Raising the Next Generation

Child-rearing, whether by birth parents or other caregivers, is an exercise in optimism, rooted in the belief that babies will turn into children and children will turn into adults who will contribute to the flourishing of life on Earth. Progressive parents, of course, try to teach their offspring the values of fairness, equity, and peace. These values typically include feminism, racial justice, respect for the environment, and carceral abolition, and are woven into bedtime stories and daily conversations. 

Needless to say, striking the right balance can be tricky, necessitating a blend of whimsy and hard facts delivered with kindness, love, and patience. There are neither roadmaps nor formulas for these discussions.

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, an anthology of twenty-nine essays edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, brings an intriguing mix of personal and political essays to activist parents and caregivers, with entries ranging from the theoretical to the intimate.

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition

Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

Haymarket Books, 288 pages

Release date: November 19, 2024

Schenwar’s introduction, “From Prisons to the Playground, Caregiving and Abolition Intertwine,” stresses that the collection is not intended to be a parenting manual. Instead, it is meant to demonstrate how abolition intersects with parenting to “nourish and build new visions of sustainment and interconnected life.”

More concretely, she reminds readers that a healthy imagination undergirds abolitionist work—and gives us a way to envision a non-punitive system of justice that holds people accountable for the harms they’ve caused without placing them in cages, seeking retribution, or separating them from their communities.

It’s a heady, though so far largely unrealized, vision that is inexorably—and surprisingly—tied to bearing and raising children. As Schenwar explains in the book, “The wide open imagination most vividly displayed by young children is key to social transformation . . . . Our realities are oppressive, racist, classist, cisheteropatriarchial, sexist, and ableist, and are quickly destroying the Earth. And so the work of trying something new—of exploration toddler-style, is a skill we must work to re-access.”  

This clearly requires us to re-imagine crime, punishment, and justice itself.

We Grow the World Together centers around building a different world. At the same time, the text zeroes in on how incarceration impacts families and communities in the here and now. 

A short transcribed essay by six-year-old EJ opens the collection. In her piece, she tells her interviewer that she is eager to learn to write so that she can correspond with her incarcerated dad. It’s heartbreaking. 

Mom Erika Ray’s poignant letter to her daughter Jada is similarly powerful. “For the past decade-and-a-half, you and I have together experienced the harms of incarceration, you from outside and me from inside,” she writes. “At times we have struggled to keep funds on the phone for collect calls and have gone years without seeing each other. There have been days that you struggled and needed a hug from me, but that hug was trapped behind a razor-wire fence.”

D’Marria Monday, incarcerated for nearly fifteen years, writes of being separated from her four-month-old son and not seeing him outside of the prison visiting room until he was eight. “I was sent thousands of miles away from my baby while my breasts were still leaking the milk that was his only source of food,” she writes. “I’ve been out of prison for eight years and I still cry as I write about the pain from these memories.”

Even for those on the outside, parenting is often fraught. Dylan Rodriguez, in “Parental Tools for Abolition: Some Dad Shit,” admits that he has exerted “authority and periodic force” over his kids to protect them from danger “as well as their own self-destructive, reactionary, and otherwise misguided behaviors and tendencies.” His essay taps into themes of discipline, consequences, and the need for parents to be present at key junctures in their children’s lives. The revelatory piece never becomes didactic but rather leaves a host of questions about best practices open and unanswered. 

“Try, fail, try again, fail again, fail better” became the mantra for Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as they struggled to raise three kids. In “Out of Many, One,” they note an abundant array of contradictions: “We want our kids to face the world fearlessly, but we also want them to be careful. We want them to embrace all the joy and ecstasy life has to offer and also to be aware of the unnecessary suffering human beings endure. We want our children to know the truth and we want to protect them from the horrors.”

Yes, exactly. 

We Grow the World Together recognizes that all families, no matter their composition, will deal with conflict, misunderstandings, and disappointments. For incarcerated people, this is typically compounded by medical and psychiatric neglect, administrative abuse, arbitrary rules, and a host of other indignities. But as Kim Wilson notes in her conclusion, parenting is a relationship, not a role. And while that relationship changes over time, it is lifelong and does not need to be destroyed by incarceration. 

While I wished the collection included essays from teachers, therapists, social workers, counselors, medical practitioners, religious leaders, and others who nurture and influence youth, We Grow the World Together is a moving and evocative addition to the growing body of abolitionist literature. All told, it reminds us that a more caring and just world is possible. Perhaps, it suggests, it is even inevitable.