Parenting in the Great Unraveling

My oldest son is attempting to launch into his adult life, he knows he doesn't want more of what he has learned in compulsory school. He goes to a progressive farm school where he looks at the stars and makes coil pots, he tends to animals on a farm, he is a poet and meditator, he meditates in his elective, he rows on cold rivers on his crew team and writes essays about duende. Even in this idyllic situation, school has mostly felt like coercion and control, he has raged against this. He wants to learn, but feels what is on offer has mostly been about taking a knee and going with the program, this program is an agricultural Eurocentric and puritan one. The school's tagline is treasure the hard stretching of yourself, which four years later feels violent. I wish he was at a school with a tagline that said, weave yourself into the whole or Listen, Listen. Don't get me wrong, I love my son's school and feel grateful to have had the opportunity to invest in the imperfect attempt to make something meaningful, but I'm facing the reality that my son is not in a powerful stance towards his future, he's sleeping through classes some days and honestly feels disoriented a lot of the time. He needs a mentor, he needs a culture, he needs a job that he can do well for his community beyond vacuuming the library. What does it mean to launch into adulthood when there are no adults to be found? When your parents are overwhelmed with the distractions and demands of the industrial society, when the elders are far away and the songs of our people have been forgotten?

We have tried to raise our kids in consciousness, encouraging them to see and feel deeply and to build their intuitive capacities. We had two of the three at home, we've Waldorfed and home schooled, we have lived in Brooklyn and Vermont, we have attended Quaker meetings and forest bathed and eaten from community supported agriculture and we have raised them with honoring traditions like sweat lodges and Hindu temples. We have tried to create a culture at home which is attuned and reverent to what is sacred, at least we have started to ask, what does it mean to parent when you know the ship has left the port? I'm referring to the ecological and cultural crisis we are unraveling at the moment on planet earth. What does it mean to prepare your children for more pandemics in a pandemic?

When I imagine the future thirty years from now I see food insecurity, mass migrations, extreme weather, rising water and increased social isolation. When you have raised your children to be in non-denial and to listen deeply to their intuition and they fail to launch into the industrial machine culture, should you feel that this is right? Can I tolerate the anxiety of a child who is not in a naive stance towards what is happening in our culture? Would I be more comfortable if he was addicted to his telephone, watching Squid Games and dreaming into college life?

My son is brilliant, his mind is exquisite, his heart is enormous, he is strong and subtle and kind. My wish for him is that he finds a way to weave and to listen, a way to stretch and a patience with the contracting and expanding path of life on earth, even this burning raging, violent earth has beauty and needs him awake and present for all of it. What does it feel like to launch into adulthood now and who can we learn from? Has it been like this before? Can our ancestors come forward and help, even those whose names and songs have been forgotten.