Introduction to Building Sustainable Relationships with Our Children — Sustainable Relationships

What characterizes the parent-child relationship?

What characterizes the parent-child relationship?

Most familial relationships are generally not chosen by us. We are born into them. While we select many of our other relationships (such as friendships and romantic relationships) based on the qualities we desire, familial relationships are often determined solely by shared genetics and/or circumstance. This can sometimes make it hard to cultivate sustainable relationships because, as the saying goes, we can’t choose our family. Just because you share the same genes with someone doesn’t mean you will easily cultivate a balanced, sustainable relationship.

I believe that love should be the center of all sustainable relationships we cultivate in our lives. But of all the types of micro relationships, the parent-child relationship holds the most expectation of unconditional, unrelenting love. When children are young, this relationship is very high frequency, in very close proximity, and is essential to the survival and development of the child.

Familial relationships are always the first relationships to develop in a person’s life. Your relationship with your mother began at the moment of your conception. No matter who you are, the first relationship you ever had was with your mother. It was largely a one-sided relationship, like our macro relationship with Earth. You depended solely on your mother for all of your needs, sometimes to her detriment. The fact that you exist means that she met those needs, at least to some extent. Pregnancy, particularly in humans, is very baby-led. Babies consume many of the mother’s resources, much more than our closest non-human relative, the chimpanzee. Human newborns enter the world with about five times more fat than chimpanzees and with much bigger brains.

But unlike our macro relationship with Earth, the mother-child relationship shifts from being almost completely one-sided to more balanced interactions later in life. As children grow and develop, the relationship graduates to more “give-and-take” instead of just “take.”

Length of Childhood in Humans

Humans are characterized by our very long childhoods. While many species spend 5–10% of their lifespan in childhood, humans are not usually considered adults until almost 25% of our expected lifetime has passed. This characteristic of humans is key to our uniqueness as a species.

Challenging and demanding gestation, along with a lengthened childhood, necessitates more than one caregiver for our species. This role is often filled by fathers. Mammalian fathers are usually simply sperm donors. Even when compared with other primates, our closest relatives, we see males trying to spread their seed far and wide without much investment in the offspring once they are born. At some point during the evolution of apes, humans diverged from the rest and men started to contribute to providing for their young.

Grandparents are the other common caretakers worth noting here. Female humans appear to undergo menopause earlier than other primates. It’s thought that this long post-reproductive period in a woman’s life evolved so that grandmothers could be more available to help care for future generations.

So when I say that cooperation is in our genes, I hope you see what I mean. I wrote this article for parents. Mothers and fathers, of course. But many people cooperate to parent children. There are lots of roles that I didn’t include here: aunts, uncles, godparents, cousins, teachers, etc. This article is for all who participate in the rearing of young people.

Although childhood is very long in humans, “babyhood” is shorter than it is in our closest relatives. If you’re a parent, you know firsthand how quickly children’s time in infancy flies. They grow and change daily. Human babies are usually weaned between one and four years after birth whereas our closest ape relatives nurse for about twice as long. It’s the later years of childhood that are extended, not infancy. Even after puberty, which is when humans become sexually mature and able to reproduce, they are still not considered adults. Why is this?

Humans, like all other organisms, have evolved to adapt to our environment. The most useful and beneficial trait we have acquired is our sophisticated consciousness. We have evolved the ability to understand and interact with our world in ways that are unmatched among the kingdoms of life. We manipulate our environment in ways no other animal has managed. Few other species value and benefit from cooperation as much as we do.

The systems we have in place have many moving parts. We have to learn values, norms, behaviors, and skills that allow us to move through these complexities and collaborate with each other effectively. Learning in childhood has been prioritized by people so much that we have developed an entire organized system for training prospective adults: formal education A.K.A. school. So the part of childhood that is extended for us is later — after our brains have developed enough to gradually take on the task of being a part of collective humanity.

That is our goal for our children, isn’t it? We want our children to grow up to be their own true selves and hopefully, contributors to collective humanity. If we want this for our descendants, the extended learning time in childhood should be spent immersed in sustainable relationships. These are the first relationships they will ever experience. They should model what the most sustainable relationships look like.

The Importance of Building Sustainable Relationships with Children

I mentioned the basic requirements of a sustainable relationship in my first post. Let’s recall what they are. Sustainable relationships must:

• be desired by, agreed upon, and feel good to both parties involved

• not cause harm to other parties

These requirements do not apply only to relationships with adults. Relationships with children need to be sustainable. They are the first micro relationships to be experienced and they are very high-frequency for an extended period of time. Childhood is a long growing process and most of it should be spent showing our children what sustainable relationships look like.

“Traditional” parenting is often characterized by violence, both physical and emotional. Many American parents think hitting a child is appropriate or necessary. Yelling at children is almost ubiquitous in households. Do children desire these actions? Do they agree to these conditions in your relationship? If you ask a child in your life how it feels when a parent yells at them, which I encourage you to do, do you think they would say it feels good? The answers to all three of these questions is no, so these interactions do not support sustainable relationships. Many parents would say they traditionally parent because it’s in the best interest of their children, but those adults are often engaged in many unsustainable relationships themselves due to their own lack of knowledge about and practice with sustainable relationships. This is not the parents’ fault. When a child needs to learn to do something, we encourage them to practice. Yet, we don’t give children enough practice experiencing sustainable relationships.

Remember in my last post, I introduced the idea that our unsustainable relationship with Earth is linked to our relationships with each other. I said that the way toward a sustainable planetary ecosystem is through building sustainable relationships with each other. We need to start at home. Removing the harm from our homes and establishing sustainable relationships as the very first relationships is the first step toward global sustainability.

I hope you’ll be back here for future posts about how to build sustainable relationships with our children.