5 Ways Parenting is Political

Written by: Allyson Inez Ford, MA, LPCC

An Individual Pursuit or Part of Collective Action?

We tend to talk about parenting as if it's a private matter- a series of personal choices made behind closed doors, in quiet kitchens, at 3 a.m. feedings. But a growing body of feminist and abolitionist writing insists that parenting has always been deeply, unavoidably political. From the way we value (or fail to value) care work, to the systems we're raising our children inside of, parenting is shaped by power and it shapes power in return. When I became a parent, I worried what would happen to my activism. Little did I know, I was about to embark on one of the most radical journeys yet.

I’m thankful I had teachers like Angela Garbes' and her book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change and Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, and Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson's We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. Let’s break down 5 ways each of these trailblazing, feminist parents talk about parenting as political.

1. Care Work is Labor- and Who Does It is No Accident

One of the central arguments in Angela Garbes' Essential Labor is that the work of caring for children is real, skilled and exhausting labor, and that our collective refusal to treat it as such is a political choice, not a natural fact. Garbes writes from her own experience as a Filipino American mother, drawing out how caregiving has historically been offloaded onto women, and disproportionately onto women of color and immigrant women, so that others (whiter, wealthier, often male) could pursue work that society deemed more valuable.

This arrangement is the product of specific economic and racial hierarchies. When we dismiss caregiving as something that "just happens," or frame it as an expression of love rather than work, we make those hierarchies invisible and therefore harder to challenge. To name caregiving as labor, and to ask who is doing it and under what conditions, is an inherently political act.

2. Pregnancy and Birth Reveal Who Society Values

In Like a Mother, Garbes takes readers deep into the science and culture of pregnancy, and what she finds is that medical institutions (like all institutions) are not neutral. The way pregnancy is managed, who is believed when they report pain, whose birth outcomes are treated as acceptable losses: all of it reflects the politics of race, class, and gender. As a predominantly Latine household, I remember being asked race related questions in my routine pregnancy check ups- one in particular that felt jarring and out of pocket coming from a white presenting provider: “You need to make sure your child’s pediatrician is a person of color, so they take his health seriously.” ?!?! It’s not that she was wrong, but the delivery was harsh and unexpected. There was no follow up discussion on the racial disparity in healthcare of BIPOC children is wrong- just “Make sure you find a BIPOC provider.”

And I would be remiss if I didn’t note my example is a very mild example in comparison to what folks more marginalized than my family experience. For example, Black women in the United States die in childbirth at rates far higher than white women, regardless of income or education level. Garbes situates this not as a medical anomaly but as a political outcome- the result of a healthcare system built on the devaluation of Black life and the erasure of Black women's pain. To give birth, and to accompany someone through birth, is to enter a system that has never been equally safe for everyone. Understanding that is the beginning of demanding something different.

3. Raising Children Inside Unjust Systems Is a Political Act

In We Grow the World Together, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together voices of parents (many of them incarcerated or formerly incarcerated) who are navigating the task of raising children inside and alongside systems designed to harm them. The book argues that parenting cannot be separated from the systems that surround it: policing, incarceration, surveillance, poverty and the child welfare system that often functions as a pipeline into those very institutions.

Schenwar and Wilson ask a radical question: what would it mean to parent toward abolition? Not simply to shield children from harm, but to raise them with an active vision of a world without prisons, without surveillance, without the violence of the state. This is parenting as political imagination, and it requires confronting the ways that "safety," as our society currently constructs it, is often purchased at the expense of the most marginalized families.

4. The Myth of the Individual Family Protects the Status Quo

Both Garbes and Schenwar and Wilson push back against the idea that the family is a self-contained unit, responsible only for itself. In Essential Labor, Garbes draws on Filipino concepts of community and collective care to argue that the isolated nuclear family is a relatively recent and culturally specific invention, one that serves the interests of capitalism by making care invisible and unpaid, and by preventing the kind of mutual aid that might challenge existing power structures.

In We Grow the World Together, Schenwar and Wilson similarly insist that children belong not just to their parents but to communities, and that communities have both a responsibility and a stake in how children are raised. When we frame parenting as purely private, we make it impossible to demand public support: affordable childcare, paid family leave, housing stability- and we let the state off the hook for the conditions it creates. Insisting that children are a collective responsibility is a political demand that pushes back against hyper-individualism.

5. What We Teach Children About the World Is a Political Choice

Perhaps the most intimate way parenting is political is in what we choose to tell our children: about history, about differences, about harm and justice. Schenwar and Wilson are explicit about this: raising children toward abolition means refusing to teach them that police mean safety, that prisons are where "bad people" go, or that the current order of things is natural or inevitable. It means telling the truth about violence, about who is protected and who is not, and about the long history of people who have organized for something better.

Garbes, too, insists that the stories we tell matter, including the stories we tell about care itself. Teaching children that caregiving is valuable, that interdependence is not weakness, that their community has obligations to them and they to it: these are lessons with political consequences. Every choice about what to teach, what to name, and what to normalize is a choice about what kind of world we're building- one child, and one conversation, at a time. Like adrienne maree brown says in Emergent Strategy, “small is all.”

Final Thoughts

Parenting is not an escape from politics or something only for trad wives and conservative households. It is one of the places where politics is most alive: in the body, in the household, in the stories we tell at bedtime. The personal is political, and the political is deeply, irreducibly personal.

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Recommended Reading/ Sources:

• Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Harper Wave, 2022)

• Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy (Harper Wave, 2018)

• Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2022)