Family Work—Progress and Challenges
Special time, play days for young people, play days for adults, and family workshops continue to work well. We have created a great model. They look similar everywhere.
In family work we do many things at the same time. We support parents, support allies, and pay attention to young people in play. We help young people and adults with struggles and fears and support relationships between parents and young people. We share information about RC and young people’s liberation with the young people and assist them in their relationships with each other. Family work is a collective project. Teams work together and think about all its aspects. We use family work to build the RC Communities.
Young people are always ready to use our attention to move their lives forward. We continue to figure out how to make this resource available to them.
PROGRESS
Family work is happening in more Communities. Teams have been forming (or re-forming) in Korea, Japan, China, India, Australia, Nigeria, East Africa, Taiwan, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Newer RC Communities in Africa are using family work as part of their Community-building strategy. The Liberation Reference Persons for Young People, Young Adults, Parents, and Allies to Young People, and the Commonality Reference Person for Family Work, are having conference calls together. We work on the same project in overlapping ways.
We now have the resource and experience to better assist Communities that are new to or rebuilding family work. Skype, conference calls, WhatsApp, Zoom, Signal, and Jitsi are helpful, particularly in the COVID lockdowns. We have been able to model, while being online, playing with young people and helping them discharge. Families that are far apart can keep developing their practice.
We have held constituency-based family workshops and play days for girls, boys, Indigenous people, African-heritage people, Jews, Chicanos/as, Asian-heritage people, adoptive families, LGBTQ+ families, and young people and parents with disabilities. Constituency-based workshops can make it easier for participants to relax and show themselves fully. It can be easier to work on internalized oppression.
We are figuring out how to think about whole families, large families, and families that live far apart from each other in rural areas. We have had play days and family workshops for just one large family (which have made a big difference for the family but haven’t built resource for other families).
We have found ways to keep families connected during COVID, even without physical contact and in-person play.
We keep figuring out how young people can move from family work to RC Community membership. They generally succeed with the transition, though we do need more fundamentals classes that effectively support young people in their Co-Counseling.
CHALLENGES
There are always new challenges. For example, a family of color was stopped by police on the way to a recent workshop. As soon as the play started, the son wanted to play “stopped by the police” and be the severe policeman. Everyone watching got to work on racism. When we follow their lead, young people will show us how the society is affecting them.
Parents and allies are preparing the next generation for challenges that they themselves never experienced. Adult groups have met to discharge on suicide, war, genocide, racism, classism, sexism, male domination, men’s oppression, LGBTQ+ and transgender oppression, sex, drugs, self-abuse, staying safe around police, COVID, and the climate emergency.
It is challenging to talk to young people about the oppressive society and what we in RC understand about the world. Adults are having sessions on the issues their children bring up and finding ways to talk with their children about them.
Many young adults are discharging on whether or not to have children, because of the kind of world their children would face, including the compromised climate.
War and the effects of war present big challenges. Many parents did not have peaceful childhoods or opportunities to play—things that are often taken for granted in some parts of the world. We try to give them some opportunities.
Sometimes parents who are in their early teens show up at [attend] play days. Sometimes fears about war and genocide lead to war games and even fights.
As societies collapse, families—and connection itself—are coming under attack. Worried parents want things to happen quickly. Sometimes people bring four or five family members, or their children’s friends, to family workshops and play days. Sometimes young people arrive unexpectedly. They still have a great time, often because they’ve rarely had any adults play with and think about them, but these situations don’t work very well for the adults or for building resource in the RC Community.
Family work can only be sustained in an RC Community when other work, for example, with parents and allies, is going well and when the Community already values and supports work with young people. This takes time to develop.
Parents want the best help, and sometimes they can’t see themselves as a resource that can be developed.
What we want and what is possible are still far apart. We wish that every young person had a community of adults thinking about them. Ideally each young person at an RC workshop or a play day would have at least one parent and one ally who were there for them. So far this has only been possible in places where there are well-developed RC Communities, often in big cities.
WHERE WE NEED TO GO
We want everything for the young people we care about. We want a world where everyone can have good lives and flourish. We want a family-friendly and sustainable environment. We envision a world where there is enough resource for parents to do the demanding work of parenting without having to worry about financial security.
Our RC Communities need to grow. Family work is one of the most effective ways to make that happen. Participants experience the power of RC. We need many more family-work and parent leaders. We need to teach about family work in fundamentals and ongoing classes and make it part of our personal re-emergence and our strategy for societal change.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
(Present Time 207, April 2022)