How Politics Is Hijacking Parenting (And How to Reclaim It)

0:00 Every time I hear the phrase parenting is political, something in me tightens. Because if even parenting is political, then what is left in our life that is sacred, personal, and real? Well, welcome back to High Fam. I am Avital. I'm the mother of five, and I'm here on a mission to help you to build a strong family culture. And you may have heard this idea that parenting is political. In fact, I've lived across three different continents and I have seen places where every decision, even the most intimate ones, like whether or not to breastfeed, whether or not to take a maternity leave, whether or not to send children to school is seen through a political lens. And where parents are admonished and pushed and really cajjolled into particular parenting practices as a political statement or as a statement of allegiance to a particular political party or persuasion or even as a way of signaling their virtue and their loyalty to a particular party. But I think breastfeeding and bedtime are not political statements. In fact, I think we've got this exactly backwards. And in today's video, I'm going to break down why. If you like this kind of content, make sure that you are subscribed, ring that notification bell, and leave me your key takeaway in the comments below. So, let's start with point number one. Where parenting is political comes from and why it feels so off. Well, the idea that parenting is political comes from the secondwave feminism idea that the personal is the political. And of course, there is some kernel of truth to this idea like many others. We can still man it and say that yes, things that are supposedly private choices like child care or gender roles or division of labor at home are certainly influenced by political forces. But now it is being used to say that your parenting decisions, your personal life should be used to actually signal your political preferences and beliefs. So, we've come to a place where moms who want to stay at home sometimes feel guilty about it being an anti-feminist choice, as though their personal choice to stay home with their babies was not loyal to their political stance. Or dads who want to lead and provide and allow their wives to stay home might have their ambition labeled as toxic masculinity and they might feel like that too doesn't vibe with their political stance. So this idea that the personal is political, that parenting is political, actually disconnects us from what's actually best for us and for our families on a personal level by driving us and forcing us to parent to the public approval, right? To parent to the virtue signal, to make choices that appear better in alliance with our political beliefs. Which leads me to number two. My belief is that it's actually the opposite. That actually the political should be influenced by parenting and not vice versa. In other words, you've heard the idea that politics is downstream from culture.

3:11 What happens on TV, what happens in music and in theaters and in pop culture and in celebrity land influences politics. That whatever becomes normalized on the streets is then infiltrated into our political policies later on. that in fact political parties when they're campaigning and trying to gain the funness of the masses are kind of playing to cultural norms. And the truth is that I think that culture itself can and should and often is downstream of parenting. I mean, think about it just logically. The way that you raise your child in your own home, what you teach them to believe, what you teach them to value, the norms, the rules, the ideas that you put into their heads from a very young age are what create the culture of the future. As we raise our children, we get them acclimated. We normalize. We socialize them in particular directions. And we create a home culture, a culture of what is considered normal, what is considered healthy, what is considered good versus bad, what we think they should be doing with their time and with their resources, the way that we respond to the world at large, the traditions, the rights, the rituals, the community that we form, all of the things that happen inside our home, right? how we have dinner, right? It's just an example.

4:32 Like if you're having say microwave dinners in front of the TV or if you're having grandma and grandpa over for a screenfree dinner around the table with healthy foods, those are two very different cultures and they're going to lead to different futures for our children who are the creators and the consumers of culture in the future. So culture is actually downstream from what we do as parents. When you say that parenting is political, what you're saying is we should be reactive to what's happening in politics, what the zeitgeist is, what the norms are, what people are protesting, what people are putting out there, the hashtags that people are using, the movements that people are rallying behind are what should shape our parenting. But I think that this is an inversion of what could and should really be happening, which is that we shape the future because we are leaders in our own home. We have creative control and direction and vision. We are on a mission. We have goals. We have a purpose within our own home to create a particular type of culture which will create a particular kind of future culture which will then trickle down and influence politics.

5:37 Because what shapes culture more than anything is actually parenting. Parents are the source, not the subjects. You in your parenting are forming your children's conscience, their values, their identity, their resilience. So you are upstream from politics and upstream from culture. You are actually shaping the future, not through protests or hashtags, but through your presence in your home. So parenting isn't a political stance, but politics should be shaped by how we parent our children.

6:10 Number three is that politics shifts but human nature not so much. The truth is that politics in western democracies is transient. Governments rise and fall. Parties come and go. Hashtags, trends, and protests disappear. Politics changes pretty rapidly. If you think about all the big movements we've had in politics over the last 5 years, you'll see a very sharp rise and then a pretty precipitous fall. But the human needs of love, of belonging, of safety, of a sense of purpose and contribution, of community, those don't change. They stay constant.

6:49 Parenting is about meeting those needs at the root level. So, it's not trendy. It's timeless. That's why we must not build our parenting on the shifting sands of political trends. Rather, we need to find a rock of truth that is much more connected to human nature, to things that we hold deeply, that are unchanging and that are about human development and connection and not about the zeitgeist, the culture or political trends of our time. Number four is to remember that parenting is much deeper than politics. It really breaks my heart when I see families fall apart over politics. I've seen marriages disintegrate over an election. I've seen grandparents become estranged because of who they vote for. And this is the type of thing that really gets me in the gut because I feel like it's so superficial to what's real in a family. Yes, we might have different beliefs about policy, about finances, about immigration, about lots of different things on the political level, but much deeper than that is our need for a spiritual, biological, even ancestral connection with the people that we love.

8:00 Family offers us a path to meaning, to purpose, to love, to sacrifice, to real vision in our life. It's a human experience that actually unites us across cultures, across religions, across ideologies. It's far more lasting and far more universal and far more powerful than any political identity you might hold. I see that many parents today are really identifying as their political beliefs because they are part of a particular movement because they go to particular parades or protests or have a hashtag or have a sticker that becomes their identity and then their family kind of has to fall behind or fall in to that category and those who don't get left behind, right? Those relationships disintegrate. But the truth is that if you really think about creating deep bonds with the people that you love, creating a sense of real community, creating a sense of connection, of support, of unconditional love, of raising the values of the future, these things can rise above political trends and beliefs. I know people hold their political beliefs passionately. I know it can become a major part of someone's identity, and that's okay. But I'm talking about the idea that parenting is much deeper than politics. So even if your child, God forbid, you know, strayed from your political persuasions, you could still maintain a deep and meaningful bond with them and be their parent through thick and thin. And hopefully the same could be true for the grandparents, the in-laws or your partner. And number five, and perhaps the most crucial one, is that when parenting does become political, it turns toxic. Very often we see celebrities virtue signaling by using their children as political porns.

9:44 for example, and these are alleged. We can't prove it, but it seems like the idea is that our children are somehow a token, an asset that we can use to signal our allegiance to particular political ideas. It's things like using children in protests, using them to create content, signs, slogans. It's things like parents virtue signaling through their kids, collecting identities just to prove an alignment. It seems like when parenting becomes political, it's no longer about putting the child's best interest at heart, but rather it becomes about the parents image. And this flips parenting from how it's supposed to be, which is other centered. When you're a parent, it's supposed to be about the other person's best interest, and it becomes instead selfcentered, and it strips it from its status as a sacred relationship and puts it into the category of a performance.

10:40 Remember also that you might change politically. Many people have political awakenings, political comingings of age, red pill moments, or whatever other changes you might have. And making your parenting too reliant on your political identity might create a real crisis, a real shape-shifting moment for you in the future. Also, politics really goes over the head of children. It's kind of adult stuff. governance and policies are not things that we need to involve children in or use children for. I would say that it's not that it's inappropriate per se or it's not something that you mustn't share with your child. If there's some, you know, protest or, you know, hashtag that you believe in, a movement that you want to be part of, that's fine. But it's important that we keep childhood childhood. Make it play-based. Make it a time for growth, education, learning, development, and social skills. not a time to worry about adult issues.

11:36 Politics often comes with a lot of anxiety and a ton of polarization, especially in today's day and age. Am I right? And that's something that children aren't really equipped to deal with. And neither should they be. We should be teaching them to get along with their peers, to learn to read and write, to learn basic maths, and to focus on being kids, on developing themselves, on taking risks, on developing skills, and all of the things that they need to thrive in the adult landscape. And the truth of the matter is that vast majority of adults, political activism and even a lot of political awareness is not a huge part of their adult life. It's not something that they need in order to thrive and grow and do well in their life and in their relationships. Sure, we all need to do our research every four years when elections come around. And sure, some of us can participate in particular movements that we believe are right and just and we want to support. Sure, we can send our dollars and our feet in the direction of the hashtags and of the big political motions that we want to support or reject. Our voices can be heard and democracy is important and all of that is great, but again, it really is relegated to the realm of the adults.

12:44 It's not something that children need to be constantly indoctrinated in, worried about, concerned with, or used as pawns in those particular movements. Furthermore, I would add that political involvement, activism, constant keeping up with the content, with the hashtags, with the Tik Toks, with the news even is something that can be really distracting to us parents from the very important future building work that we're doing of parenting. I know that when I've been doom scrolling on my phone and watching political content, it gets in my head.

13:17 It spikes my anxiety. It makes me more nervous about the future. It makes me worried. It makes me a bit snappy and agitated because it's built there to sensationalize, to outrage, right? It's capitalizing on my emotive responses and it's also highly addictive. So, it's funneling me down into this never-ending rabbit hole of resentment, polarization, worry, concern, fear, agitation, and rather than taking all of that energy back and putting it into my home where it belongs, into the actual purpose of my life, into the actual job that I need to fulfill, into the actual meaningful work of creating a future and building a culture, I am now mesmerized by and worried by concerned with current affairs, politics, and news. So, is keeping up with what's going on somewhat a good idea? Maybe, perhaps. But we have to be really careful of our energy and our mind space as parents. As parents, we need to pull back from political agitation and feed all of that energy in to building up great mindsets, great life skills, great relationships for our children and for their future. Another thing here is that politics really tends to flatten people. It tends to talk about things that are complex and nuanced and individual and really rather gray areas as just policy. It's binary, yes or no, right? It can't really take into account who you are as an individual and the situations that you might be in. When it comes to things like medical decisions, child care, division of labor, gender roles, you know, personal health, all of those things are things that on the big macro level of government, they have to just flatten it into a one-sizefits-all policy, but that is not going to be reflective of your particular life and your particular belief system. You might have a belief system that's a little bit more complicated or nuanced, that's a little bit more delicate, that is not just red or blue, right or left, that is actually somewhere in the middle or dependent on the context or all sorts of things that might be more nuanced than politics can ever capture. So when you make parenting political, it just flattens decisions like, oh, stay-at-home moms anti-feminist, right?

15:31 Or, you know, take the very heated and controversial debate about being pro-life or pro-choice, the decision for women to have, you know, women's rights over abortions. That's a conversation that could be very nuanced and complex. But in politics, it becomes flattened to yes or no answers, particularly in the US at least. And that's the type of thing that makes parenting incompatible with politics. In fact, it's not just that parenting is not political. It's that parenting is on a completely different and parallel line, you know, parallel track to politics. We have to have very different conversations when we talk about what's going on in our personal life. And then we have to lower it down to a very superficial, very binary, very black and white, very kind of all or nothing, a one-sizefits-all, lowest common denominator uh governmental policy. Again, that's fine and that's how we should talk about politics, but that's not how we could ever talk about our individual personal day-to-day lives and relationships and life choices. So, in many ways, when you say parenting is political, you're flattening the experience of parenting.

16:37 I know in our culture, everything's become political, but I think it's really important to save some things as not political. making your own decisions about whether or not to stay home, about gender roles, about your religious beliefs, about how you divide labor in the household, about whether or not you take a maternity leave or breastfeed or bed share or homeschool. These decisions should be personal to you, not a political signal that you are part of a particular movement. I know identity is important, belonging is important, and we all want to feel part of something.

17:11 But you really do need to trust and bolster your own intuition, your own belief, your own instincts, your own values that might pick and choose from different political persuasions. One of the things I sometimes pride myself on is that people can't easily place me on a political map. And that's because I'm an individual. My husband is an individual. We are a particular family. and we align with some parties in this direction and with other parties in that direction. And that's just about policy.

17:39 It's just about ideas about governance or about finances. But it doesn't pertain to our personal beliefs in how we raise our family in the choices that we make in our day-to-day life. And it certainly will not infringe upon our closest held relationships if we can help it. So, if you are ready to stop parenting to the tune of someone else's politics and start leading your family from a place of strength and truth and your own personal vision, then stick around because that's what we do here in Hyan. And make sure that you are signed up to the weight list to the studio.

18:10 Inside the studio, I help you to craft your vision to implement your own beliefs about your parenting and to shape the future. I strongly believe that parents are the most influential people in the world. We might not have millions of followers on Tik Tok and we might not have political power, but we are raising the next generation. That means we're shaping the future of planet earth and your values and your beliefs are upstream from the culture of tomorrow, which is upstream of the politics of the future. As such, you have tremendous power. And inside the studio membership, I can tell you how to harness that power and create a culture that you are so proud of, a future that you want to usher in. So, make sure you're on the wait list at highfam.com/studio. Meanwhile, keep on living that H Highfam life. Leave me your comment below. Do you too believe that parenting is not political and should not be? If so, let me know in the comments below. I would love to hear.

19:06 Meanwhile, make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so that you're sure never to miss one of these episodes. I would love to continue to empower you to love parenting and to parent from love. Keep on living that high fam life and I'll see you in the next one.