There are facets of my identity that I share with Ollie and Ethan, my sons. We are all American, our biological sex is male, and we both share parts of our DNA. All of these things are categorized as vertical identities, things that I shared with my children.
Horizontal identities are identities that my children do not share with me, but they will likely find with people in their own generation. For example, they are mixed race, I am not. Ethan has a disability, and I do not. My children may not share the same sexual identity and/or the same gender expression as me.
Add all of this on top of the normal generation gap issues like music, and movies, along with the dramatically different way technology is integrated into their lives than during my generation, contribute to a very different experience my children will have growing up from my own. If you take this a step further, Ethan and Ollie grandparents and them have even more than a generation gap, they have a chasm of differences in their identities and their life experiences.
It is not uncommon children who do have horizontal identities have challenges with their parents. For example, straight parents with a Gay child, hearing parents with a deaf child, cis-gender parents with a transgender child. All of these situations are difficult in the best of the situations, and traumatic and scarring in the worst of situations.
When you don’t share life experience, and more importantly don’t share identities with your children, you as a parent need to extra work around gender. You will never know what it’s like as a father to be a girl, so if you’ve got daughters you have to work extra-hard to be feminist and do right by your daughters. I don’t know what it’s like to be mixed-race, so I’ve got work to do.
The reality is that if you create a family where children feel free to explore the many facets of their identity it is more likely than not that your children will differ than you in some way, and it’s incumbent on you as the parent to try understand this identity and support it. It may be something like sexual identity, or it may be the fact that your child identifies as a comic book geek, and you don’t.
Cultural plurality is not really a choice, or a novelty. It’s my family. My side of the family is mostly Asian but also has white women, and mixed raced children. There was a time that almost everyone spoke and understood Mandarin Chinese as an extended family. This is no longer the case anymore. Diana’s side is not all Caucasian, and they are not all the same religion. We can’t take for granted that just because we are a family, that these differences will somehow work themselves out. They will not unless we as the older generation make the effort to build bridges, cross them ourselves, and challenge ourselves to support parts of our children, which we don’t completely understand.
I know that there are things that my children will go through that I will be limited in my ability to help them work through. There will times that I will need to rely on someone else who is mixed-race to support them because I don’t really get the issues they are working through. This is the job for progressive parents. It's transforming parenting from guiding children through their own paths of life into learning experience as parent help their children fine a new journey, unfamiliar but right.
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