Raising Changemakers: Parenting Dilemmas Among Environmental Organizers in Kerala, India

Background and Purpose: The objective of this ethnographic study was to understand challenges faced by community organizers in pursuing radical environmental change in Kerala, India. In this presentation, I explore how middle-aged and older adult organizers attempted to transfer knowledge, values, and leadership roles to youth, including their own children. For those pursuing radical change, a major challenge can be passing on their values and social change initiatives to the next generation. Kerala’s environmental movements began among college-age youth in the 1980s, and many of the most active organizers are now middle-aged. Members of this generation of founders are keenly aware of the need to recruit a new generation of environmentalists to their cause. Here, I focus on how concern for sustaining the movement influences parenting practices among these organizers.

 

Methods: This presentation reports findings from twenty-five months of ethnographic fieldwork among environmental justice organizers in Kerala, India. For the bulk of this period (14 months) I lived with an organizer and his family, and during some of this time (3.5 months), I cared for my own baby daughter, allowing me to become closely acquainted with other parents. 37 informal interviews and 60 semi-structured interviews were conducted concurrently with 900 hours of participant observation. Two researchers (the primary investigator and a trained local assistant) were present during participant observation, and field notes were compared daily to reduce bias.  In-situ coding employed MAXQDA qualitative analysis software to identify emergent themes, which were iteratively refined based on further analysis of field notes, recordings, and interviews.

Results: Environmental organizers faced a major dilemma in parenting, rooted in an opposition between their ideologies about kinship and their desire to sustain the environmental movement to which they had dedicated their lives. On the one hand, parents believed in allowing their children to choose their own value systems and paths. This commitment was rooted in many environmental organizers’ own experiences of rejecting the value systems of their parents and kin and re-organizing their lives around environmentalist values rather than kinship. On the other hand, environmentalist parents had a strong desire to pass on to their own children the very values that had, in many cases, led them to part ways with their own kin. Thus, environmental organizers struggled with how to pass their way of life on to their children without impinging on the moral freedom of the latter. The dilemma was made more difficult by the fact that many of their children were drawn to more mainstream ways of life.

Implications: This study highlights one major challenge facing parents who have dedicated their lives to making social change. As I have argued elsewhere, the pursuit of radical social change often forces people to choose between relationships and values. In this case, parenting presents a new twist on this theme. For those who prioritize living out their radical values over sustaining relationships, passing on values to children may be simultaneously inappropriate and highly desirable.