When many people think about living lives of consent, they assume that the obstacles to always finding solutions and everyone, children and adults, getting what they want will be practical ones. We don't have enough time to think through every issue innovatively or we don't have enough money to satisfy our children's wishes, or we're simply not that good at problem solving. It is easy to rationalize further and tell ourselves that our children are too young to be reasonable or that they have sugar allergies or soft teeth that mean that we can't just let go of the controls on their diet. Yet the truth is that all of these practical problems are soluble. It is not practical difficulties that block our way so much as our own ideas and assumptions. Let's be clear: practical problems do not stop us from helping our children to get what they want. The problem is the way we think; our resourcefulness, our ideas.

Imagine Paula. She is at the airport with her five-year-old daughter, Zoë, half an hour away from boarding her flight from London, where her parents live, to Texas, where she lives. Suddenly, Zoë announces that she has left her favorite teddy bear at Grandma's house and she wants to go back to fetch it. Most of us in this situation think that the problem is one of time: we can't retrieve the bear and board the plane and it's obvious to any adult which of those things has to happen. If Paula is a conventional parent then she is probably willing to offer comfort to Zoë, as long as Zoë doesn't make too much noise in a public place, but Paula will also believe, like most parents, that Zoë has to learn that some things just can't be changed; some things just have to be done whether we like them or not; some things are simply not negotiable.

The real problem though is not the conjunction of practical factors; an airplane departure at 8.30a.m; a bear that is a forty minute round trip away and a distressed child do not add up to an impossible situation in which someone has to lose. The real problem is Paula's inability or unwillingness to think that there is a solution. The solution might very well involve a later flight. It is not actually an immutable law of nature that Paula and Zoë must get on this plane. Although, as parents, we often present our decisions as though there really were no choice, as though our doctor's appointment or need to do some grocery shopping was written into the universe, the truth is that there are choices - as many as our resourcefulness allows us to envisage. On the other hand the solution might include Paula's initial wish that she and Zoë board their flight on time. Perhaps there is a story that they could invent together to make the bear's absence an extra stay with Grandma so that she doesn't have to say good-bye to them all at once or a story to make the time it takes for the bear to be posted to Zoë an adventure. Perhaps a new toy from the airport shop would make all the difference. Perhaps a call to someone at Grandma's house or to a courier service could get the bear to the airport in time. Perhaps Zoë simply needs more information - information about how much extra new plane tickets would cost, using up money she might like for other things; information about how Daddy will be waiting at the airport I Texas and will be sad not to see them for another day - not information that is used to manipulate Zoë with guilt and sentimentality, but real information that she can choose to take into consideration, knowing that the final decision has not already been made.

If Paula wants to live by consent with her child she will tell Zoë that she really strongly prefers that they make this plane. She will tell Zoë why that is what she wants - things that she hopes to be able to do by being home at a particular time; people who are meeting them at the other end; extra expense and what that might mean to their family; effects on their tiredness and ability to enjoy an already long journey. She will make suggestions about alternatives - stories about the bear, a new toy, a trip to the ice-cream shop at the airport, the possibility of someone bringing the bear to the airport for them and how they will deal with it if the bear doesn't arrive on time. Zoë, knowing that her mother wants to find a mutual solution, a way in which both of them can win, will be able to listen and consider without feeling brow beaten, knowing that she doesn't have to sit on the airport floor and cry her heart out to get listened to.

Let's imagine that Paula wants to find a consensual solution. They decide to ring Grandma and ask her to post the bear, but they also ask Grandma to take some pictures of the bear at Grandma's house, the bear being packaged, the bear being handed in at the Post Office. Zoë and Paula take pictures together of their journey and decide to keep a scrapbook of things they do when they get home until the bear arrives so that they can make their own picture narrative of the days of the bear's adventure. In the meantime, an ice-cream, a large cuddly Dalmatian toy from the airport gift shop and the thought of Daddy waiting to meet them at the other end mean that Zoë happily decides that getting on the plane now is actually what she wants to do.

A couple of years later, Paula is at home with Zoë and her new baby, Jacob, when Jacob suddenly develops a high temperature and begins to convulse. The hospital is close to their home and Paula knows that she can drive there quicker than an ambulance would take to reach them and get back again. Zoë has just got a new play station game and Paula knows that Zoë really doesn't want to leave the house today, but neither is Zoë comfortable alone at home and Paula has noticed that both sets of friendly neighbors, who might otherwise sit with Zoë, have gone out today. Paula tells Zoë that this is an emergency, she doesn't have time to talk this through right now, and Jacob needs to get the hospital. This is a very rare moment for Zoë; she knows that her mother doesn't lie to her, that Paula doesn't decide outcomes before discussions, so, despite not otherwise wanting to go to the hospital, Zoë has no qualms about accepting the genuineness of her mother's fears for Jacob and leaves her game without a backward glance.

Ideas, not practical problems are the real building blocks to living by consent; solutions are out there, but we don't always find them because we don't always have ways of thinking about them. We all have inner voices that say 'you can't always win' or 'but teeth have to be brushed no matter what children want' or 'if Jimmie watches too much TV he'll become aggressive'. We all have areas in which our assumptions are poor, often because of the compulsion we have experienced ourselves or because the ideas which we learnt and imitated are in fact false. These ideas can become so strongly held that they are ingrained in us and no amount of reason seems to shake them.

These deeply rooted ideas are well recognized and the scientist Richard Dawkins has given them a name that conveys the way these ideas reproduce themselves from brain to brain. Dawkins calls such ideas memes and although these ideas are deeply embedded, we are not slaves to memes, we can work on them. So what is a meme?

Dawkins talks about memes as being ideas that, like genes, self-replicate.
"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as gene types propogate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propogate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via process, which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. …
Some memes, like genes, achieve brilliant short term success in spreading rapidly, but do not last in the meme pool. Popular songs and stiletto heels are examples. Others such as the Jewish religious laws, may continue to propagate themselves for thousands of years, usually because of the great potential permanence of written records. (From Selfish Genes by Richard Dawkins. Chapter 11)

So memes are simply the building blocks by which culture and ideas spread from one person to the next in learnt behavior or imitation. Dawkins uses the word memes to show how ideas re-produce in a similar way to genes. Memes exhibit the features of evolution. They are inherited in that they are copied; they vary in that the copying is not exact, but is subject to subtle and larger mutations through imperfect copying and there is a process of selection in which the memes that survive will tend to be those which are highly memorable, useful or provoke an emotional response. In the arena of socio-biology there is a lot of argument about what memes mean and whether or not the theory of memes could mean that we are not free, but Dawkins himself and many others insist that we are free people.

The human arena of parenting is full of memes. Most of us have sworn never to be the kind of parents that our own parents were to us and yet most of us soon acknowledge that many of our most deeply rooted parenting ideas come from the way we were treated as children. Whether against our better judgment or not, we will often discover that many of our deepest held parenting assumptions bear more than a passing resemblance to those of our families and to the dominant theories of our particular culture, but that doesn't mean that we have to remain stuck.

Once we begin to believe that practical problems are susceptible to solutions then we can begin to recognize, criticize and change our memes. In short we can rebel by using reason and analysis to weigh the memes by which we parent and educate. This is exactly what we do when we begin to question mainstream parenting and education and when we begin to put counter cultural ideas of education as fun and child-led or growing up as a process of having one's autonomy constantly nurtured into practice. The more we free up our ideas, the more our daily lives change and the results, as we know, can be breath-taking.

© Jan Fortune-Wood, May 2005

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer & parenting adviser, who home educates her four children. Jan works as editor at Cinnamon Press and edits the poetry journal Coffee House Poetry. She is the author of five titles on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting. Jan's new book Winning Parent, Winning Child was published on May 1st 2005 and is now available from www.home-education.org.uk or www.cinnamonpress.com (in US or Canadian dollars) She can be contacted at here