What a real pro-family movement looks like!!

“There is a crisis in family life, and we progressives know the only way to dissolve it. We are the force that is serious about strengthening family life. We know that families come in many different forms today, including single parent families, gay and lesbian families, traditional two parent families, and inter-generational families. We have a plan to strengthen them all. We want to build families where people can fully experience the joy of being loving beings, and feel safe to let love be the center of our universe.”

Imagine if the liberals and progressives spoke that way!

There was a time when some people on the Left described families as vehicles for patriarchy and oppression. For them, the fundamental idea of being pro-family seemed reactionary.

We don’t think so. It’s true that families were once understood to be places where the powerful male father had all authority and women and children were supposed to be obedient. We do not seek a return to that period. One of the great accomplishments of liberalism was that it undermined legal constraints on divorce so that women would be free to leave authoritarian families. There are still economic constraints and fears of violence that sometimes keep women in oppressive family structures, but increasingly our society has recognized divorce as legitimate and sought to provide economic and legal safeguards for women who seek to leave oppressive marriages. Similarly, women have fought for the right to be protected against violence from their husbands, either inside the marriage or when leaving. By making it easier for women to leave oppressive relationships, the feminist movement has actually contributed to strengthening families, because they’ve given incentive for men who wish to remain in their marriages to become more sensitive to the needs of their wives.

But there is an important reason why most people in the United States, when asked to choose to which social institution they feel most connected, overwhelmingly choose family. The reason is this: family is the only institution whose explicit goal is to provide love and caring. It is the anti-capitalist-ethos institution par excellence. People are not members of families because they have achieved something elsewhere — they are in families either because they were born in and have a “right” to belong, or because they married in as a result of two people making a decision that they loved each other. No wonder, then, that people feel so attached to family. They use words like “brother” and “sister” toward people they really care about. They talk of their closest affiliations with others “as though they were family.” There is an implied loyalty and solidarity in family life that is rare to experience anywhere else in the society.

No wonder, then, that people feel very concerned when they live at a moment in which so many families are unstable. No wonder that they respond to programs designed to support the family.

Creating a Culture of Love

The most important thing we can do to provide support for families is to create a culture of love in the larger society. In the first part of this book I tried to show how very much the social and political institutions of this society pull for an ethos of selfishness and materialism that undermine our capacities to be loving. In this chapter I’m suggesting concrete programs that may contribute to strengthening the family. But they will only work in that way if they are manifestations of a deeper underlying commitment to building a society in which there is a gut recognition that “love comes first.”

Love is not only a feeling but a way of being with others.

It involves caring for the other’s well-being, on the material, emotional and spiritual levels.

Love involves being present to the other with the fullness of one’s being, being willing to share one’s whole self with the other, and being accepting and nourishing to the full self of the loved one.

Love also involves commitment—a willingness to be there for the other person when it is not convenient for us or when we’d rather be doing something else. This is sometimes called “responsibility,” a willingness to put the needs of the other above one’s own wants at least some of the time. Feminists were correct to challenge patriarchal practices that demanded that women always sacrifice their interests and desires for those of the other whom they were “supposed” to be taking care of (husband or children), but love requires a willingness to do this sacrificing of one’s own wants for the interests of the other at least some of the time. Being responsible to the other will sometimes mean that one doesn’t do what feels best at the moment, but what one knows will be best for the other for whom one cares.

In that same way, love requires sacrifice, a giving up of endless possibilities. One cannot give one’s full attention and presence equally to all human beings because being fully present and fully nourishing the other takes time. So one has to make sacrifices, close off some possible loving relationships in order to be more fully present to other loving relationships. Similarly, in the world in which people have been emotionally damaged by a lifetime of encounters with others who were not fully present and emotionally supportive, your ability to give them love requires patience, persistence, and a faithful devotion that makes them feel safe enough to be able to respond without fear that they are going to be humiliated by your misusing then.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead makes a similar point in Commonweal Magazine, Feb. 25, 2005, when she says in an article on Why Parents Feel so Inept, “it is hard to be a parent when the mainstream consumer culture disfavors the virtue associated with the ordinary daily tasks of rearing children, such as sacrifice, patience, persistence, and faithful love.”

But love is not only about sacrifice but also about pleasure and celebration and joy. A culture of love is one in which we find ways to give each other permission and assistance to temporarily leave the world of goal-directed behavior so that we can instead immerse ourselves in playfulness and fun, celebration of other human beings and of the universe, pleasure, and joy.

The Traditional Liberal Program: Indispensible and Inadequate

The spiritual crisis described in the first part of this book has had an especially negative effect on families as they negotiate the ethos of selfishness and materialism in American society.

For some families, that crisis is most immediately material: the society doesn’t provide the minimum material and health care benefits that would make it possible for a family to be held together. For that reason, a progressive pro-families program starts with an affirmation and reframing of the parts of the liberal and progressive agenda which are already pro-family.

Yet even while we should embrace the liberal program, we should also quickly reject the implications that what will solve the problem for families is if there are more economic props.

We know that the crisis in families is NOT just confined to people who have inadequate financial supports, inadequate leisure time, inadequate health care or face oppressive work conditions. The family crisis is a cross-class crisis, and it is rooted in the ethos of selfishness and materialism that are the dominant realities of American life.

Want to be pro-family? Then challenge the selfishness and materialism that permeate the consciousness and shape the “common sense” of the contemporary Western world.

And this approach really is the essence of a spiritual politics. It includes the liberal agenda, but it transcends it and goes to a different level.

But NOT SO FAST! Including the liberal agenda is also important, and it speaks to a central point that some conservatives have never fully grasped: you can’t care for the soul of another without also caring for their material well-being.

When the Torah says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” or when Jesus says, “The way you treat God is the way you treat the least among us” they were NOT saying: love this person’s soul, but don’t worry whether or not they are starving to death.

But they are starving to death.

It’s this simple: we live in a global economy whose primary direction is set by the major corporations and governments of seven countries, including the U.S. Over the course of the past several decades, that economy has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Every day, some 20,000 children die of starvation, or from diseases related to malnutrition, inadequate health care, and inadequate sanitary conditions. All preventable deaths.

And in the U.S. itself there is massive suffering having to do with the inadequate provision of material benefits to sectors of our society.

So, when Jesus, Moses, or any of the other great spiritual teachers tells us to “love” the other, they do not mean that we can provide this love without caring for their bodies as well as their souls.

It was precisely this failure that outraged the Prophets of ancient Israel. They watched the religious world around them celebrating the soul in beautiful Temple worship, but ignoring the plight of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

Similarly, there are people in both the Religious Right and in the New Age movement who think that they can be spiritual and love the souls of others without paying attention to their material well-being. This is not the position of a progressive spiritual activism.

That’s why in many respects we need to embrace the best liberal and progressive ideas to eliminate poverty, homelessness, inadequate health care and inadequate education.

I know that when I tried to explain this to a cynical New Republic columnist named Michael Kelley, who was at the time writing a feature piece on Hillary Clinton for the NY Times in which he dedicated a page to my alleged influence, he simply declared that the politics of meaning was nothing more than a new slogan to cover up the same old liberal politics of the past. I recognize that danger in even mentioning what is correct about the liberal agenda. But on the other hand, it is a necessary but not sufficient part of a pro-family agenda, so let me start by endorsing some parts of it.

So even though the crisis in families is far deeper than any narrow economic reform can cure, a prophetic agenda for families must include:

1. A living wage

Some of the people in the Tikkun Community’s chapter in Santa Fe have led a recent struggle to extend “living wage” benefits from the public sector, where they were originally won for public employees and employees of corporations that do business with the public sector, to private employers. If people have to take two or even three jobs in order to be able to support their families, they will be too exhausted to have time to actually be with their families and build the loving ties that are necessary to sustain loving commitments

2. Ending poverty

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, “In 2003, 12.9 million American children younger than 18 lived below the poverty line and more than one out of every six American children (17.6 percent) was poor. That is more children living in poverty today than 30 or 35 years ago. A child in America is more likely to live in poverty than a child in any of the 18 other wealthy industrialized nations for which data exist.”
Think that’s because of the failure of parents to work? Well, the Children’s Defense Fund points out that “Seven out of ten poor children lived in a family where someone worked for at least part of the year and almost one out of three poor children lived in families with full-time year-round workers in 2003: …The number of children in extreme poverty (in families with incomes of one-half of the poverty level or lower) grew at almost twice the rate of increase for child poverty overall from 2002 to 2003 (11.5 percent compared to 6.0 percent). This significantly faster growth in extreme poverty is evidence of a collapse of the social safety net for children at the very bottom of the economic scale.

3. Full employment

If the bottom line for all corporations is to maximize the amount of profits they make, for many it will make sense to move their firms abroad. They can find a variety of countries where people are so desperate for a job that they’ll gladly accept pay that is sometimes 1/4 or 1/5 of what the company would have to pay to American employees. Similarly, many corporations find it far cheaper to produce their goods in countries where there are few serious health and safety regulations at the workplace and few demands on corporations to stop polluting the environment. Workers who have given their whole lives to a corporation may find themselves and their whole community suddenly without employment possibilities as the firms simply pick up and move abroad.

We at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health watched the terrible impact on families when GM decided to shut down its plant in Fremont, California. Our staff member Lee Schore received a contract to provide support services for the workers, and what she saw was increased alchoholism, drug abuse, family violence, and finally family breakdown. A wide variety of studies show a similar pattern.

Unemployment is one of those things that always seems far away, a problem happening to someone else, until it hits your family or your community. But it has hit many Americans. According to the AFLCIO, “By February 2005, 8 million were officially jobless — but experts estimate the total number of unemployed and underemployed is nearly 14 million.

“U.S. jobs that pay well have disappeared as a result of the recession that began in 2001 — the Bush administration’s failed economic policies based on tax cuts for millionaires, trade laws that encourage companies to move jobs overseas and the unwillingness of Bush and Congress to embrace job-creating programs to repair the nation’s roads, schools and rail and water systems.

“The number of workers facing long-term unemployment and unable to find work before exhausting their unemployment benefits is at an all-time high. But the Bush administration and congressional Republicans stubbornly refused to extend unemployment benefits until the public outcry forced action — but not to workers who already have exhausted their benefits.”

4. Quality Child Care

Some people take the attitude toward child care and education that this is really a matter for parents to worry about on their own, expressed in the attitude, “They made the decision to bring children into the world, so they should pay for what it costs.” That´s a notion that fits a world in which each person is understood as alone and with no fundamental connection to others. But from the standpoint of a spiritual politics, it´s exactly the opposite: each of us alive today has been the beneficiary of the kindness and generosity of past generations, and our obligation is to pass that on to the coming generations with our own addition of whatever we can contribute to that human legacy. So, those who have chosen to not personally bear the particular burdens of childcare have a social responsibility to those who did take on that responsibility to participate in every possible way to alleviate the burdens of those who have brought children into the world. While some are going to make a utilitarian argument (when we are old we will be dependent on the good will of the generations that we have raised), a spiritual politics focuses on another dimension: how much good it does our own beings to have the opportunity to care for and contribute to the well-being of others, recognizing that it is precisely in so doing that we most fully actualize our own human capacities.

Although many middle-class women enter the work force to find fulfillment, many other women work because they have no alternative, either as single parents or as part of working two-parent families, both of whom need to work to pay for the basic needs of their families. While those with higher incomes can often purchase high-quality child care, the picture is quite unappealing for many other parents. One report on child care claimed that 1/8 of all child care centers had quality of care which threatened the children’s health and safety, seven in ten provided mediocre care, and another study determined that 1/3 of child care centers offered care poor enough to endanger the child’s development.

One reason for this poor-quality care is that child care workers can’t afford to stay in their jobs. They are among the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. — average wage is $15,430 a year, usually with no benefits or paid leave. As the AFL-CIO points out, on average child care workers earn less than parking lot attendants.

Parents need high-quality after-school care. There are nearly seven million children who are home alone after school every week. Their parents at work often have to worry about what they are doing and whether they are safe. Schools should be funded to provide imaginative and engaging programs for students after school, including safe and quiet places where students can do homework and work on high-quality computers.

Our society must take a totally different approach to child care.

A spiritual politics would insist that high-quality child care be available as a right for every family, with care modulated to each age level from three months old to twelve years old, and pay provided for child care workers at the same level as pay for police and firemen.

The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, yet nearly 47 million Americans lack medical coverage. While most Americans with health insurance rely on their employers for access to quality care, employers are increasingly shifting their rising costs to workers who struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments. And workers with coverage find themselves in a rapidly changing health care market where they are forced to bear more of the risk of catastrophic illness through cost-shifting and “consumer-driven” defined-contribution health plans. Workers may find themselves without coverage and access to care as a result of health care and insurance industry mergers, conversions of nonprofit health plans and profiteering drug companies that earn billions on the backs of working families and seniors. Patients deserve better. What can be done? Learn what’s going on and how to make health care work for working families.

The Essence of a Pro-Family Policy: Build a Society Safe for Love and Intimacy

No matter how many institutional props and economic supports you create for families, the crisis in families will persist until we live in a society which values love and intimacy more than it values money and power.

That´s why the political party that can put on its banner and mean it that its agenda is to "Build a Society Safe for Love and Intimacy" is the party that will eventually command the respect and loyalty of most people.

Of course, anyone can manipulate the words. We´ve seen a political Right in the U.S. that was all too happy to present itself as the "pro-family" force and then use the credibility it got from that to advance Right-wing politics. But did they actually strengthen the family? Not if divorce figures are relevant, because it turns out that many of the red states have the highest levels of divorce just like some of them have the highest levels of abortions! Turns out that saying you are supporting the family doesn´t mean that you actually are willing to build a society that is safe for love and intimacy.

Why not?

Because the only way to build a society that is safe for love and intimacy is to make love the bottom line rather than money and power — and that is precisely what the political Right will not do. It won´t do it, because the political Right is more invested in making sure the wealthy keep their money and the corporations keep their power than it is in creating a new way of doing business that would give priority to love and caring and generosity and kindness — the very biblical values that are what it would take to make the society safe for love and intimacy. That was the point of providing you with all that analysis in the first half of this book — so that you´d understand why we are not going to have a society that is pro-family unless we are prepared to change in fundamental ways the world of work and the economy.

Family Support Networks

One of the most destructive impacts of the world of work is that people come home from their work not only dispirited and exhausted, but often feeling self-blame that they did not do work that had a higher meaning or purpose, and that they had to be involved in activities that violated their own sense of value as a sacred being. The internalization of the ethos of selfishness and materialism, and the frustration at not being able to use much of their time to actualize their own spiritual essence, makes people feel terrible about themselves.

When, in turn, they find that their spouse or children are acting in ways that are not fully loving or that do not manifest the highest aspects of their own spiritual capacities, it is not unusual for people to get angry, inappropriately releasing onto their spouse or children the frustration that they had themselves been feeling all day long at work (often without being aware of those feelings until they started to pour out at this family member).

In contemporary society, the problem then gets defined as poor impulse control or some other "personal problem" that the person venting anger has, and they are treated with medications or, in more enlightened circles, with psychotherapy. In yet more enlightened circles, the entire family may be brought in to analyze family dynamics and how they produced the Identified Problem person as the one who may be acting out frustrations that exist in the entire family network.

Yet what is almost always left out of the therapy process is the workplace and the social order that generates it — because addressing that would require challenging existing power relationships, and that is always considered “unrealistic” from the standpoint of the therapists, counselors, or whoever else is called upon for help.
A spiritual politics, however, has to go to the core issue. So it will advocate the creation of family support networks in which families come together to discuss the kinds of issues that come up in family life, and simultaneously to prepare themselves for whatever struggles may be necessary to change the workplaces and the dynamics of the larger society. When sitting one-on-one in a therapy office, that kind of societal change thinking always seems utopian. In the context of a larger family support network, taking on institutions can at times seem less fanciful.

Family support networks can be created with families from the same workplace or union, or families from the same neighborhood, profession, or spiritual community.
The task of the family support network is first of all to help people understand a central truth about families: everyone has problems in their family life. Demystifying this reality is central, because otherwise the self-blaming that people have already brought home from the world of work gets intensified when dealing with family life. It is not atypical for many sophisticated people who know that everyone has problems in family life to nevertheless believe that their own particular personal family is worse than that of most others, and that that reflects on the fact that they themselves are worse than most other people.

So an important element of family support networks is to provide a context in which people can talk honestly about their own family lives in a context of confidentiality and guaranteed privacy.

A second function of family support networks is to provide opportunities for parents to learn parenting skills, and for families to learn family communication skills.
While these skills can be aided by the contributions of professional family therapists, the key to the success of family support networks is to model on the 12-step programs, at least with regard to this: that they are free, that they are led by the people inside of them and not by professionals, and that they have an explicit spiritual goal of affirming the human spiritual essence.

There are already family support networks created by various religious communities. A progressive spiritual politics, however, would separate this process from any particular religious community and seek to promote family support groups that do not require a belief in a particular God or spiritual path, and would in that sense be equally welcoming to secular and religious people. Yet these groups would have a commitment to the values of the Left Hand of God, the values of love, caring, generosity and kindness, social justice, peace, nonviolence and ecological responsibility.

Imagine if the Democratic Party or some other progressive force with resources and visibility were to take as one of its major goals for the next twenty years the creation of these kind of family support networks and the development of manuals, TV shows, movies, CDs, DVDs, etc., that were aimed at providing assistance in promoting and deepening the practices of these groups, along with the process of changing the world of work as described in the previous section of this chapter. Understood as a progressive pro-family force, a force fully and seriously committed to making a society that was safe for love and intimacy, the Democratic Party, or whatever political party or social movement that came into existence to embody the vision of the Left Hand of God, would become one of the most powerful forces in American political history.

Love, Recognition and Spiritual Nourishment for Children

Children seek and need to be recognized in their specificity and loved for who they are. Love and recognition are as fundamental needs as food.

Unfortunately, many parents are the products of childhoods in which that love and recognition were not fully available to them. As a result, they grew up with a gaping hole in their psychic being, and have been seeking some way to fill that hole through much of their lives.

And too many parents faced yet a second deprivation as they grew up: the denial or repression of their own spiritual being, including their inclination toward celebration of the spiritual dimension of being. Children have an intuitive inclination toward spiritual awareness. They respond to the universe with awe, wonder, and endless curiosity. Unfortunately, many parents are the products of childhoods in which this aspect of their being was systematically uprooted. As a result, they grew up with yet a second gaping hole in their psychic being, and have been seeking some way to fill that hole through much of their lives.

These two needs are at the heart of the pathologies and distortions in contemporary life. People who do not get these needs met adequately in childhood are constantly engaged in a desperate attempt to get those needs met and to repress awareness of the reasons those needs were not met.

There are an array of techniques that parents and society use to teach children to deny the need for love and recognition, and in particular the way that that need is not or was not adequately met by one’s own parents. It is not that parents willfully repress their children’s needs, but that they themselves have not had their own needs for love and recognition met adequately. Living in a society in which there is a continual struggle for power and “success,” and in which people are taught to blame themselves for their own failure to “make it” to the top (however that gets defined for different people in their own specific life circumstances), many people end up blaming themselves for having failed to achieve in their life the success that they imagined would bring them satisfaction. The meritocratic ideology of this society — that they can make it if they really try, but that if they don’t make it they have no one to blame but themselves — obscures the structural reality that only a handful of people in any given enterprise are going to feel that they have made it, given the hierarchical structure of rewards that concentrate power and success in the hands of a relatively small part of the population. So, many people feel terrible about themselves and the lives that they imagine they have created for themselves. For many, this feeling is not strange at all, but quite coincident with the feeling that they’ve had all their lives that there was something wrong with them that caused their parents to not love them enough or provide them with genuine recognition, and that caused schoolmates not to respond to them with full recognition and love. Some may seek to overcome those feelings through relentless competition and self-advancement (in some cases leading them to climb high on the ladder of financial success), others by drowning out the feelings through alcohol, drugs, television, or other mind-deadeners.

Let me emphasize that feelings of inadequacy and failure may be held by people holding powerful or financially lucrative jobs, by people who are widely admired and respected, by people who everyone else thinks of as a success. The lack of recognition and loving attention in childhood burns a deep hole in one’s consciousness, and unless that hole has been repaired, the person may be suffering and feeling terrible about themselves, and then frenetically engaged in burying those feelings, no matter what external validations they receive.

Obviously, these dynamics do not play out in precisely the same way for everyone. There are huge variations in the levels of love and recognition that one receives from parents, from schoolmates, and from the world of work and adult life relationships. Yet for many, many parents the reality is that they did not get enough of this love and recognition, and still don’t. As a result, many parents approach their own children with this hunger, imagining that they will get through their children the love and recognition that they were unable to achieve anywhere else.

Unfortunately, this rarely works. The child has its own set of needs, and it requires a parent who is present to them. But far too many parents see the child through the frame of their own needs. For some parents, that takes the form of wanting children to “behave” in some particular way conforming to their own notion of what children should be like to confirm that they, the parents, are “good parents.” For other parents, that takes the form of children performing with specific skills or succeeding in ways that the parent didn’t succeed. When the child fails to conform to the behavior that allows the parent to feel that s/he is a “success” for having raised this child “right,” the parents often react with anger, disappointment, or withdrawal of emotional energy. And the child, in turn, not understanding that this response has nothing to do with its own inadequacies and everything to do with its parents’ own inner drama of unfulfilled desire for love and recognition, responds with distress, fear, crying, or desperate attempts to figure out what it needs to do to satisfy the parents’ needs.

To the extent that parents can overcome their own desperate neediness and be present to the needs of their children, they will quickly learn ways to satisfy their children, or at least ways to be lovingly present as their children develop. But when their own neediness gets in the way of being fully present to their children, the chlldren themselves become desperate, intuitively knowing that they are dependent on these parenting others for the fulfillment of their basic physical and emotional needs, and hence need those parents to remain connected in a loving way. But since their own behavior seems not adequate to generate that needed loving attention from parents, children develop an array of behaviors of their own which express their frustration, fear, and desperation. And then the cycle of miscommunication deepens. Parents see this behavior, and too many interpret it as a sign of their own failure, restimulating within themselves the frustrations that they have had all through their lives at being self-perceived failures. The upset gets so intense for many that they strike out in a physical way, “spanking” their children as a way to alleviate their own inner frustration, and justifying this act of violence as somehow “for the good of the child.” As so many people explain to counselors or therapists, “I hit my child because I loved him/her, and thought that it was the best way to get him/her to understand what the real world is like. They needed to get that lesson from me, lest they get it in even worse form from the rest of the world.” Most frequently these parents are simply passing on to their own children the violence that was done to them “for their own good.” But even when parents do not resort to spanking or other forms of violence, they often communicate deep displeasure with their children in ways that generate both anger and upset in the child.

Anger is a healthy response to the absence of love and recognition. It is nature’s way of empowering each of us to become aware when we’ve been deprived of a fundamental human need. But for a parent who has been feeling the life-long consequences of inadequate attention and loving as a child, the anger of their own children may feel intolerable, forcing them to confront their own deepest certainty that they don’t really “deserve” love. So, they react, some with great anger or violence, some with great fear, some with rapid emotional withdrawal. What their child learns is two things: first, how scary their anger is and how potentially dangerous unless it is repressed, and second, how overwhelmingly vulnerable their own parents are, how fragile those parents appear to be. Faced with these two messages, the child often learns that their own feelings are dangerous to their own survival and to the emotional well-being of their parents, and so the safest thing to do is to repress one’s own feelings, to try to accommodate one’s parents and their needs, and when that fails (as it inevitably will, because no child can ever fill up the hole of self-deprecating inadequacy felt by their parents) to begin to feel terrible about themselves.

Add on to this the second trauma of childhood: the repression of the natural spiritual awareness of children as they respond to the demands of parents and schooling to narrow their attention to those aspects of their surrounding that will be “useful” in order to succeed. Parents and schools are seeking this “adjustment” in consciousness because they quite correctly read the nature of the social order in which these children will have to find a way to make a living, a social order that rewards people precisely to the extent that they are able to find aspects of their environment that can be turned into commodities to be sold, or able to sell themselves as having the qualities and talents that the corporations and other major employers will want to employ. It rarely occurs to parents that that larger social order could be changed, or that their children’s own spiritual awareness might be a precious gift to be nurtured. Instead, parents worry about whether their children will perform well on objective tests that may be given (in some cases, as early as entrance exams to exclusive preschoolers, in most cases by the time their children are in third grade), which will determine the kinds of schooling that they get and the subsequent opportunities to get into colleges and professional schools that will be the necessary stepping stones to future economic sufficiency. So parents and schools quickly seek to interfere with what they perceive to be a child’s “day-dreaming” (that is, the wandering of children’s minds to all that fascinates them with their world) so that they can teach the children to “pay attention” to the aspects of their environment that will be useful for them in terms of future success. Can they teach their children to manipulate objects to fit into the right size and shape of container; can they teach them to develop the right kind of hand/eye coordination; can they get their children to read early enough, so that they will do well? These preoccupations, of course, are not destructive in and of themselves, but when the are accompanied by high levels of anxiety about the need of children to learn, and high levels of disapproval at children’s attention going elsewhere in “non-productive” directions, they can leave a permanent scar, repressing the child’s spiritual hungers.

For some, the anxiety produced by these anti-spiritual experiences leads them to feel that their spiritual yearnings must be carefully controlled. So, in adult life they feel most comfortable in spiritual or religious traditions where a powerful authority (the pope, priest, minister, imam, rabbi, literal words of the Bible, or official interpretation of the tradition) acts as the anxiety-reducer, assuring people that their spiritual experience is safe as long as kept within the boundaries they set. For others, the unpleasant repression of this aspect of their being lingers as a powerful obstacle, preventing them from allowing themselves to explore their own spiritual needs, denying that they have such needs, or seeking to tame those needs by reframing them in more rational language that is acceptable to the goal-directed norms of a competitive market society. They may feel particularly threatened by a spirituality that is accompanied by invitations to get back in touch with their feelings, since these feelings proved so dangerous as children. I’ve met many such people in the secular world — people who believe that “real religion” is the stuff they hate (authoritarian, chauvinistic, anti-intellectual), and that the more creative forms of spiritual and religious life are “inauthentic” precisely because they lack these qualities they detest. But of course that same dismissal of emotionally alive, spiritually creative religious life gets dismissed as flaky or inauthentic also by those in the fundamentalist or more orthodox versions of any given religious tradition. But when I watched how threatened many people were by the creativity and spiritual aliveness of my teachers Abraham Joshua Heschel, Zalman Schachter Shalomi, and Shlomo Carlebach, though each of them had deep roots in Jewish orthodoxy, I came to understand that it was not commitment to Jewish law but commitment to spiritual deadness that is frequently the major requirement for being acceptable as a mainstream religious teacher.

What can we do to save children from these emotionally and spiritually deadening childhood experiences?

The most important thing we can do is to try to find ways to provide more love and support for parents to work through these childhood experiences and fill up the holes in their emotional makeup so that they are better able to provide emotionally alive and loving energies to their children. We may want to explore therapeutic programs that provide adults with this kind of support, and give this a high priority for funding as a necessary health care/educational issue. Nothing could be more important in building a healthy society than the healing of parents before they transmit their own feelings of inadequacy to their children.

A first step in this direction is to create a climate of understanding about these issues. Unfortunately, dealing with them in an honest and straightforward way often provokes monumental resistance. Only a small part of the population is currently willing to hear this kind of a message without feeling overwhelmingly upset that this might apply to them. Instead of considering the possibility that they have been victims of deprivation as children, a view that would then require them to challenge their own internalized memories of the parents upon whom they depended as children, they turn with ferocity on anyone suggesting that there might have been a problem or deficiency. On the one hand, they unconsciously still feel the need to defend their own parents and blame themselves for what happened, in part because to think otherwise would be to reexperience their parents’ extreme vulnerability and feel a kind of “survival guilt” at doing better than their parents. On the other hand, they feel a strong compunction to observe the fifth commandment: honor your father and mother, which they imagine means that they must not allow themselves to see their parents’ nakedness, vulnerability, and inadequacy.

It remains an open question whether any political movement can emerge which will have the courage to take this issue on directly. It may be that the best that can be hoped for in the short run is for spiritual progressives to develop educational programs independent of their political movement which seek to do this kind of societal education. A spiritual political movement should create an ethos within it which expects that anyone providing leadership or gaining employment within that movement has gone thorugh some such educational or therapeutic process so that they are aware of these childhood dynamics and how they might apply in their own personal lives.

What the political movement can do, however, is to develop a set of behavioral norms that assist in the raising of children. Here are a few:

1. Do not spank or otherwise physically assault your children. Sometimes you may need to restrain children from doing something that may hurt them or others, but in these cases, use the absolute minimum amount of force, combined with the strongest possible communication of love. Do not let others assault their children. Interfere with such behavior whenever and wherever it occurs, and do not accept the alleged “right” of parents to discipline their own children. Challenge violence as unhealthy and hurtful. Similarly, interfere when you see other parents emotionally abusing or devaluing their children.

2. Trust your children’s desires and wants. Children can often know better than their parents what is in their own interests.

3. Protect your children from known hazards to their emotional health, like television. Do not use television as a baby-sitter. Carefully supervise whatever shows you allow children to see. Do not accept violence or depictions of exploitation and domination on television as "natural" or acceptable forms of entertainment, even when these come presented in the form of cartoons or supposedly child-oriented educational shows. Also protect them from addictive and destructive foods like sugar except where it occurs naturally in fruit, or poison additives to foods or to the environment.

4. Challenge the fantasies of meritocracy whenever you hear them being articulated. Help friends and neighbors understand that their own lives are not only a product of their personal efforts, but have been powerfully shaped by forces out of their control. That doesn’t mean that they should then take a “victim stance.” There is much that we can do to change the way our society is organized, but we can never accomplish those changes if we feel that we ourselves have already been “proven” to be inadequate. The task here, as everywhere, is to come to a sense of balance in which one both recognizes one’s own potential contribution to changing one’s situation, and yet recognizes also the nature of the social system within which one lives and the constraints it has imposed. With that two-fold knowledge, one can take the next step: to enter into social movements aimed at changing these realities. But as should be clear from my analysis in the first part of the book, those movements themselves will defeat and destroy themselves unless they contain a major dose of compassion for oneself and each other, and carefully balance the demands for transformation with a powerfully explicit ethos of kindness toward each other and toward those who do not yet agree with your movement.

5. Compassion must be the guiding message of every pro-love and pro-family movement. In noting the ways that families get undermined, our goal is to spread awareness of the difficulties people face. The more that we can have this discussion in public, the more we can reduce self-blaming and make it safe for people to actually look at their own roles, acknowledge where they may be unintentionally hurting themselves and their own children, and then seek support and education about how to change. None of this will happen if the pro-family movement gets perceived as a blaming movement. It is only by reducing the blaming and highlighting compassion that a progressive pro-family movement can begin to provide an effective alternative to Right-wing pro-family movements that take the legitimate concerns about family dissolution and channel them into hurtful and hateful policy directions.