Baby anarchists are the cutest anarchists

April 25, 2015 6:57 PM

I just picked up this book on collective/anarchist childcare and got intrigued by the concept....help me find more!

I just happened to find a book on anarchist childcare - care for families, kids and parents through collective action. I can't seem to find other books on it, and a Google search just turned up a lot of blog posts about how parents, families and children are often left out of anarchist movements. I'd be really keen to find other books that address anarchist childcare, that are less about getting left out of a movement and more about how it works and success stories.

I'd also be interested in reading more about anarchist parenting specifically, but what I've found online so far has involved "attachment parenting" and "unschooling", which I'm less interested in reading about. Are there other forms of anarchist parenting?

posted by Toddles to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Not sure if this quite fits the bill but I know there's some stuff based around Non-Violent Commuication for parenting & education. The wiki page has some links (footnotes 8-14).

Also, I doubt he considers himself an anarchist, but Alfie Kohn has some amazing ideas around education and parenting that I find are very challenging to many of the prevailing popular ideas on these subjects in a way that's sympathetic to anarchist principles. He is particularly critical of how *power* is used and abused to get compliance -- I haven't really come across much else in parenting that really talks about power. Kohn can be rather polemical, at least in his parenting stuff, rather than practical advice-type stuff. But there is a more hands-on, practical book called "How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So They'll Talk" which I think embraces the same concepts.

In childcare specifically, the "RIE" concepts are interesting and respect-based, and can be applied in a professional environment (my kids/ daycare uses it in the baby/early toddler room).

Although the above often gets lumped in with "Attachment parenting" I think it's quite different.. unfortunately Attachment Parenting is at best a very narrow interpretation of attachment theory.
posted by 8k at 7:18 PM on April 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

You might be interested in Taking Children Seriously; Google can tell you more about it.
posted by metasarah at 7:34 PM on April 25, 2015

Would Summerhill count? Also maybe this book, although it is addressed to children rather than parents.
posted by homelystar at 7:51 PM on April 25, 2015

If you're non-religious, you might enjoy Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion and the companion book, Raising Freethinkers. Both provide some good perspective on raising kids to question everything (in a healthy way), to develop compassion and empathy, and to find ways to work around the ways in which society is (weirdly) structured around religion.
posted by VioletU at 7:58 PM on April 25, 2015

Check out this Radical Childcare Collective in Chicago.

http://www.chichico.org/

I know them, they're all anarchists, and they widely connected to other similar childcare groups around the US. Might be a good start.
posted by meeeese at 12:42 AM on April 26, 2015

I would think that unschooling would actually be the definition of anarchist parenting for older kids.
posted by yarly at 6:04 AM on April 26, 2015

There's an excellent section "The Anarchists on Education" in Patterns of Anarchy: A Collection of Writings on the Anarchist Tradition, the book that made me an anarchist. Subsections are "The Nature and Aims of Education," "How Not to Educate," and "The Scope of Anarchist Education," and there are selections from Herbert Read, William Godwin, Paul Goodman (whose Growing Up Absurd you might want to investigate), Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, and others.
posted by languagehat at 7:35 AM on April 26, 2015