The author documents and reflects upon her activities organizing cooperative childcare and co-organizing a freeskool for kindergarten aged children as an alternative to public schooling and homeschooling. Drawing from her experiences, Mills addresses the topic of anti-oppressive parenting: “I worked hard to figure out how to put everything together—parenting with the intent to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate parenting authority, how to be in control without being controlling, and the desire to parent a free child while avoiding both adult-centered and child-centered practices.”
Parenting a free child involves guiding and teaching life skills while engaging in cooperation, modeling human fallibility, responsibility, mutual aid and respect, all the while conscious of parental intent with respect to anti-oppression. Mills notes, “If we parents oppress our children, we are setting them up to be oppressed, compliant societal cogs. We are training them to be oppressed as adults. Instead, train children to be free, to use their voices as powerful weapons, to stand up, to get together, to call out injustice.”
Mills’ approach to critical parenting --and by extension, critical teaching --is evident throughout the book. “Radically rethinking parenting, I discovered that discipline is not separate from parenting and that parenting is not separate from teaching. I embraced the idea that parenting a free child requires a fundamental paradigm shift, one that demands radical honesty and self-examination in order to shift from authoritarian parenting to cooperative parenting.”
Mills describes a teaching moment during childcare for the FTAA protests, during which she helped to organize a baby bloc. She describes having her daughter take photos of colorful costumes and protest signs from her stroller: “Later, we’d be able to use the pictures she took as a great way to talk more about the costumes, the messages on the signs, why all the people there had gotten together to march, and why all the cops were there.”
In terms of television, Mills discusses watching videos with her daughter, rather than having her child passively consume videos: “We got in the habit of talking about why things were funny or scary, rude or considerate, and the difference between real and make-believe. I started asking questions that would challenge some of the sexist social messages, like, “Why are there only Lost Boys? Where are the Lost Girls?”
Her approach involves guidance and open dialogue, as opposed to dictating prescribed viewpoints on any given issue. Mills also discusses fostering critical thinking skills with regards to advertisements, also by posing questions: “I started to plant critical-question seeds, which with careful cultivation, would grow to help make her aware…If she was old enough to be duped by marketing, she was old enough to start learning how to repel it.”
Methods described for cultivating critical media skills include explaining junk mail, and critiquing commercials and advertising together, as well as buying something depicted on a commercial, and reflecting together about that experience. “Ask your kid if they think the commercial told the truth about the product. After repeating this experiment with Emma-Joy a few times, the results were nothing short of amazing. Disappointed by all but one product, she’d firsthand felt misled by junk-food and toy commercials aimed at her.”
In addition to fostering critical thinking through various parenting moments, Mills describes her involvement and experiences cofounding the Village Cooperative Skool. The educational philosophy of the school included child-based learning through facilitation, creation of a minimally coercive learning environment, fostering community, mutual respect, positive reinforcement, natural consequences, conflict resolution, gently established boundaries, redirection, and rules established by both facilitators and learners together. The Cooperative Skool operated for approximately six months, as organizers struggled to balance logistics. Reflecting on these experiences, Mills offers practical possibilities on how organizing such a project could go more smoothly in the future.
Some limitations of the book, noted by Mills herself, include the fact that since she is speaking from her own parenting experiences, examples are limited to thereto, partnered parenting and she only includes experiences parenting her child up to the age of five.
Nonetheless, Mills comprehensively and engagingly describes her experiences as a parent, offering possibilities to potential parents from thrifty suggestions on saving money and reducing waste with infants, to organizing cooperative childcare and a Cooperative Skool.
Mills’ parenting philosophy and values contrast with most other guides to parenting, and as far as I am aware this is the only guide to radical parenting in book form. Mills considers, describes, and weighs in on major parenting debates, while building on knowledge and discussions in radical parenting zines.
