An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline

I just read Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With: An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline. (There's no hyphen in African American here because there isn't one on the cover of the book.) I read it with great interest and a little nagging feeling of guilty voyeurism. Because I am not an African American parent.

And one of the interesting things about the book it that it was not written for me. I usually read books that I am part of the target audience for; even "generic" parenting books. Reading a book written by Black professionals for Black parents made the ways that other books tend to assume whiteness really stand out. I also found it kind of fun when the authors talked about Black people's stereotypes and perceptions of white parenting (that our children are out of control little apes--if I recall correctly, the word "apes" was actually used--and we are pushovers). Sometimes it hit a little close to home.

As the white mother of an African American child, I found the material about dealing with the different stages of a child's life, and figuring out developmentally appropriate ways to talk to them about racism very useful. Including the different standards of behavior that they might have to hold themselves to in order to avoid trouble ("I don't care if all your friends are doing it, if the police see a Black kid doing it they are not going to give you a second chance to explain"). There's a chapter on dealing with pre-teens, and then a chapter on navigating the challenges of letting kids become more responsible for themselves as they move into their teen years. All parents and their children have to figure out how to cope with increasing independence, but for Black parents and children, the stakes can be very high.

I also liked that the book addressed something most parenting books don't: figuring out how to productively address your own childhood baggage and the trauma you may carry so that your reactions to your children are healthy. "Many people should read this," I thought. There was a useful sidebar on ways to know if you're reacting from your own past baggage ("You get instantly furious about something and you don't know why; You find that you are willing to fight to the death over a small issue like which way the toilet paper should roll; You tell childhood stories way too much."). And there were some good ideas for how to get over that.

The book did a good job, I thought, of honoring the reasons why Black parents tend to parent differently than the mainstream middle-class white model, while at the same time asking Black parents to think about the ways they might use physical discipline (or choose not to). There's none of the blanket "spanking is bad and you are a bad person if you do it" kind of thing that other parenting books I've read tend toward, but there is a model here for being mindful rather than reactionary in disciplining children.

I'm a white mom. And I've read about a thousand books on transracial parenting. But this book specifically about Black parenting felt more useful to me in some ways, although I didn't love every bit of it. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation between people who have the experience of both being and raising Black children, and by listening I learned a lot. When I read books that are aimed at white parents raising children of color, there's often still a sense of distance, of talking about "them." This book was all about "us," and that immediacy made some things clearer to me.