No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money.
Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process.
Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children.
In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.
Children inevitably turn to their parents for more than just food and security; equally important are assurance, recognition, and interpretation of life. A child develops best in an environment where creativity and discovery are unimpeded by the artificial restrictions of blind faith and dogmatic belief.Parenting without God is for parents, and future parents, who lack belief in a god and are seeking guidance on raising freethinkers and social-justice-aware children in a nation where public dialogue has been controlled by the Christian Right.
Dan Arel, activist and critically acclaimed author, has penned a magnificently practical guide to help parents provide their children with the intellectual tools for standing up to attempts at religious proselytism, whether by teachers, coaches, friends, or other family members. Parenting without God is also for the parent activist who is trying to make the world a better place for all children by first educating their own children about racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination that serve as barriers to the fundamentals of human dignity and democracy. It’s for parents who wish for their children to question everything and to learn how to reach their own conclusions based on verifiable evidence and reason. Above all, Arel makes the penetrating argument that parents should lead by example—both by speaking candidly about the importance of secularism and by living an openly and unabashedly secular life.
Parenting without God is written with humility, compassion, and understanding. Dan Arel’s writing conveys the unmistakable impression of a loving father dedicated to redefining the role of parenthood so that it also includes the vitally important task of nurturing every child’s latent impulse for freedom and autonomy.
This second edition has been expanded with new material from the author.
In lives where there is a new diagnosis or drama every day, the stories in this collection provide parents of “special needs” kids with a welcome chuckle, a rock to stand on, and a moment of reality held far enough from the heart to see clearly. Featuring works by “alternative” parents who have attempted to move away from mainstream thought—or remove its influence altogether—this anthology, taken as a whole, carefully considers the implications of parenting while raising children with disabilities.
From professional writers to novice storytellers including Robert Rummel-Hudson, Ayun Halliday, and Kerry Cohen, this assortment of authentic, shared experiences from parents at the fringe of the fringes is a partial antidote to the stories that misrepresent, ridicule, and objectify disabled kids and their parents.
Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood combines the best pieces from the award-winning zine Rad Dad and from the blog Daddy Dialectic, two kindred publications that have tried to explore parenting as political territory. Both of these projects have pushed the conversation around fathering beyond the safe, apolitical focus most books and websites stick to; they have not been complacent but have worked hard to create a diverse, multi-faceted space in which to grapple with the complexity of fathering.
Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle. With grace and honesty and strength, Rad Dad’s writers tackle all the issues that other parenting guides are afraid to touch: the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, the emotions of sperm donation, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.
I am a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist living and working in Southern California. My lived experience and my interest in activism are the driving forces in my creative process. I use my artwork as a tool for activism, drawing on social issues that have affected me on a personal level, such as my experience of motherhood, the politics of childbirth or sexual violence. My artwork explores universal issues of gender and collective identity, culture, memory and loss, while it is imbued with the feeling of saudade, a typically Portuguese trait roughly translated as a nostalgic longing or yearning of someone or something of the past.
I have used a wide range of media - including painting, installation, social practice, video and sound - but drawing and photography remain at the core of my practice. Influenced by Vija Celmins's drawings, Andrea Bowers use of text and activism and Suzanne Lacy’s commitment to social justice, my work examines inequality and is borne out of a desire to call attention to the often invisible and overlooked issues that affect primarily women.
@celiarochastudio
My artwork is a visual diary about my obsessive thoughts and humorous take on habit, identity and time. Juggling three part-time jobs in addition to being an artist, spouse and mother feels like I live six different lives simultaneously. I constantly try to make sense of the nonsensical through installations, sculptures and performances. As a pathway to self-inquiry, I meticulously craft ridiculous objects and performances to visually embody the absurdities of my daily experiences. The processes are both a struggle and cathartic — just like parenting.
Pandemic Letter #1 May 28, 2020
This video was created at what we considered to be the beginning of the pandemic as we were trying to figure out how to cope with our new existence under lockdown and how to communicate this new reality to our child. My partner and collaborator Angela Beallor helped record the video, shooting on a DSLR with a macro lens. Our kid turned three right before I wrote this. Now, they are four. So far, we have survived this pandemic with little personal loss but not without the stresses that come along with constantly being on for work, for our family, and for our community. We continue to struggle as a queer family in a predominately heteronormative parent community and we continue to work, as a white family, for racial justice in our town.
Elizabeth Press (EP/They/Them) is a media-maker and educator based in Troy, NY. Press is interested in socially engaged practices and experimental documentary which sometimes crosses over with topics of caregiving.
Press is a lecturer in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute teaching classes in digital filmmaking and studio production. Press has also taught classes at New York University, The New School and several after-school and community media centers.
Press cut their teeth in journalism as a producer for the independent TV/Radio program, Democracy Now!. As a videographer, producer and editor, Press worked with BRIC Arts Media, The International Institute for Sustainable Development covering the UN climate negotiations, StreetFilms, GritTV with Laura Flanders and PBS.
Press’ work has been screened in international festivals across Europe and featured here in the New York Times, Democracy Now!, Rooftop Films, Exit Art, and EMPAC.
EP is on the board for the Sanctuary for Independent Media and helped bottom-line the launch of the low power FM station and the daily local news show, The Hudson Mohawk Magazine in 2017 that still runs today.
Press is a Fulbright Scholar, has an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BA in Anthropology from Ithaca College.
It almost feels like I have spent the past two years in isolation. I’ve been consistently trying to navigate my artistic practice through intense waves of grief over the loss of my mum, infertility/miscarriage, and a fear of dying. Things have shifted in the last 4 months, with added postpartum anxieties, healing associated with childbirth, obsessive tracking of my baby’s feeds, breastfeeding struggles and COVID 19. With the COVID pandemic, there were increased anxieties surrounding my newborns health. Will my baby be okay? What if my baby gets sick? What about check-ups? Am I feeding my baby enough? what if my milk dries up and I can’t feed my baby? What if I get sick and can't feed my baby? Am I spending adequate time with my oldest child?
As a way to ease my anxieties, I started pumping breast milk. I would pump at 5:00 every morning after our first feed. I began writing thoughts or worries along with the date on each bag of breastmilk. I would then photograph the bags of breastmilk as a way to document life postpartum, anxieties about mumhood and life in COVID19. The act of pumping breastmilk and freezing was a ritualistic and meditative way for me to cope and eased anxieties around getting sick and not being able to feed my baby.
Postpartum anxieties are exacerbated by the times we are living in.
WHAT:
The Birth Justice Podcast NYC takes a close, comprehensive and creative look at how folks in New York City experience and navigate reproductive oppression and create resilience strategies for their health and their families. Through storytelling and conversations, BJP NYC provides a space for dialogue and debate addressing one of New York City’s most pressing public health and racial justice issues: birth. Hosted by Taja Lindley, podcast episodes feature one-on-one long form interviews and conversations with advocates, organizers, historians, scholars, healers, birth workers, pregnant and parenting people, and folks of reproductive age.
The first episode dropped Wednesday July 8th and featureds an interview between the host, Taja Lindley, and her mother, Adrianne Robinson, where they discussed Robinson’s experience giving birth to Lindley in 1985. This was a special occasion because the release date is also Lindley’s birthday.
WHY:
In the United States, Black women are three to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy related causes than white women. But in New York City, Black women are eight times more likely to die than white women. This is twice the national average. And during this pandemic moment, matters of public health are brought into focus, including long standing health inequities like maternal health. For example,when COVID first hit, NYC hospitals barred visitors during childbirth, leaving many people to labor alone. In response, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order allowing laboring people to have one support person during their childbirth. A few weeks after it was issued, however, Amber Rose Isaac - a 26-year-old pregnant Black woman - died after giving birth in a Bronx hospital.
This work is a portrait of a mother.
The living room was built to contain her feelings, with the walls programmed to reveal them based on the proximity of the audience. The wallpaper, patterned from another portrait of the mother five months pregnant with her second set of twins, offers an abstracted glimpse of her. The books and the photographs are hers. This work explores her lived experience and her interior life.
Beneath the mothering and the obligation and the sacrifice, is she there? Is this her? What is she feeling?
I am a contemporary painter living and working in rural New Hampshire, where I live with my husband and two sons. As a child and an adult, I have lived on all three coasts and in between, and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Now I live in a small New England town. Much of the reason that I live where I live, see what I see, and think about what I think about, is because I am a parent. Being a parent has influenced my work by influencing the choices I have made about where and how to live. These choices, in turn, present different roads for my artwork and for my professional career as an artist than would be the case if I did not have children. Many of my artist colleagues are also artist-mothers whose situations are similar to my own. We are finding ways to work together to create opportunities for ourselves well outside of the usual “art world” venues.
Painting is an essential part of who I am, and I have continued to develop my work, exhibit, and sell whenever possible. I began painting in oils in college and continued until my first pregnancy, when I switched to acrylics. This was the first example of the many times that parenthood and art needed to find new ways to coexist in my life!
As a parent, I am always doing more than one thing at a time, and as an artist, I see no reason to limit myself to only one style or way of working. Most of my work is not explicitly on the subject of parenthood or reproduction. But it shows up again and again in different ways and in different series. Sometimes it’s visceral—like Lupa, a wolf with two babies. The painting is on loose canvas, nailed to the wall, with slashes from her claws. Sometimes it’s joyous and chaotic—like Strong Nuclear Force, a dancing woman with four legs and a baby under each arm. Some are mysterious—like Inside, Mothers Are Dancing, which hints at the nature of mothers together. Some are more remote—even elegiac, like The Minivan Series.
It’s always been important to me as a parent to set an example for my boys of what women really are—separate individuals with their own lives, their own work, their own dreams, their own futures—not just the mothers who take care of them. At the same time, raising my children is all-consuming and wonderful. As my boys grow up, what they need from me grows and changes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that reflected in my work.
Artists who are mothers see the world in a distinct and complex way. “Mommy eyes” see close and far, beauty and danger, past and future. Mothers are attuned to the possibilities of known and unknown, joy experienced and lost, a future both exciting and frightening. The view of the mother-artist is a valuable perspective on the world that is often dismissed as mothers in our society are sentimentalized but not truly respected.
Motherhood is a profoundly feminist subject. It is because of the physical nature of preparing for, carrying, bearing, and raising children that women are, even today, frequently excluded from many types of roles (excluded by both men and other women). Women in both the business and art worlds are often told to downplay their role as mothers, so that those in power won’t have that excuse to doubt not only their abilities and intelligence, but their commitment and dedication. Since the beginning of the women’s movement, women who intended to be both artists and mothers were marginalized within the movement, finding the need to be feminists within feminism. Thirty years later, mother-artists are still facing this prejudice, especially within the art world itself. This is the background against which I began thinking of this exhibition.
MOMMA presents the work of four artist-mothers, each of whom addresses aspects of motherhood in her work. Laura Morrison’s sculptural yarn work responds to the generative properties of nature, while her delicate assemblages are ruminations about family and connections between people. In Patricia Schappler’s drawings and paintings, she creates closely observed life-size and more-than-life-size portraits of her children over time, individually and as a family. In her paintings, prints, and quilts, Annette Mitchell looks at motherhood from inside and outside, as a mother and grandmother, but also as a daughter. I (Marcia Santore) began this exhibition with paintings about the swirling, chaotic, and animal nature of motherhood, but that MOMMA sparked an entirely new group of work, The Minivan Series.
MOMMA is not a motherhood manifesto. It is not about advocating motherhood for all women or defining women as mothers first and anything else second. It is not about the “right” way to mother. And it is most definitely not intended to diminish women who don’t have children, whether by choice or not. It’s about showing something important about a group of people who make art based on the conditions of their lives—how being mothers affects the work we do as artists. We are who we are and where we are in large part because of our roles as mothers. How we see the world, what we notice, what we make art about, is strongly affected by our roles as mothers and provides a point of view that is often overlooked.
This year, the Women’s Caucus for Art national conference included a panel discussion on artists and motherhood. In conjunction with the MOMMA exhibition, the Silver Center for the Arts will screen Who Does She Think She Is?, a documentary about artist-mothers. It’s exciting to me to realize that these ideas about motherhood, making art, and marginalization that I’ve been considering for years are being thought about and talked about nationally at the same time that MOMMA is coming together.
My current work views the world through the lens of a parent, simultaneously embracing joy, frustration, hope and fear. My work has always engaged in the liminal states of consciousness, through examinations of precipices, seams, folds, and crevices. In this new work, figurative elements of hands: my own and my children’s, become further lenses for exhuberence or despair. In some cases the hands obscure, and in others highlight. Both experiences are true, useful, and not mutually exclusive. I often feel that my arms are my most precious resource. They allow me to hold hands across parking lots, to carry bags, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to gesture when I am intensely speaking, to draw, to write, and they are often full.
Precarious balance has always been at the crux of my work, and never has it seemed more true to my lived experience than as an artist and mother. The imagery included with the arms and hands continues to reflect the landscape, as I am habitually drawn to rock formations and fields of flowers. I connect this imagery to the world we inhabit, are desperate to protect, and which holds the history of generations. Through this work, I hope to examine and share the experience of motherhood, in all that is devastating, and all that is jubilant.
I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
I am fascinated by transformation processes.
I observe transforming spaces, economy, environment, cities, work, cells, bodies, knowledge, history, countries, roles, education, technology, relationships, selves, languages.
Becoming and being a mother is for me all about transformation. My first solo exhibition in the Zepter Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia was called Metamorphosis . The objects I made used banal everyday objects (plastic bags) and transformed them into an immense vagina or into umbilical cords falling from the ceiling. This story from 1999 was a intimate story of separating oneself from the primary family and a story about the everyday and the environment.
From 2006 to 2012 my partner and I went through a series of unsuccessful IVFs and several miscarriages. I did several sculptural works that documented this part of our lives - like the Womb exhibited in 2010 in Museum de Ceramica de l’Alcora, Spain. It was just about the pain, I guess.
In 2012, I was invited to make an urban intervention inside the Vesel Garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was three months pregnant with my son and did not know what to expect about the occurring pregnancy. So I did an urban intervention with a participative performance and called this work Embryo garden. It was all about the thin line between life and death of the child to be, but also of the artistic child within myself.
My experience as a parent has been both challenging and inspiring for me as an artist. I explored the relationship between the roles of artist and parent in my 2016 exhibition in the Glass Atrium of the City Hall of Ljubljana, called A Thank You Note To the Cleaning Lady. The work that lent its name to the exhibition questions the relation between reproductive, maintenance work and having greater purpose in life. As a whole, the exhibition was born as a product of broken antagonism between being a parent and an artist and of cooperation between the two roles. The installation To Include Everything, Everything, Everything, Absolutely, Absolutely, Everything especially focused on that. And the work The Map is about the child experiencing and learning by himself, and the artist-mother just observing and taking notes. In this process, I sometimes feel as if steeling from him.
I’ve spent the last decade exploring the world of domestic life and family systems. Although I started as a painter, describing the chaotic and contradictory world of parenting seemed to require a multi-layered, eclectic approach, and I have expanded my practice to include collage, installation and photography. Recently, I’ve been drawn into the digital worlds my children inhabit so readily (in part because the subject of ‘screen’ causes so much debate and anxiety in the cultural discourse) and the imagery I’ve found there has been surprisingly inspiring and oddly familiar. One game had a pixelated, modular landscape—touched with moments of surprising, naturalistic beauty—that became an excellent metaphor for my domestic world. I use this imagery layered with realism, as well as a layering of techniques, to develop the idea of parenting and domestic life as a many-layered experience: funny, moving, and labor-intensive.