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I just left the dentist’s office, and while I was back in the chair, mirror and metal pick poking my gums, my dentist described with delight his move to a new neighborhood, where the schools are great and he “doesn’t have to deal with all the bullshit.”
Spit!
I’m not sure which exact bullshit my dentist was referring to, but there’s no doubt that between our school system and our childcare infrastructure in general, there’s plenty to be upset about.
But the issue is not about an individual choice between school districts. The inequities we face require a complete shift in the way we think about what’s best for our kids as a whole.
And that’s where Sarah W. Jaffe has some suggestions.
A former lawyer and child welfare advocate, Jaffe has turned her attention to ways that privileged white parents – like her, like me – can undo structures that keep systems unequal and unfair.
“I get the message at every turn that your only job as a parent is to pour your energy and resources and everything you have into your child or children,” she told me. “And not to think about the big picture.”
What Jaffe is calling for is a fundamental mindset shift, that involves “thinking about how your actions affect your community, and affect the kids down the road,” she said.
“It’s about looking at the bigger picture of what's good for our society, in terms of our higher education system, our schools, and in terms of wealth distribution.”
A question to ask yourself, she says is: “If everyone made the decision in the way I was making it, what would be the impact on society? Would it be a net positive or a net negative?
Jaffe’s new book, “Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege and Building a Just World” looks at the lifespan of our parenting choices: early childcare, K-12 education, college, as well as inheritance, mutual aid, and activism.
Every chapter goes deep into research and interviews about ways to not just think about what’s best for my kid, but what’s best for all kids.
One example: Re-think the PTA. I first learned about Jaffe’s work through a group called Integrated Schools. Jaffe writes about an experiment in school funding in the town of Evanston, IL, where, through a lot of work by determined parents, PTA funding was restructured so that it was equitable across the system.
She’s asking privileged parents to think about the question of “what’s best” – not just for “our little, insular, nuclear family unit.” But instead to consider what would be good for everyone.
Every chapter of the book includes a short list of individual choices, collective actions, and further readings to further inspire you. (And readers: If any of you want to support each other in following up on some of this, drop a note in the comments! I would love to team up!)
Below is an edited version of a conversation we had back in July.
There are a couple of places in the book where you talk about fear-based parenting, which takes the shape of privilege hoarding. So it's fear-based parenting versus….what? Is there a word or a phrase that you think describes the direction you think we should choose instead?
I like the idea of something that’s the opposite of fear. I might say something like, equity-based parenting or community-care based parenting.
A phrase that I use sometimes in my own thinking around equity and caregiving is “widen the circle.” But when I was reading your book, I began to think, well, if I widen the circle, I'm not really giving anything up.
We want to have it all: to feel great about our parenting choices and to be getting our kid ahead. I think you have to let go of that a little bit, and choose which one's more important to you.
One of the moms I interviewed in the schools chapter thinks a lot about this choice when it comes to enrolling her kid in her neighborhood public school.
She said, “My kid doesn't have an organic garden, and they don't get as much recess time. And I make that trade willingly.” She's come down on the side that attending a global majority school is more important to her family.
What does she say she gets her kids get in the trade off? What is she trading for?
It's very important to her that her kids are friends with people below the poverty line, and are friends with people of all races. That her kids have this rich social circle that she cannot give to them in any other way but through her school.
She said very frankly, “I just don’t have friends below the poverty line. I just don’t. I’ve only met them through my kids’ school.”
And that’s the mindset shift, where you believe that people from different class backgrounds, different faiths, different races, have wisdom that you simply don't have.
That’s not a viewpoint we're encouraged to adopt. We're encouraged to think that “those” people should be more like “us” in every way. So that's what she talks about gaining: It's about having her kids be comfortable interacting with anyone from any background, because they've never known anything else.
I wanted to ask you about your experience as a lawyer working in foster care. How did that impact your approach to being a parent?
Foster care is very bleak. It's very forgotten and underfunded. The kids caught in it have just such dramatically different lives than kids who are not involved in it.
Before I had a kid, I would be able to advocate, of course. I would say it was outrageous that this young kid had been in five different placements in a month.
Now, I think, actually: What would my four-year-old be like, if that had happened to her? The thought of packing her stuff five different times and getting picked up? It just makes it more real.
Also, I think it gave me a baseline of being more relaxed about a lot of the things that people in my demographic worry about, because I've seen what actually causes children harm. It's not the things that these parents are worried about. It's not the failure to have the best bedtime routine, or organic sprays.
If your child has stable caretakers who care about them, they are already so far ahead. And for most people, that's just such a given that you don't even think about it.
But it's not for every kid, at least 400,000 kids in that system. That's a huge number of kids for whom that's not a given.
How do you see white supremacy shaping the choices parents make around child care, for example, or schools?
I mean, that's absolutely everywhere. It's baked into absolutely everything. It's baked into the fact that we don't value care workers very highly, which has its roots partly in slavery and the wages paid to those workers.
Certainly it’s baked into what we think a good school looks like, including our higher-education system.
Colleges spent a lot of time showcasing their efforts at diversity and equity. What did you discover in your reporting?
I had not realized how few colleges truly have need-blind admissions and how much schools use merit scholarships, which are like a cherry on top of the privilege. The privileged-parents sundae. If you get your kid into the elite school and you get the merit scholarship, you are truly special, you are one of the chosen ones.
Merit scholarships are more of a marketing tool to bring in students who can bring in the majority of the tuition dollars. They get this discount to make them more likely to choose the college. So that blew my mind. A huge number of financial aid dollars go to kids without the most need, by any means. In some cases, the less needy, you're more likely to get in.
Can you describe how college merit scholarships are a marketing tool?
The example in the book was that of a kid who came from a very, very, very wealthy family and got a $30,000 a year merit scholarship.
Now, total tuition is something like 80 grand.
So the school is making the bet that by giving him the 30 grand, he'll bring in – $50K times four years – $200K at the end of the day.
Colleges are a business, but then they have nonprofit status, and they hold themselves out as these engines of social change and creating equity. And that's very inconsistent with what's going on behind closed doors, and that is the thing that's so important to point out.
At the end of each chapter you make recommendations about what to do, what actions folks can take. I thought it was really interesting in the college chapter that the recommendations are about working locally to address the gap in college counseling, sharing knowledge with students who need it, and holding your alma mater accountable. They're all very local, and also personal.
Do you have faith that there are structural changes in the big system that we could even be advocating for now, that would really shift things?
We absolutely need to be advocating: Public colleges need to be better funded. They got really hammered in the 2008 crisis and just have never, never returned, not remotely.
Also, when we talk about college, it is so rarely focused on community colleges, which serve seven million students or something. We’re so very focused on the number of Ivies that serve, I don't know, 20,000-some undergrads all combined
Harvard should do away with legacy admissions, absolutely. But that will not fundamentally change the calculation because the majority of the way people access higher education in this country is through community college, and their public universities. So being aware of those institutions and what's going on at your state legislature level is definitely a big part of it.
One of your actions is to fight and vote for policies that will lessen the need for private solutions. What are the problems with private solutions in the realm of parenting, or child care or schooling?
Well, for example: The group Resource Generation is a group of very well-off young people, mostly under 35, who have inherited wealth – and are giving that wealth away.
They talked about doing voluntary giving in service of creating a society where they will be forced to involuntarily give. Which I think is cool.
Now, they’re viewed as this quirky group of idealistic young people. We cannot rely on everyone joining their group and voluntarily giving away a lot of money. That's just not a realistic policy solution for wealth redistribution.
And this is a tricky one, because I definitely grew up hearing about the importance of charitable giving and philanthropy.
The fundamental issue is it’s just solely up to the giver, right? They can give however much money they want to whatever organization they want, and they get applauded for it. And at the same time as they are jumping through tax loopholes to avoid actually paying their share of taxes. Frankly, it’s fundamentally undemocratic.
At one point, Trump was threatening to have the U.S. stop sending money to the World Health Organization. And Bill Gates would have been a private citizen who is the largest donor to the WHO, and therefore able to set the global health agenda in this very important way.
And, you know, I think he's done a lot of great things. I'm from Seattle. There's a lot of Bill Gates love. But it's really undemocratic to have one donor to a world organization, this private individual who with talent and luck brought him a lot of wealth.
And then therefore he can set policy and practice. And then one day decide not to do that.
Right.
You spoke with several families that had very clear ways of thinking about mutuality and mutual aid. Can you describe what their practices are, and how they came to it?
It’s a mindset shift away from the idea of, “This is your money and you get to decide what to do with it.” And you’re being a beneficent person by sharing your charitable donation.
Versus: “We're part of a community. We have an obligation to take care of each other, and also an obligation to receive help.”
Some of it is seeing yourselves in community with people with fewer resources than you and seeing that they have gifts that benefit you, even if it's not their money. There’s mutuality there. It’s more dignified for all involved.
Also, I don't think the takeaway of the chapter at all is: Don't volunteer at a soup kitchen, don't drop off food with your kid. Absolutely do those things. Those are great, but they're not the end all be all.
That's the beauty of the “family mission statement,” which you talk about in a couple of places in the book. It can just be something that holds the whole family to account and together frames our actions.
Yes, just having it be doing a little something once a month is more important than the big conversation that happens once. Like, this is just part of our family's thing. This is what we do. Every other weekend, we do this, and it's part of who we are.
I liked the parent I interviewed who brought that idea, because it also feels more manageable than having to impart the big lesson about poverty through the Thanksgiving soup kitchen volunteer night.
You write, “I came to think that one way to define privilege is that you are never forced into activism.” How did that insight arise for you?
That came to me as I was reading Nefertiti Austin's great book, Motherhood So White, which opens with her feeling like that she really had to go protest Trayvon Martin's murder. She was compelled – as the mom of a Black boy, as a Black woman. It was impossible for her not to.
And of course we should all be equally appalled by that murder. But it doesn't have the same sense of urgency if you’re a white parent. You are less directly fearful for your own kids. In a lot of ways you have less to fear in general. There's a layer of abstraction between the bad things in the world and your own family, when you have the privilege to just find your own solutions, basically.
That can make getting involved harder. We all want to get involved in the things that speak to us, and it might not as directly speak to you when you feel a little removed from it or you don’t – in the same way – feel like your own son could have been Trayvon Martin, as she did.
So what are the ways that privileged parents should be engaged with activism? In your book you go deeply into several examples – including a group of parents in Portland who organize around childcare access, as well as the Evanston “One-Fund” model where all the schools get equitable funding.
With the Portland parents, their kids are never going to benefit from this universal child care program. They're aged-out. Then, with one of the two Evanston parents, her school is going to have less money at the end of the day. But it just felt like the right thing to do. They just had some deeper inspiration, almost like a calling towards doing it. That pulled them through.
And, also, a lot of activism is about listening. It's about being in community with people. There's a lot of drudge work and very little glory. It's about providing child care for the people who might have more experience in this space than you, or just supporting them with whatever else they need. Just recognizing the expertise of others.
You know, I was a social justice-minded kid and I got the message so much that I was going to save the world individually. It's all about me. So there’s plenty of unlearning to happen in that space.
So how can other privileged parents find their place in activism?
We all have the thing that really gets us in the heartstrings. That thing is the thing you're more likely to keep up with.
I am, of course, very worried about climate change, like any sane person is. But it doesn't really speak to me as an issue. I feel embarrassed that it just isn't my issue. Helping refugee families get resettled – that just speaks to me. I don't know why. It just does.
And for the Portland families, a lot of them had been through horrendously expensive childcare years for their family. And they just felt: this cannot continue this way.
Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you want to make sure we discuss?
I think the more we can talk about this stuff, the better. The more this can be a part of the questions we're asking each other as privileged parents, and not talking in such an extremely narrow way, the better. If we can just try to shift that conversation a little, I actually think it could make a difference.
Fantastic report. I loved the questions which drew out the depth of what Sarah Jaffe knows.
Sarah lives her values. Lots of gems here, especially the widening of the circle and awareness of how much richer our lives are when we receive from people who have different life experiences.
Thank you!
Wow, I loved this so much! “I get the message at every turn that your only job as a parent is to pour your energy and resources and everything you have into your child or children," but what's best for our community, for all the kids in the community, for all the kids in our country?!
These are the questions that i think about *constantly* I think so many of us are just sick when we think about how other people are getting by (and not getting by), and how kids are not getting by, bc it's so hard even for people with relative privilege. It's this immense emotional burden and would love to feel like we live in a place and in a way that makes things better for everyone. Thanks to you and Jaffe, I can't wait to read some of her suggestions and solutions. Perfect timing.