know the massive sums of money that pass hands from corporations to politicians.
And yet we can see the new paradigm coming into place, the power-with paradigm, with people like Jacinta Ardern, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marianne Williamson bringing compassion, interconnectedness and care for the environment into politics.
The School Strike movement and Extinction Rebellion are also bringing about a shift in power as more and more people are taking action to bring about change.
In partnership, we’ve been seeing the development of a new paradigm of power for some time, but like in the other two areas, this transition phrase from power-over and powerlessness to power-with is inevitably rocky as old ways of thinking and responding are increasingly replaced with new ones.
My biggest passions of the three are power in parenting, because our core sense of power comes from how we are responded to when we grow up.
If we wonder why politicians who value power and money above care for other beings keep being voted in, we can look to old fashioned parenting paradigms.
The work of people like Robin Grille and Lloyd deMause show how powerfully parenting paradigms and cultural paradigms are related.
If we look at how the political structures we’ve lived in have been possible, we only need to look to parenting.
Alice Miller’s work brought to light the profoundly harsh treatment of children that preceded Nazi Germany, for example, “According to the reports of Nazi criminals (and also of soldiers who volunteered to fight in Vietnam), their unconscious programming to be violent began in every case with a brutal upbringing that demanded absolute obedience and expressed total contempt for the child….The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty-two blows he received…In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair – in other words, by denying the truth – Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings….Hitler could make Europe and the world into the battlefield of his childhood because in the Germany of that time there were millions of people who had experienced the same kind of upbringing he had.”
Peter Gray cites research that found that respondents’ beliefs about childrearing the best predictors of which Republicans voted for Trump. He says, “People with an authoritarian mindset believe, first and foremost, in obedience to authority.So, of course, obedience is high on their list of ideal traits for a child; but obedience is also high on their list of ideal traits for people in general. Leaders, especially strong, confident leaders, are to be followed.”
And this is one of the many reasons why parenting is so important.
The more a child is brought up within an authoritarian paradigm, which is all about the parents and teachers having power-over the child, the more powerless they will feel.
That powerlessness leads to either submission or the desire to have power-over others.
I invite us all to have lots of compassion for ourselves as parents here.
Most of us grew up within the old fashioned paradigm. Our parents might not have been authoritarian, but the culture we’ve grown up in is a domination paradigm, which is all about power-over rather than power-with.
As we aim to bring up our children in more power-with ways, our own feelings of powerlessness will inevitably show up.
These feelings often bubble up when our child is doing something we don’t want to do, or isn’t doing what we do want them to do.
Our own feelings of powerlessness can lead us to give up and on our needs as parents, leading to flatness and resentment, or they can build up and flip over into power-over our children.
The more we understand the culture and family we grew up in, and the relationship with power in both, the more capacity we have to bring up children in power-with ways.
Power-with is fundamentally about connection and compassion.
In order to use power-over another, in that moment we’ve lost connection with them.
It’s a profound sense of disconnection that makes it possible for multinational corporations to treat our planet in ways that mean that we’re in the middle of the 6th mass extinction.
It’s a profound sense of disconnection that makes it possible for politicians to turn a blind eye to all the solvable pain and suffering of humanity.
We have the resources to live in a completely different world.
It’s simply that our collective consciousness that isn’t yet creating that different world.
And the collective consciousness has been created by the ways children are treated and then internalise.
Your parenting is profoundly important.
Your parenting deeply affects your child’s future relationships.
Your parenting helps change the consciousness of humanity.
There is already a new generation of young people who feel connected, who feel a sense of power-with others. We only need look at the School Strikers to see this. Consciousness is evolving.
As parents, the more inner work we do on our own inherited sense of powerlessness, and the more deeply interconnected we feel with life, the less likely we will use power-over our children, and the more likely we will be able to help them heal from the inevitable powerlessness that they will experience.
How you respond to your child not cooperating, hitting, or having a tantrum may not seem important – but all of these are related to power and will, and are all important in terms of the future of humanity.
Your parenting is important. Deeply important.
Thank you for all that you are doing to co-crete a new paradigm on this planet.
If you want to learn more about this, my Power and Powerlessness in Parenting Course is HERE and my Psychospiritual Parenting Course is HERE.