Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
Today, we are beginning a new month and new theme, so this is our ‘Appreciate’ episode, where we introduce the theme and offer questions to reflect on that help us appreciate where we are and where we’ve been. Let’s begin.
*music*
Abbie: This month is about power. Power is the ability to influence and it can take many forms.
Power seems like an important thing to talk about with our kids, but first, we need to think about it for ourselves. What is your understanding of power? What is your relationship to it? We understand power to be the ability to influence. And we all have varying amounts of power in our lives, our families, and our communities and that power can come from identities like class, race, gender, income, education, ability, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or from positions or expertise that we have.
I want to take us back to our first month’s theme of stories and remind you that truly everything is a story, the meaning behind everything is something that is socially and relationally constructed, as in, we decide it, or people before us have decided. So who has power and who doesn’t? It’s all meaning that we have made and, importantly, meaning that we can change. For example, some societies are patriarchal and men hold a lot of power and those who identify as women, feel disempowered. However, other societies are matriarchal and center women and they hold a lot of power in the community. These are two different ways of making meaning. Some cultures would have us believe that there is one right way of divvying up power- that power is innate- and that some of us are pre-ordained not to have it, but I invite you to question where power comes from and who is benefitted by power in your social worlds.
Last month, we practiced questioning the story we have around conflict. So now I'm hoping to push that one step farther by beginning to question the stories we have around power.
Power can look like being the boss of a company and getting to make the decisions; power can look like having expertise on a topic, and having people rely on you, like electricians or neuroscientists; power can look like a local government or school board deciding what is taught in schools; power can look like getting to eat and play and go outside when you want to; power is being able to say yes or no. Power can be having any amount of control over something- no matter how big or small. You can invite your children to have power over what they decide to wear or which friends they invite over to play with. And you can exert your power by deciding when bedtime is or making the rules for screen time in your family.
As we wrap up this episode, I want to offer some questions for you to reflect on. I’m going to ask the questions here, but you can also find them written in the show notes of this episode, or on Substack.
What are your stories about your power? In your country? In your community? In your family? In your self?
When have you witnessed positive uses of power? When have you witnessed negative uses of power?
What are some ways you can find to empower yourself and your children?
Okay, those are the questions I will leave you with today. I invite you to spend some time in reflection after this episode ends and throughout your week thinking about these questions. I’ll also point you toward the additional resources we have at www.cosmoactivities.com and encourage you to do some reflecting on the CosmoParenting Substack so you can be in dialogue with our community! Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the CosmoParenting Podcast. We are so grateful to be with you on this journey. And we will see you next week to hear a parenting story.
*music*
Share this post