relational worldview – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Whose Children Are Our Children? Whose Children Do We Care About?

This was originally posted on 4/22/2013

Melissa Harris-Perry created a media flurry when she stated that if we as a society considered “all children” to be “our children,” we would spend more money on childhood education. Critics at Fox News and other pundits called Melissa Harris-Perry a communist socialist Marxist, accusing her of wanting the state to take children away from their parents.

Some commentators framed their critique of Harris-Perry using the model of “ownership,” insisting that parents own their children, not the state. To this charge Harris-Perry responded by quoting Kalil Gibran’s poem which rejects the idea that parents and by extension anyone else can “own” children:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

The poem continues:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.

Birth and Community by Sara Frykenberg

My daughter Hazel was born on a November afternoon. Just over two weeks old, my own individual role as mother is too young to comment on much here—I am thinking too much and too little about what it means, adjusting to my little one’s schedule, feeling like my boobs are going to fall off from my breastfeeding efforts, and loving in a new way. (It’s amazing how excited one can get about ‘poopy’ after baby has been struggling for days, isn’t it?)

But when I am lying in my bed, sometimes at night, I find myself amazed and grateful for the community it took to bring my daughter into being. I was pregnant but I also had a pregnant community. I labored with community; and what I am learning, is that my motherhood is also a function of community—something, for me, that would not have been possible without the many, many people who supported Hazel and me through the process of new birth. Continue reading “Birth and Community by Sara Frykenberg”

Whose Children Are Our Children? Whose Children Do We Care About? by Carol P. Christ

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

The poem continues:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.

This makes it clear that Gibran is telling parents that children have their own minds and individualities and will make their own choices. Children do not exist to fulfill the needs and wishes of their parents.

While in my opinion Gibran’s statement is true, this is not the main point Harris-Perry was making when she asked us to consider all children as “our children.” Harris-Perry was asking us whose children we care about. She was asking us to care for all children–not only the children in our own families and not only the children that look like them.

I saw this as a “teaching moment” in which process philosophy comes to the rescue—providing a way beyond a dead-end in the thinking that shapes US political debates and discussions. Continue reading “Whose Children Are Our Children? Whose Children Do We Care About? by Carol P. Christ”