Against future-oriented parenting

Because children aren't products, they're people.

Jul 28, 2026

Early on in my parenting journey, I started asking myself a question whenever I found myself getting overwhelmed or impatient with my children:

What am I afraid of?

I don’t know what inspired me to start asking it. I don’t even know how I came to the understanding that fear or anxiety were often the primary emotion driving my most intense moments of frustration. Almost certainly it was some lightbulb moment of connection that happened either while reading or in the wake of reading one of the countless books I read as a new parent, singularly compelled by a desperation to do right by my children.1 But whether it was one specific book or just the conversations in my head engendered by many of them I can’t say; it was too long ago now. Regardless, it became a foundational question I would repeat and return to each time I began to feel that slow creep of irritated heat climb up my chest, threatening to boil over into my head and spill out of my mouth. Of course I wasn’t able to remember do this in every situation, all the time. But if I could do it — if I could somehow remember to wade through that hot sea of frustration and grasp for those words, which most of the time I could—2 they often immediately served as a cool sea breeze that would settle the heat.

What am I afraid of?

The question, for whatever reason, took me out of irritation and into curiosity. It served as a reminder to stop, to think, to reconnect with myself and assess the situation at hand. Occasionally, my brain would stamp its proverbial foot and petulantly declare I’m not afraid of anything! and then I’d know that whatever was happening was more about my own inner child than my actual children, that I needed to take a second and tend to her.

An accurate representation of the inner child who might petulantly taunt myself for my own psychobabble. Damn would a Shirley Temple hit right now, though.

But often I could identify that I was in fact parenting from a place of fear, and that usually the type of fear could be distilled to a variation of one of following two themes:

Fear of others’ judgement;
Fear that something happening in that moment would reflect, define, or predict something negative about my child’s future.

In truth, most of my least proud parenting moments happened because of fear number one; when I think back at all the times I caved into authoritarian parenting,3 all the times I felt least authentic and least in integrity in my parenting, it was usually because of worry of what other people thought of my parenting. I could probably write an entire article about fearing judgement in parenting, the way shame, when left unchecked, can become a powerful force in our relationships with our children, and maybe I will someday. But for now I want to focus on fear number 2:

THE FUTURE.

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In the late stage capitalist world in which most of us are parenting — and by “most of us” I mean my readership, the vast majority of whom I understand to be reading from within the imperial core — THE FUTURE is assumed to be the primary motivator in parenting. In fact, it’s the whole point, right? We are bombarded, constantly, by messages that tell us our purpose as parents is to produce successful adults. Implicit in the words we use to describe parenting — “raising children;” “childrearing;” “upbringing” — is an orientation toward the future, the idea that parenting is a linearly progressing endeavor toward a specific end goal. And we are told that every choice we make - from how our babies sleep to what schools our kids attend to how we “discipline” our teens - should be made with an eye toward that end goal. Everything we do is an investment in how successful they are once they’re grown.

This messaging, of course, relies on a tactic assumption that the whole purpose of being a child is to be raised into an adult. But this linear conceptualization of life is neither universal nor accurate, and, like so much of what we’ve naturalized and internalized, is instead a construction borne of the toxic interplay between colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. When we look at pre-colonial and indigenous understandings of the lifespan and child development, though, the conceptualizations of childhood is very different.

Take, for example, the Maori. The word for children in Maori is tamariki, a word derived from tama-te-ra, the central sun, the divine spark. In Maori cosmology, tamariki are the “physical manifestation of aeons and aeons of ancestors, and embody the achievements of those who have gone before them,”4 a sort of “repository of the combined strengths, knowledge and abilities, of their ancestors: taonga or treasured gifts.”5 In this understanding, children are not just representative of the future, not just worthwhile because of who they might become in the future, but a throughline between past and future from which adults are expected to learn from as much as they teach.

And this understanding is actually a commonality the Maori share with many other indigenous cultures. The Indigenous Connectedness Framework, developed in 2019 by Dr. Jessica Sangiq Ullrich (a tribal citizen of the Nome Eskimo community in Alaska) and based on a review of the literature regarding conceptualizations of child development and well‐being among Indigenous peoples across the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand foundationally puts children at the center or “heart,” of indigenous societies, the link between family, community, generations, spirit, and land.6 For the majority of these cultures, childhood is understood a complete state of being unto itself rather than a stepping stone or less developed version of humanity than adulthood, and children are seen as “bringers of light”7 with “status, responsibility, and respect”8 rather than adults in training waiting to be molded. Meanwhile, Dr. Stacey Patton, who has done beautiful work disrupting the idea that spanking and other corporal punishment is a “distinctly Black [American] tradition,” writes that pre-colonial “West Africans believed that children came from the afterlife, that they were gods or reincarnated ancestors who led profoundly spiritual lives and held extraordinary mystical powers that could be harnessed through ritual practice for the good of the community.” In other words, there’s good evidence that indigenous and pre-colonial ways of knowing oriented not toward hierarchal understandings of the relationship between adults and children, but mutuality and reciprocal knowledge exchange, an understanding that children are not just adults-in-training but one of the many valuable and valued ways to be a human in the world, with insights and strengths unique to that time.

"Juanita Writing on a Wall,” as photographed. by W. Eugene Smith around 1953,

So while Western culture may have convinced us that it is natural to think of children as individual products that individual parents optimize into fully formed and productive adulthood, we need only look toward these indigenous and pre-colonial ways of knowing to understand that worldview is not a reflection of objective truth, but a cultural construction. And not only has it been constructed by a culture, but this narrative also helps to construct and reproduce a culture. It does cultural work. We haven’t internalized an industrial capitalist obsession on product rather than process, on linearity rather than cyclicality, because it’s somehow the objectively correct way to approach the world, but because instilling the belief in people that it’s the objectively correct way to approach the world is a project that has been very, very successful at at consolidating power and resources among a small segment of the population. And one need only look at the foundations of Western conceptions of childhood to see how they parallel and buttress the needs and desires of that small segment of the population. The earliest understandings in Western culture of childhood as a distinct stage are inextricably woven in with narratives of colonial capitalism, from John Locke’s “tabula rasa” — the idea that children are born blank slates and must be shaped, primarily by their parents, an idea that is structurally parallel to his ideas that “uncultivated” native lands simply awaited European development — to the early twentieth century evolution of “developmental psychologists” like Luther Emmett Holt and John Watson, whose theories of childhood reflected the mechanization and optimization of industrialization. These latter theorists, who promoted what they argued was a “scientific” approach to parenting called behaviorism, emphasized rules, discipline, order, and rigid routine. By following strict protocols, many of which were explicitly modeled on the procedures and routines of the hospital, factory, and farm, Holt and Watson argued that parents could “produce” a child “who finally enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.”9 The goal was, of course, to get children to that independent future where they would conform to “polite society” as quickly as possible. Too much affection — and specifically too much “mother love” — was on the other hand a “dangerous instrument,” one that might “ wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

It is not surprising that the mechanization of parenting proliferated during the Fordist/Taylorist10 era of increased mechanization; it is not surprising that feminine energy and affection was becoming maligned during a time of women’s suffrage; it is not surprising that so-called experts sold middle- and upper-class white parents “rational” paradigms and practices to distinguish themselves from traditional, global-majority parenting practices at precisely the time when so many feared that Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States was being threatened by increased immigration and the abolition of slavery. Of course parenting has been of especial interest to the ruling classes; as Rupa Marya and Raj Patel write in the masterwork Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, colonialism is

the invasion but also the subtle centuries-long dynamics of normalizing restructured relationships of power. In order to create a new normal, you need to control how society is reproduced. This is why colonialists have always held a deep concern for the institutions of that shape the consciousness and behavior of colonial subjects: the school, the jail, the hospital, the workplace, and the household.

But the fact that colonial capitalist ideals have so infected our understandings of childhood remains invisible — even, often, to those who consider themselves leftists, or abolitionists, or Marxists, or anti-imperialists, those who otherwise find themselves adept at deconstructing white supremacy and capitalism in other domains — precisely because children are the most marginalized members of our society. It hasn’t been widespread to wonder where the idea that parenting is a fundamentally hierarchal endeavor where one “raises” a child into adulthood came from because we have so naturalized the idea that adulthood is center.

And this is why I always say the quickest way to start embodying decolonial ideals is to start rethinking your relationship to children.

Adulthood is not objectively “the end product” of childhood— because, after all, does adulthood end? Is there a monolith of adulthood, an age where we are fully formed and stop learning and growing? Obviously not. It is an ever-evolving process. We are all always growing and learning; this isn’t specific to childhood. And part of how many of us evolve, how we learn and grow is through our relationship with children. Children teach us just as much about what it means to be human as we teach them. Childhood can be understood, then, as valuable as it is and not as preparation for anything else.

Children aren’t products; they’re people.

So what if we parented our children as they are now, to validate their humanity and needs now rather than in service of the future?

What if we gave ourselves permission to be in relationship with them as they are rather than struggling to find the right recipe to create who we think they should be in the future?

What if we trusted that our children would become loving, respectful, helpful members of our communities in the future because we trusted ourselves to serve as potent models of how to be loving, respectful, helpful members of our communities — and we included them in those communities — in the present?

What if we let parenting become a journey of discovery rather than a performance of expertise?

Look, I’m not arguing that it’s possible to completely divest from thinking about our children’s futures. I named this piece “Against future-oriented parenting” because it’s short and snappy and because in this attention economy short and snappy is compelling, but I’m also not denying that many of my parenting choices have been and are continued to be made with an eye toward the long game. Obviously even in indigenous and pre-colonial communities that value childhood not as preparation for adulthood but as its own worthwhile and spiritual phase of existence, children are seen as members of a community and, as such, are prepared to be members of community throughout all of those worthwhile and spiritual phases of existence. What I’m instead encouraging us to divest from is the idea that all the choices we make in the present should be overdetermined by a fear that we are not setting up our children for an optimal future. That if we don’t sleep train them now, they will never sleep. That if they are not reading by age 5, they will be “behind.” That if we go to a playdate and they spend more time in our laps than playing with friends, it means they will be antisocial or never gain independence. That if they don’t do enough “enrichment” activities they won’t be able to get into a good college, and if they don’t get into a good college, they won’t have a chance at a financially secure adulthood. I’m encouraging us to critically engage with the ways this kind of thinking serves a colonial capitalist machine more than it does us or are children. Because the truth is, we actually never know what’s coming next, anyway. Everything — the world, our children, and us — are changing all the time, in ways we cannot always predict. And our constantly trying to optimize toward one assumed goal is often impeding us from seeing all the possibilities that could transcend it. Seeing parenting as a sort of world building for the future prevents us from understanding that we are building the world through our parenting right now.

A quote from bell hooks’ “Outlaw Culture,” as represented on the excellent Instagram account @savedbythebellhooks

Rooting our parenting in the present shifts us from paradigms of optimization and fear toward one of acceptance and trust. It relinquishes the illusion of control we have over who our children will be and anchors us in appreciation and curiosity for who they are. Paradoxically, it is precisely this kind of presence that promotes strong, secure relationships — and not just with our children, but with ourselves. By leaning into the idea that we can respond to our children as they are and understand what they need in the present, we are not just validating and nurturing them, but we are building our sense of trust in ourselves. It reclaims our sense of what we know to be true from those who would evaluate and advise and train us out of it, both in parenting and our lives at large. Trusting ourselves is radical. Trusting ourselves and our children is revolutionary.

In other words, we don’t have to explicitly parent toward the future to powerfully invest in the future.

Future-oriented parenting is a construct of a capitalist paradigm that fetishizes mastery and hierarchy (ie ambition, status, wealth, competition, etc) above all. Nurturing children responsively, being in relationship with them as they are now, is an act of resistance against those forces.

And THAT is the best true hope for our collective futures.

In love and solidarity,

Robina

Speaking of inner children, at the start of the year one of my intentions was to continue making monthly playlists like I did in 2025, because in that year I had discovered that the practice was potent inner child work for me. Alas, 2026 has thrown too many disruptions my way to have held fast to that intention in the first half of the year, but I did spend some time making a July playlist, and if you’d like to hear it, it’s here:

And on another note to you, dear reader, I have endeavored to keep most of my writing free (at least for large swaths of time, though some do eventually convert to paid) so as to remain accessible to the widest readership, but my family does in fact rely on and deeply appreciate those of you who still choose to sustain me in doing this work, especially now more than ever as the Trump administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has further emboldened insurance companies to deny coverage for my midwifery clients. My practice is currently 65% sliding scale to make up for the new insurance denials, which has meant a huge loss of income for my family for the same amount of work. Your subscriptions actually really does matter to us, perhaps more than you know! If it is within your means, you can upgrade your subscription now:

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