All Your Relations: Building Community Beyond The Nuclear Family

The role of an adult in relation to elder and child. Essay 5 in the series "Conjuring Rites of Passage in Their Absence".

Jan 11, 2026

a painting of animals and trees on a green background

Adults and Kids

I am generally not a fan of parenting advice, but there is no other way to shape this statement: one of your primary roles as a parent of a young child is to cultivate relationships between your child and other adults that are your age and, especially, adults that are older than you, the parent. The earlier this starts, the better, though as the saying goes: the best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago; the next best time is right now.

When your child reaches the age of puberty, ensuring that they have a circle of trusted adults in their life that are not their parents will give them ballast in that very particular storm, and set them up for a life of turning towards older people in times of trouble. The adults in your midst will receive the blessing of having their experience employed in the service of the younger, towards a better day.

And so this essay isn’t really about parenting advice. In the math of what I am advocating for, the largest number of adults in the equation are those who are not the parents of the child in question.

And, so panning out from parenting: one of your primary roles as an adult in a healthy culture is to be engaged consequently in the lives of other people’s children.

One of the marks of mature adulthood is the serving of others, and especially when “others” is taken one level deeper than “not you” to mean people in different life stages and phases than you. This very act of service is one of the main conjurers of usefulness, and so in turn, meaning.1

Elders and Kids

If this is true for parents and adults, it is even more true for elders. In cultures that don’t orbit around the nuclear family, the grandparents and children often spend more time together than the parents and children. Both the young and the old benefit greatly from this arrangement.

From our nuclear family regime and our ethos of busyness, we are likely to see those benefits as free childcare, and a solution to the epidemic of loneliness that plagues the older people in the culture. But there is far more at play here than solving the “problem” of what to do with those that are too young and too old to be a working cog of the economy.

If you have ancestors—not believe in ancestors, but have ancestors, then the place where children are born out of and that elders die into is the ancestral realm.2 The youngest and oldest people in a culture are the closest to that realm in terms of time and space, and so, they share a spirit and soul level commonality that a parent can never achieve with their children. And because the older people won’t be toiling away in the fields or at the office all day, they are able to offer a level of attention to the young ones that isn’t available from their parents.

Stories

One of the pillars that this level of attention is centered around is the telling of stories. Ancestral stories, family stories, myths, parables. Children the world-over love stories, and in a culture with an elder function, it is the elders who are the main keepers of the stories of that culture. That folk and fairy tales are relegated to “children stories” these days is an echo of this remembering. Some of these stories are tens of thousands of years old, and they were never just for children. The children were the ones closest to the elders, and the elders were the ones closest to the stories, and so the children were immersed, and the elders were immersed, and the stories were well-fed and well-met.

Today, this story sharing is usually done by the parents at the end of a long day at bedtime, and at no other time.3 In this culture, the parents reading the fairy tales to the kids aren’t just parents, they are nuclear-family parents, and so by day’s end they are exhausted by being the Godheads of their little universe.

The twin menaces of individualism and self-sufficiency that our culture enthrones visits most mothers as a relentless societal pressure to be the perfect mother, and this gnaws away at them. In this culture, new mothers are especially prone to isolation, guilt, and anxiety.

Those same twin menaces visit fathers, and the societal pressure born of them dictates that fathers financially support the family by any means necessary. Most of the options available are harmful to the earth, or are entirely meaningless in terms of serving life. The father is away from the home for most of the days of the week, and most of the weeks of the year. All of this gnaws away at them.

And these are the two people that are the primary story sharers of their children. If there’s even time. If there’s even two. The stories themselves are already on life support from their being Disney-fied, de-clawed, and relegated to the dustbin of children’s entertainment, but their wings still spread with each telling, even if in a monotone reading crammed in before washing the dishes.

If you have had the privilege of sharing old folk and fairy stories with a child, you know that for a while, the magic and animate world of the story aligns with the magic and animate world of the child, that they feed and play off of each other, that they are familiar to each other. This is not because these are children’s stories, it’s because children are born knowing that everything is alive, just as it is in the old stories. You yourself surely remember greeting a stone or an apple tree or the sun as a living being in your childhood.

That animistic relation with the world gets almost entirely stripped away from children in the West by the time they are school aged, and the school system squelches the rest. The nuclear parents can’t sustain that spark in their child, because chances are that they lost that spark themselves at a young age, and their current middle-world livelihood depends on that spark staying dark.4

The stories they were sharing with their child were simply “stories” and not living dreams from the ancestral realm. There’s no time for that, there’s no instruction for that, and in our culture, there’s no example of that. These are some of the very things that rites of passage address, and that elders uphold.

Where There Used To Be Ancestors and Eldering, We Have Parenting Instead

The word parent comes to us directly from the Latin parentum meaning father, mother, ancestor. The Proto Indo European root *pere, means to produce, to bring forth. The English word, along with its definition of one who brings forth or begets offspring didn’t come into common use until the 15th century.

In the casting out of ancestor from the designation used to describe the heads of a family, you can see the beast of the nuclear family slouching towards our modern time, with the emphasis on your children being what defines your life station, and on your parenting being what crafts the life of your children. You as a parent are the deliverer of meaning to your child, and your child is the deliverer of meaning to you. The word incestual comes to mind.

The erasure of ancestors in the function of parenting isn’t surprising when we remember that severing the link to your ancestors is one of the conditions of conversion to monotheism. When a religion orbits around a parental nucleus God, what was a family of ancestors in a living and polytheistic world eventually collapses into a family of two parents and their children, in direct reflection of the human / God relationship.The nuclear family is yet another constriction not just born out of monotheism, but made in its image.

The opposite of nuclear is extensive, which means vast and far reaching. The Latin root extendre means to stretch out, to spread. What I am pointing to is better said in the inverse: the opposite of extensive is nuclear. Eldering does not fit neatly into nuclear, for it is not bound to blood or standardization. An elder is extensive.

Words live much longer than humans, and so often the story within the changing of words over time tracks the story of a much larger change within the culture over that time, a change that is so incremental that it goes unnoticed in the span of an individual human life. Concerning the word elder and parent, the etymology dictionaries say it plainly: “[Parent] began to replace native elder after c. 1500.”

Where there used to be eldering, we now have parenting.

Parenting The Inner Life

The dominance of the parent function has also found its way into our inner lives. In the realm of psychology (the latest and greatest incarnation of monotheism) the archetype of the child (commonly called the inner child) is prevalent and absolute.

Where we used to have God, we now have Self.

The idea of the inner child creates a parental dynamic within our very own psyche, and as a culture we put extreme emphasis on our childhood and our parental relationships as the primary causes of who and how we are. To say so is hardly novel or controversial, but this is by no means true the world-over.

James Hillman explains it this way:

The principal content of American psychology is developmental psychology: what happened to you earlier is the cause of what happened to you later. That’s the basic theory: our history is our causality. We don’t even separate history as a story from history as a cause. So you have to go back to childhood to get at why you are the way you are. And so when people are out of their minds or disturbed or fucked up or whatever, in our culture, in our psychotherapeutic world, we go back to our mothers and fathers and our childhoods.

No other culture would do that. If you’re out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you have been eating, who’s been casting spells on you, what taboo you’ve crossed, what you haven’t done right, when you last missed reverence to the Gods or didn’t take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom. Whatever. It could be thousands of other things—the plants, the water, the curses, the demons, the Gods, being out of touch with the Great Spirit. It would never, never be what happened to you with your mother and father forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth.5

For those of us raised in a nuclear family, parental god, inner-child enthroning culture it can be hard for us to imagine it any other way. This is the water we swim in, and the song that we sing. But there are still examples of other ways of being in familial relationship if we care to look.

You see this practice in many indigenous cultures, where all of the adults seem to be uncles and aunts of all the children. This is not a failure in language, nor is it a lapse of boundaries. This is this way of relating in practice, or at least a very strong echo of it that survived the catastrophes of colonization. Those uncles and aunts—blood relatives and not—are the ones responsible for tending to the inner life of the children, and their familial titles remind both them and the children of that each time they are used.

In her book Intimacy, Dagarra author and elder Sobonfu Some shares how it was growing up in her village in Burkina Faso. All of the mothers with children were called ‘mother’ by all of the children. The breast feeding was communal, as was the parenting, and the children were welcome in anyone’s home and at anyone’s table. There was no differentiation between ‘birth mother’ and mother for the young children. It wasn’t until Sobonfu was 13 years old that she realized that one of these mothers was her mother. She does not share this story as a vignette of grief or loneliness, but one of deep belonging and connection to the whole.

On Nuclear Family Parenting

Bringing this back to rites of passage, the fact is that in a traditional culture, parents are not directly involved in the passage rites of their children. This is especially true of the coming of age initiation rites.

Traditional cultures know that parents are too close to be of much use to the forging of their child into an adult. The wants, desires, and projections of the parents subvert what and who that child is meant to be. It doesn’t mean they are entirely excluded, just that their function as parents is, as I’ve heard Stephen Jenkinson describe it when discussing this topic, custodial.

That initiation rites have existed for thousands of years cross-culturally tell us that difficulty in parenting pubescent aged children is not a modern or western phenomenon. When a child is on the threshold of puberty they have immense energy pulsing through them.

When puberty takes place in the confines of the nuclear family, the parents are the main proxy for the culture and therefore the target for that energy. This energy generally manifests through the youth as one of two distinct behaviours that are the inverted twins of each other: rebellion or compliance.

It is impossible to know all the factors that determine if someone is going to be rebellious or compliant, for often the same nature and nurture factors lead to opposite results in a pair of siblings, or between genders. Rebellion is generally stereotyped as the act of teenage males, but a rebellious teenage female is by no means rare. Compliance is generally stereotyped as the behaviour style of a teenage female, but a compliant teenage male not difficult to find. In families with two children, often one will be the rebel, and one will be the compliant. Birth order doesn’t seem to influence this.

If you have a nose for it, you can predict with good accuracy which way a child will swing in their puberty by about the age of seven.6 You can’t stop it, but you can prepare yourself for that oncoming maelstrom. If an adult has not done the considerable conscious work of integrating their own adolescent behaviour and energies (one aspect of the tempering that initiation could have offered them), their own adolescent energies are reignited by meeting its likeness in their pubescent child. Only this time, the adult has power and authority to go with their uninitiated energy.

Rebellion + Tyranny

In the case of teenage rebellion, the uninitiated parental energy generally responds in one of two ways.

One is with equal charge, but from the inverse stance. The teenage rebellion is against authority, and so the parent becomes the authoritative foil. The stronger the rebellion, the stronger the authority. The teenager has a seemingly infinite amount of energy in this regard, and it’s almost entirely unconscious—primordial, even. If the parent continues to react from their unconscious, then the miscreant’s behaviour becomes a personal affront to the absolute authority that the parent is certain is theirs, and that authority goes the route of all unconscious and total power when pressed: tyranny.

A parent who occupied the compliant-end of the spectrum in their teenage years can also turn tyrant in the face of rebellion. The energy coming towards them can remind them of how small and reduced their own teenage passage was, and of how they continually tamped their bright hot flame to appease and please others. If they haven’t worked with the grief of this piece of their life before, this news being delivered by their own child’s behaviour is unlikely to be welcome or even noticed on a conscious level. They will simply find themselves in a near constant state of confusion bordering on rage around the life choices of the young one in their midst, and the young one, seeing the power that they have to enrage and confound the authority, increases their rebellion.

Alternatively, the unconsidered and compulsive compliance of the parent was planted so deep in their upbringing that they put all of their parenting energy into forcing compliance, which is an echo of their own proneness to compliance.

Those rebellious teenagers, with their primordial energy never tempered, never integrated, and never acknowledged as anything of deep value and purpose to the culture grow into uninitiated adults with a penchant for dominating behaviour, which will tend to come out anytime there is a perceived threat to their power—most notably in the crucible of intimate relationship and especially in their future parenting.

In the ancestor-free and elder-free soil of the nuclear family, the two generational feedback loop gains power with each successive generation, feeding back in the manner Mr. Hillman points to in the above quote. The more nuclear we go, the more individual we go, and the further we stray from ancestry, elders, and belonging.

Compliance + Enabling

The other end of this spectrum is compulsive compliance, which though less intense than rebellion on the surface, is as equally detrimental in the appearance of a whole and grounded adult on the other side of adolescence.

Consider what emotions enforce compliant behaviour when someone is in a power-under position, as a child certainly is: fear, guilt, and shame. If the parent is in tyrannical mode—a mode that interestingly enough is sometimes conjured by the very presence of compliance, those emotions can be employed and leveraged overtly, but just as often, they are subtly taught as the embodiment of ‘respect’ in what is presented as a regiment of order. The compliant one learns that respecting authority means fearing authority, that using their voice is a punishable act, and that they have no control over their life.

No surprise then that compliant teenagers tend to grow up into boundary-free, conflict-avoidant, people-pleasing adults who confuse feelings of guilt, fear, and shame with feelings of love and respect—in both how they treat themselves, and in how they are treated.

Meanwhile the parental incarnation of the compliant teen, if not tipped over into tyranny as in the examples mentioned above, becomes the enabler. Enablers avoid conflict like a cat avoids a bath, and in doing so they are experts at internalizing all feelings of discomfort, which is their compliance kicking back in.

The enabling parent will meet their child’s rebellion as if they were a teenage friend and not a parent, making excuses for poor behaviour, looking the other way, and in some cases becoming an underling to their own child.

Enablers don’t create compliance, and tyrants don’t create rebellion. But there is a relation.7 I suspect whether a kid is going to rebel or comply is part of their soul-contract coming into this world, and again, the nature and nurture that surrounds them is simply one level of influence on what was always going to come to pass.

In the basking light of an enabler, the rebel kids grow up learning that there is no consequence to their action. The enabling parent is willingly (and tragically) raising an incorrigible child, and this incorrigibility increases the rebellion, for there is nothing more satisfying to rebel against than the image of the golden child, the prince, the princess.

If the child is prone to compliance and their image of being a prince or princess who can do no wrong is what is enabled, then perfection is the order of the day. Perfection is not a natural or balanced state, and it takes an immense amount of energy to present it as such. In this orientation the energies of both the child and the parent are in full collusion. And what is the incarnation of an energy that enforces perfection? Fear, guilt, and shame.

These princes and princesses grow up to be entitled brats in their social bubble that can keep their image of perfection going. Or they are victims of egregious acts of harm when their enforced naivety meets the adult world, and their victimhood gets internalized as part of their adult character, which is yet another form of their enabling going into overdrive to bypass grief, and to prevent meaningful change.

Going into one’s adult years believing that one’s actions and choices are inconsequential is learned behaviour, and is the antithesis of meaning and belonging.

On Parenting Through Community

Enabling and tyranny present as opposites, but they traffic in the same dark matter. Similarly to rebellion and compliance, a person can occupy both stations at different times or around different issues, though there tends to be one that is the stronger manifestation in moments of unconsciousness. It’s that unconsciousness that is the real damage-maker here, and parenting in a similar way to the parenting you received, or in direct reaction to the parenting you received is the natural state of parenting, which doesn’t leave much room for conscious growth while in the teeth of the storm. This is where (and why) the community steps in.

There’s an old African proverb that says this very well: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

Through our modern lens, it’s easy to translate ‘embrace’ into some version of unconditional love; giving the child everything they desire and building their self esteem by insisting that they can be anything that they want to be. Encouraging kids that they can be anything they want to be sounds positive, but below the surface it banishes limits, and obliterates specificity and uniqueness, giving direct rise to the meaninglessness that is so prevalent in modern times.

“You can be anything”, when considered beyond the warm glow of hope, sounds like a recipe for attention deficit disorder, which explains a lot. Traditional cultures know that each person is here for a very specific reason, to serve the earth in a way that only they can. Inclusion and diversity are not enforced, because they are not human-level things to enforce. They are states to be recognized and reflected through the natural world, and through the more-than-human-world.

In a village with initiation rites, that village embrace would be to ensure each child was initiated into an adult, by having the initiation burn off their childhood. On the other side of that embrace and act of unconditional love an adult is forged, one who has a very unique and specific role in that village, ecosystem, and cosmology thereafter. That uncomfortable and meaning-making transformation is where diverse inclusion into the more-than-human-world is conjured.

Building Community and Making Elders

Though initiation rites may not be an option for your child or mine, being in regular congress with a diverse group of adults and elders when the troubles come to call is. But it will not come to pass without your active effort in the matter. Your kid certainly won’t set it up, and it’s unlikely that the other adults will either. Even if they do offer, and attempt to join your family-ing, it’s very likely that your self sufficiency, pride, or general awkwardness around receiving unbidden help will bat them away.

Sending kids off to school and extra curricular activities is not what I am discussing here. There are too many other things at play in those environments—namely power imbalance, the energy of teaching-by-correction rather than by example, and pressure to perform—that makes the energy of friendship that-is-also-mentorship mostly unavailable. What I am advocating here is you making community for your child. And—here’s the other side to this—being the community for other people’s children.

Not having children of your own does not excuse, exclude, or preclude you from this equation. If anything, not having children of your own makes your involvement all the more vital in this culture as many nuclear parents suffer a level of exhaustion from their God-function role that is almost impossible to shake.

These small but important efforts have consequences that fan out far beyond the children. You honour the adults and elders in your circle by asking them to be surrogate grandparents, uncles, and aunts to your little one. Another layer of this? By asking the older ones among you to take up a meaningful role in your life and the life of your child, you are planting the seeds of elderhood in those adults.

An elder is made by a younger person coming to them with a consequential ask, by insisting that they elder. So though rites of the passage into elderhood may not be available right now, a version of elderhood can still be forged by your willingness to summon elderhood from the older adults in your midst.

You have done, and continue to do your best to keep your children mostly safe, mostly healthy, and to inspire and encourage curiosity, creativity, and expression. But if your focus remains on your children into their pubescent age, they remain children, no matter their biological age. You do not have the ability to make adults and elders out of your children. That specific tempering is for others to do.

Children are born. Adults, elders, and ancestors are made. Parenting that includes ancestors is part of the mix, and that whole and embodied parenting function needs to be turned outwards for it to do its work in a way that feeds the world.

Sacred Gestures

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