an exploration of parent knowledge

If you’ve been following my body of work or the parent engagement space more broadly, you have likely heard the term Parent Knowledge. In this collection, I will explore different aspects of the concept. Before we dive in, here’s a brief reflection on parent knowledge itself.

Everyone holds “funds of knowledge” and that includes their personal, practical, professional, and craft knowledge, garnered experientially, informally, and formally throughout their lives. Only parents possess “parent knowledge,” the particular knowledge held and used by someone who nurtures children in the complex act of childrearing and in the complex context of a home and family. Parent knowledge reflects the ways in which a parent knows their child in a way that no one else ever will, including their teachers.

Every parent has knowledge to contribute to their child’s teaching, learning, and development - relational, intimate, bodied, embodied, intuitive, and shifting knowledge. One of the critical attributes of parent engagement is that it uses parent knowledge; that’s how you know it’s engagement and not parent involvement.

Parent Knowledge as Bodied.

Within parent knowledge, there is an element of physicality. Parents know their children in bodied ways, as their physical bodies – theirs and their children’s – interact in the home and family environments. When we consider babies, the physical relationship between parent and child is expressed in life-sustaining processes such as feeding, diapering, bathing, and rocking. As children grow, it can be seen further in an expression of shared play – in singing songs, doing crafts, playing sports and games together; in engagement in household activities.

As children become young adults, the physicality of the parent child relationship shifts to include the parents’ mentorship of teens into adult activities – teaching them to drive, sharing a hobby, helping them learn the skills needed to take up a part time or summer job.

Through the many ways in which parents’ and children’s bodies connect, and through all of their sensory interactions – touching, holding, watching, listening, talking – parent knowledge is generated, held, and used.

Parent Knowledge as Embodied.

Parents also know their children and hold and use their parent knowledge in ways that are both situated in their body and innate. Embodied parent knowledge is the knowledge that exists within a parent and is tied to their bodily orientations.

Anecdotally, having been formally educated as a teacher, and having read a great deal on childrearing and parenting during my pregnancies, I had to work hard as a new mom to trust and act upon my embodied parent knowledge. Wanting to do things the ‘right’ way, in ways that experts advised, there were moments when I did not trust my ‘gut instincts,’ when I did not trust what I knew in the very core of my body. I regret that I did not trust what I knew in some of those moments, that I did not listen to my embodied parent knowledge.

What I did learn with time and experience is that no expert, even a trusted family doctor, knew the dynamic of my family the way I did; no expert knew my children, their emotions and responses, better than I did; no expert understood my beliefs about children or my hopes and dreams for my children and my family in the same way that I did. My embodied knowledge, the knowledge I received from my body’s cues in those particular and contextual moments, was an important source of knowledge for me as a parent.

Embodied parent knowledge is what our body is telling us, what we instinctively know to be true about our families, our children, and ourselves as parents.

Parent Knowledge as Intimate.

Parent knowledge is intimate knowledge as it is constructed, held, and used in some of the most private places of our lives and with people that we share some of our most personal and vulnerable moments with. Because parent knowledge arises in the context of care giving and care receiving, it is connected to the very functions of daily life, those undertakings that attend to the health and wellbeing of family members and those that attend to their illnesses as well.

As a result, it reflects an intimate knowledge of a child that few others possess. Further, homes are often the places where people are their most authentic selves. They can be places of unconditional love and acceptance, creating space for family members to be their rawest, their most emotional, and their most honest selves. In such a context, parents often come to know their children’s gifts and talents, their vulnerabilities and sensitivities, and their greatest joys and sorrows in ways to which others are never privy. It is out of such an intimate knowledge that parents develop their hopes and dreams for their children; their desire for their children to realize the possibility that the parents know exists at the very core of their children’s being.

Parent knowledge, seen through this lens, is unbelievably special, personal, and bonding.

Parent Knowledge as Intuitive.

A parent’s knowledge can exist, unspoken, intuited. It can be described as a private, unspoken language that is shared between parent and child, a language that only they can understand. In this same way, I see the impossibility of capturing all of what parent knowledge is, all of the ways in which it is generated, held, and used by parents, in ways of knowing that are concrete, tangible, bodied, or embodied. Something exists in parent knowledge that moves beyond even these elements to dimensions of knowledge that are abstract, non-rational, situated perhaps in the metaphysical, what I am calling here intuitive. The intuitive aspect of parent knowledge speaks to that knowledge a parent holds and uses, which is transcendent, which moves beyond what is perceptible to the senses.

Parent Knowledge as Uncertain.

Finally, parent knowledge is uncertain. Existing within parent knowledge is a sense of uncertainty. Whether that parent knowledge is relational, bodied or embodied, intuitive or intimate, it is knowledge which reflects a moment in time. What parents know, how they know it, and with whom that knowledge makes sense always depends on time and space.

For instance, what you know to be true about your child today may be starkly different than what you know to be true about them 10 or 20 years, or even 10 or 20 minutes down the road. Parent knowledge is knowledge that is constructed, held, and used in the dynamic context of a family, a unit of people who are always in flux. As a result, that knowledge is complex and ever-changing.

Parent knowledge reflects the best of what a parent knows at any point in time. The philosopher Derrida once said that uncertain knowledge is the reality of human life, after all.