Are Mothers Getting Pushed Out of Group Practice?

- March 28, 2021

There is a lot of bad advice on the internet, and most women are well aware that everyone has an opinion on child-rearing. This does not seem to exclude sites on heathenry unfortunately. If you look for information on raising heathen children on the internet, you are sure to be disappointed.

First of all you have to weed through all the instances where the word “heathen” is used in a different context from what you strictly meant. Perhaps, you choose to go the raising pagan children route instead, to see if that improves the content that comes up. You will soon see you are just replacing one unsatisfying result with another. If you do manage to sift through all the stuff that presents very clearly as garbage you still will not like what you find.

We are really still at the building stage here with heathenry, and sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and write the rule book ourselves. If heathen women want information about heathenry and child raising, we really need to share our stories with each other. Our successes and failures can help out other heathen women in the community. What works for you, might work for other people, but at the same time it will never be one size fits all. There are many different dynamics at play within heathen households worldwide.

Now, I am no expert on this topic admittedly, but I don’t feel I can really hurt the narrative at this point.

What irritates me most is advice I have seen on children and group practice. I have viewed content suggesting that people should look carefully at kindreds and heathen groups and pick groups that align with their own interests. On the surface, this seems like sound advice. However, this particular content went on to say that if you have children and no one else in the group does, then that is perhaps not the group for you. Hold up! Just exactly how many groups and kindreds do you think are out there for us to choose from? Suddenly, a person with children can only choose a community that already has children?! For all the talk of needing to build a sustainable heathenry that is pretty rich. Sites are actually suggesting to not join groups based on your child status. There is just so much wrong with that.

It makes sense that not all rituals are necessarily child-friendly on some level, but it seems like to some extent that should be left to the discretion of the parents. For example, some parents are not comfortable with their children being at any events where drinking is going on. That is up to those parents. Drinking is an adult activity, and it could be seen as a learning moment for your child to understand that. Unfortunately, within heathenry drinking has become more of an institution than perhaps it should be. This is not just problematic for excluding families, but also people who are recovering alcoholics, have health issues, and any other reason why they might not want to be drinking. However, the exclusion of children at community events goes beyond just whether there is alcohol present. Some groups just don’t welcome children.

The problem is not so much that heathen events are always child friendly, but more when all the events put on by a group are not child-friendly. Parents should not be forced to choose between practicing their faith outside the hearth and their child. The child is going to win, but the parent is going to be left feeling unfulfilled. Parents, and especially mothers, are constantly being forced to choose between social interaction and their child. There is no reason to make this more difficult for them within the heathen community as well.

I think the community needs to take a good long look at their motivations for keeping ritual adult-only. A lot of great heathens, and mostly mothers, are getting excluded from group practice because they have children. If we want our community to grow in a healthy multi-generational way, we need to change how we work with families and with mothers, and set up practice that can be inclusive to all.

On the other end of the spectrum, we should not expect women to reproduce just to grow heathenry. That sort of misogynistic garbage has no place in heathenry at all. If you are suggesting that you are way out of line. There is too much of that in other religions already, we don’t need to carry it over into heathenry. One of the best things about heathenry really is that it encourages people to do their own research and express their own thoughts. It is decentralized, and that means all voices matter. Women have the right to choose what they do with their bodies, and beyond that they have the right to decide if raising a child is right for them. No matter what their choice is they should be respected for it, and it should not cause them to be limited in their participation within the community.

Thank you to all the people who gave me their honest opinions when I asked them about this subject. I actually ended up with so much to discuss on the topic of parenting that this is going to be a part 1 of 2. Stay tuned for the next installment. (Hopefully tomorrow.)