Systems of power seek to make themselves invisible. This is why, for example, every time there is a police execution of an innocent person, there are people who seek to find something the victim did wrong. It’s why we tell women to ask for raises rather than admitting that they already do, and that employers discriminate against women. Power will always seek to naturalize hierarchy and individualize the political.

This tendency is especially strong with anti-mother misogyny. Anti-mother misogyny is so deeply entrenched that many of us don’t even see it. Even when we do, our guilt and shame work overtime to convince us that perhaps we really do deserve the bad treatment. Perhaps we really did cause it.

Every hierarchical system creates a set of false beliefs that control the people the system oppresses. Identifying these false beliefs is crucial to pushing back.

Here are some of the most common false beliefs in patriarchy—and the reframes that will make you a better mother and a more politically astute feminist.

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I’ve often remarked that the hardest part of parenting, for me, has been managing and working with the people who help me care for my child: teachers, doctors, childcare providers, and all of the other adults who help form my children’s community.

Advocating for our kids is a full-time job. I’ve had some big successes, and managed to build a network of adults I trust to help me care for my children. I also had some early failures. We got one child kicked out of her school (a school that we never should have enrolled her in at all), and have threatened more than one lawsuit in our tenure as parents.

Child advocacy is incredibly challenging, and anyone who tells you there are simple answers has never actually done the hard work of helping their child get what they need. Here are some lessons I’ve learned on child advocacy. I’m not going to tell you what to do. Instead, I’m going to tell you what to think about. I hope it helps.

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A parent’s most sacred duty is to protect their child, and this means supporting their child in moments of crisis. It’s a duty many parents abandon, all while insisting they’re doing the right thing.

My inbox is filled with messages from women who left their abusers, only to be abandoned by their parents and siblings. It’s common for parents to write letters in support of abusers, especially when those parents are members of right-wing religious sects or when they endorse authoritarian approaches to parenting.

Patriarchy teaches us all that men are simply more credible and valuable than women, and so parents routinely side with them, even against their own children and grandchildren.

This act of abuse leaves no one unscathed. Children whose parents behave this way never really learn how to support other people. So they betray their children in ways small and large. They dismiss the severity of their partner’s abuse. They don’t report the abuse when given the chance. They side with a bully against their child. They don’t stand up for their kid at school.

So what does it really mean to have your kid’s back? And how can we move past generational trauma and abuse to truly stand up for our kids?

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I constantly get questions from readers asking me to help them talk to their children about death, illness, disability, sex, abuse, and discrimination. I relish the opportunity to give parents some talking points, because I find that I actually really enjoy talking to my kids about the supposedly challenging topics.

The reason we struggle to talk with our kids about some subjects and not others is because there is something about the “hard” topics that we have not yet come to terms with ourselves. As I’ve written before, what makes parents most anxious about discussing death is their own death anxiety. Sex gets a similar treatment; the more unresolved sexual trauma you have, the harder it’s going to be both to talk about sex and to avoid passing that trauma on.

This is a frustrating reality because it suggests that you have to heal all trauma and discomfort before you can safely talk to your kids about anything. None of us can ever fully heal from everything, certainly not in time to talk to our kids. And I don’t think it’s necessary. I have plenty of sexual trauma, and the deaths of people I love remain a constant source of distress.

Here are my tips for talking about the topics that feel most difficult.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

The central conflict of parenting is between control and autonomy. Because all good parents must control their children to some degree, and all good parents must also master giving kids autonomy. Most parenting advice is about how much of each to give, and when. And most disagreements about parenting really boil down to control vs. autonomy.

I’m adding my voice to the chorus, but here’s what I’m doing differently. I’m not going to tell you how much control and autonomy to give your kids at each age. I’m going to help you think more deeply about these two principles, then help clarify your own parenting style based on your child’s needs, your family culture, where you live, and more.

Because the truth is there is no single approach to parenting that works for every child. Rigid advice is doomed to fail, and often to cause immense harm in the process. Here’s how you can adapt your strategy to your family’s needs, and shift your style based on the results it gets.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

Mom-guilt is a tool of patriarchal oppression. It works by convincing us that we are inferior parents, driving us to feel constantly guilty or ashamed. This sense of inadequacy keeps us running on a hamster wheel, endlessly trying to do better rather than demand better of others.

Guilt individualizes problems that are often political problems: lack of time, lack of support, financial woes, and so much more. When we individualize these political struggles, we encourage women to blame themselves and do more free labor for others, rather than band together and demand more of our society.

This doesn’t mean that you should never feel guilt as a parent. Guilt serves an important social role. It alerts us to a discrepancy between our values and our actions, inspiring us to reduce that gap.

So how do you manage the inevitable reality that you will make parenting mistakes, without spiraling into a cycle of guilt and shame? How do you know when guilt is warranted and when it isn’t? And what should you do when you feel badly about your parenting?

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

Your romantic relationship(s) will become your child’s template for future romance. But what that actually means varies greatly from child to child. Some children normalize everything they see. Others reject it all. And now matter how your child feels about your romantic relationship, that relationship affects them—for better or for worse—right now.

The tragedy is that in patriarchy, romantic relationships are rarely a freely chosen decision. Men conceal their misogyny. Women go into relationships without knowing what awaits. And by the time they find out, it’s often too late to leave.

This means that just leaving may not be an option. If you’re not in a romantic relationship, though, it’s incredibly important to be mindful of how entering one may affect your child.

No matter where you are in your romantic life, confronting how your romantic relationships affect your children is crucial to good parenting. Here’s what I think that looks like.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

When I opened this up for reader questions, I was inundated with queries about how to talk to daughters about patriarchy. Some readers wanted to know how to introduce the topic to older girls; many hoped to incorporate it into a young child’s education. Some worried it was too late; others feared introducing the concept too soon.

The common denominator of all these questions was mothers who care deeply about their daughters, who want their daughters to have (and build) better worlds than they did. As I have often remarked, we do not get free with one big, single act of liberation. We get free over generations, doing the best we can, passing the baton down again and again.

It is not possible to get everything right. All we can do is hope to give our daughters better than what we got, and to leave the world slightly better than how we found it. That requires us to talk to them about patriarchy, misogyny, and what it means to be a woman in supremacy culture.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

A few weeks ago I was chatting up a new mom-friend, and she told me she needed to start strength-training because her toddler was now 25 pounds. I lamented my own slightly-older-toddler’s own ascent to the approximate weight of a large kettlebell, and said it was starting to get hard to lift her. I laughed that I probably needed heavy kettlebells so I could be strong enough to manage her.

And then I felt everything shift: “Oh, she looks fine to me,” my sweet feminist friend said. I felt my heart shatter. My friend was reassuring me that my young preschooler looked “good” because she was not “fat.” What I thought was a light-hearted conversation about building strength as mothers had become a much higher stakes conversation.

Isn’t that always the way it is with body image issues? Things are normal until they’re not. You feel good until you look at yourself, or think everything is fine until your preteen is sobbing in her room about her bad hair.

My friend, like all women, has grown up with a lifetime of body image abuse. She thought she was reassuring me—and maybe even worried that I was worried about my child’s weight. Her reaction is a signal of our collective victimization.

The advice we give women about body image—their own, and their daughters’—is catastrophically wrong. We rely on shame a lot, telling women that no one will talk about how thin they were at their funeral, and that no one notices the size of their waist. This is gaslighting, because neither statement is true. We collectively obsess over women’s appearance. For my whole life, I’ve heard women’s prettiness discussed, usually above and beyond all else, at their funerals. It’s not much better at the other end of things either. At birth we relentlessly comment on girls’ appearance, constantly telling them they’re pretty. Our daughters hear comments on their appearance more than anything else. Then we pretend like it’s a mystery that they hate themselves—as if this is a personal problem rather than a political one.

You cannot be singlehandedly responsible for your daughter’s body image. But she does spend the first several years of her life primarily under your care and influence, which gives you a head start and a chance to make a big difference.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

Last weekend, I stood at a kids’ birthday party surrounded by other mothers of students in my daughter’s class. There was no mindless small talk, just people talking about their lives and views. There was no jockeying for power, and no one was excluded. Any time anyone approached the group, we widened the circle and caught them up on what we were talking about.

This, to me, is the dream of community with other mothers. I haven’t always gotten it right, and sometimes I still don’t. In fact, for many of my early years as a mother, I took great pride in being unlike the other mothers (read: better than them). I was more feminist, more thoughtful about parenting, more committed to collective liberation—or so I wanted to believe.

It’s a way of thinking about other women that now makes me cringe with embarrassment. But experience has taught me that it’s incredibly common, and deeply destructive to building real community.

Community with other mothers makes everything about parenting better and easier. It will pay far greater dividends than any romantic relationship, and so it’s worth investing in the time, skills, and effort necessary to build this community.

But what do you do when you struggle to connect with other mothers? And how can you navigate community building with people who may be very different from you?

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The prospect of raising boys in a patriarchy feels daunting when we consider everything we’re up against. The truth, though, is that every child is an individual. If you treat your child as such, rather than viewing your parenting as a massive fight against patriarchy, you’ll find it much less overwhelming. The truth is that we can never attain perfection. But if you can do a small part to make the world better, then that gift extends to the next generation, who can improve more. Activism only ever happens over time, in community, intergenerationally.

Similarly, the prospect of writing the Definitive Guide to raising boys feels impossible. So that’s not what I’ve done. Overwhelming you accomplishes nothing. Instead, this post assembles some quick tips for making things a little better, and some parenting strategies for the long-term. I hope you’ll take what you need, without indulging one sliver of guilt or self-loathing.

This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

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Feminist mothers of boys are terrified. They see the harm men cause in the world, and they want their children to be an antidote to that suffering—not its cause. Yet endless harmful influences target boys as early and aggressively as possible. The manosphere is working over time to turn them into monsters. Often, bad coparents deliberately undermine good parenting. And even when parents can somehow perfect the home environment, a world of problematic peers and harmful culture waits.

This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here. Jeff and I also tackled the prospect of raising feminist boys in our podcast here.

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When I did my Deconstructing Patriarchal Thinking and Deconstructing Masculinity series, I gave readers daily questions to reflect on their role within supremacy culture and the ways in which supremacy culture had infected their lives.

A similar approach to parenting didn’t feel quite right. Readers have been asking me for years for practical tips, scripts, and strategies for the endlessly daunting work of parenting in an oppressive culture that devalues both parents and children.

Still, though, I find that the right probing questions can help with thinking more deeply about parenting. So this installment features a list of questions that I think will help you become a better and more reflective parent. I hope you enjoy it!

This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

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This is an installment of my Feminist Parenting series, which offers insights into feminist parenting and exercises to help you become a more feminist parent. It’s not just for parents. Non-parents can learn a lot about supremacy culture, and better learn how to support the parents in their lives—a task that is vital for the survival of our species. This is a daily, limited-run series for paid subscribers only. You can find all previous installments of the series here.

For many women, motherhood was a radicalizing experience, and perhaps even the first time they began identifying as feminists. This runs counter to the trope of the provincial, boring, uncool mother—but that’s because that trope is rooted in misogyny and a desire to ignore and stigmatize mothers.

Anti-mother misogyny is widespread. It plays a major role in the replication of women’s oppression, and in the suffering of children. Understanding how it functions in your life, your relationships, and your parenting is crucial to becoming a better parent, a better feminist, and a better community ally. Everyone should care about anti-mother misogyny because everyone should care about all forms of oppression.

Like all forms of bigotry, anti-mother misogyny is not internally consistent. For example, just as men can simultaneously believe that women are naturally more moral than men and that they need a man to keep them in line, a person can simultaneously believe that mothers are both too obsessed with their children and insufficiently invested.

These internally contradictory believes are actually central to the project of constructing any hierarchy. These contradictions form a tightening net of oppression that is impossible to escape. You’re either too invested in your children or not invested enough. You’re too nice or too mean, too smart or too dumb, too pretty or too ugly.

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This is an installment of my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Find other installments in this series here. You can also find other feminist parenting advice here.

When I announced this series, I was inundated with reader questions. I estimate that about 90% of those questions centered around one topic: sex.

Parents are still terrified to talk to their kids about sex. And many of you, despite holding feminist values and wanting to do better than your parents, feel scared to talk about sex. Some of you have avoided the conversation altogether.

I understand why. It can feel big and scary, especially if you haven’t overcome your own sexual shame or have a history of any sort of sexual abuse. When I worked at a rape crisis center, I was stunned by the lack of basic sex education among so many clients. I have met children—children of progressive parents even—who thought they were dying when they got their first period, because no one bothered to teach them about their bodies. Shame and isolation are the sexual gifts we pass down generation after generation.

It can end with us, if we’re willing to really do the work.

Here are my thoughts on talking to kids of all ages about sex.

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Ready for reader questions on parenting? In this column, I’m answering a number of your parenting questions. And if this one is successful, I’ll do another one at the end of the month. So if you have a parenting question you’d love to ask, post it in the comments. As always, you can anonymously submit questions for Feminist Advice by using the form.

Here are some of the topics I’m covering:

• Talking to boys about sex, and specifically about masturbation and pleasure

• Helping kids manage adults who have poor social or coping skills

• Evaluating a therapist

• How to raise your children in a more matriarchal style

• And much more

This is part of a limited-run daily series, Feminist Parenting. In this series for paid subscribers, I tackle a different feminist parenting topic every day. Paid subscribers this month are therefore getting more than 30 essays, for less than the price of a fancy coffee. And that’s on top of the usual benefits of paid membership, so if you’re interested in these topics, I hope you’ll consider signing up.

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This is the fourth installment in my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it. For the first week, I’ll be talking broadly about parenting philosophy and understanding your own mind as a parent. Next week, we’ll shift to a more explicitly gendered lens, focusing more on specific parenting practices.

Patriarchy serves up a never-ending menu of conflicting parenting messages. Take time for yourself, but never in a way that inconveniences others. Advocate for your children, but never offend another adult. Get your kids lots of exercise and expose them to the world, but never allow them to annoy anyone in public. Breastfeed but not like that. Feed them healthy food but not like that. Don’t complain. Don’t brag. Don’t be happy, sad, mad, guilty, or even dead in the wrong way.

Over the years, I’ve developed some self-talk that helps me counter the negative parenting messages patriarchy gives me. These mantras have made me a better and more compassionate mother, community member, and human being. I hope some of them will help you, too.

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This is the third installment in my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it. For the first week, I’ll be talking broadly about parenting philosophy and understanding your own mind as a parent. Next week, we’ll shift to a more explicitly gendered lens, focusing more on specific parenting practices.

“Isn’t it wild how they’re raised in the exact same family with the exact same circumstances but they’re so totally different?”

It’s the conversation that seems always to lead to some variety of nonsense or others: proclamations about how girls and boys are “just different,” or beliefs about how a child arrives on this planet with a fully formed personality that is unaffected by experience.

This is biological determinism. It allows us to avoid critical thinking, escape accountability, and pretend that our children are not the subject of thousands of constant, contradictory, ongoing cultural influences at any single moment.

Here’s my alternative, and why I think it’s not only better, but critical to the feminist project.

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This is the second installment in my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Years ago, a friend confided in me her frustration with her son. She saw him as depressed, defiant, uninterested in doing anything of value, and lazy. I found her assessment really confusing. I had spent a lot of time with him, and found him to be an easy, vibrant, happy kid who worked hard to learn and explore.

Over time, and through lots of exchanges with my friend, I realized what the problem was: She was an extroverted nature lover who envisioned lots of family hikes, travel, and adventure. She wanted to give her son a “fun” childhood, but her idea of fun was torture for this introverted intellectual, who just wanted to read in peace.

To outsiders, the problem was obvious. But my friend had so internalized her own notions of fun and meaning that she was unable to see her son for who he really was. She was moralizing about outdoor time and convinced there was something wrong with her son.

Instead, all we had was a cultural mismatch. This child was a poor fit for the family’s culture. And because the family didn’t notice its own culture, it had failed to adapt to the child’s needs.

Maybe you’re reading this and judging my friend. Or maybe you’re like my friend and can relate. No matter how you respond to this story, the odds are good that you have a strong family culture to which you are mostly oblivious. Even more importantly, you were raised in a family culture that will also influence your parenting.

Here’s how to recognize that culture, and why doing so is so integral to good parenting. In this piece, I’ll also talk about some of the most common family cultures, and the struggles they can cause.

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This is the first installment in my new, limited-run, daily series, Feminist Parenting. This series will feature reflections on parenting in a more liberatory way, as well as practical guidance on topics such as raising boys, resisting sexualization, and more. This is a bonus for paid subscribers, and I’ll still be keeping up with my usual editorial calendar on top of it.

Admit it: sometimes you parent in the hopes of being or feeling superior to other parents, and other times you parent in a desperate attempt to not feel inferior.

I experienced the latter last week, when I forgot to send in brownies to an end-of-the-year celebration. I believe in keeping my commitments, but I also thought the entire thing was silly, and that not bringing in the brownies would not cause any serious harm to anyone. But because I was that mom—the one who forgot something—I panicked, felt guilty, and spent the rest of the day flagellating, even after my husband rescued us and got the brownies.

My desperation was about not feeling worse (or, more likely, looking worse) than the other parents. We’ve all been there.

The moments when we deliberately seek to make other parents feel inferior, or when we parent in a way that makes us feel superior, can be harder to admit, or even notice. I see it in childbirth groups, where women with bad birth outcomes are told that different behavior would have gotten them a better outcome, or in parenting groups where parents somehow are shamed for having both too little structure and too much structure.

As we all know, the core truth of parenthood is that no matter what you do as a mother, it’s wrong.

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