Jennifer London:
I'm Jennifer London, and my pronouns are she/her. So great to see so many familiar faces and some new names in the participant list. We are so excited for this conversation. Dr. Dias, otherwise known as Janice to me. But Janice has been doing a lot of press for her book Parent Like It Matters. But I am not a member of the press. I am a fellow mother of a teenager. I studied sociology at Brandeis as well, and we both work in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space. So just so you know, that's the perspective we're going to bring to this conversation, and we're very much looking forward to having it with you.
Jennifer London:
So I have some questions prepared for Janice, but we definitely want to leave plenty of time for you to engage with us and ask your questions. Can certainly do that through the chat or you can raise your hand if you're interested in actually asking them out loud. We'd love to hear your voices and see your faces. So please don't feel shy about that.
Jennifer London:
So Janice, are you ready to get started?
Janice Johnson Dias:
I am ready to get started.
Jennifer London:
Good because I'm going to quote yourself back to you. In your book, you say, "Being asked questions is still one of the ways I feel most heard and appreciated. Questions suggest that you are interested in what I am thinking." And I think we're all interested in what you're thinking, and I know this goes to credit your grandmother who raised you for many years. So let's get started with some questions.
Jennifer London:
So for those of you who have known Janice in the past or maybe have heard her speak, you maybe wondering about her name. You may have known her as Janice, as I certainly did for many years. But I think it's important to start with the origin story here and talk a little bit about Janice and your name, which is something that is a critical piece of someone's identity. So Janice, do you want to start with that, and then we'll get into...
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yes. So hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. It's noontime. I hope to keep you fully awake for all of the labor that you have ahead. So I came to the United States May 19, 1984, and in Jamaica, where I grew up, I grew up in Retreat St. Mary in rural Jamaica. And then in 1980 moved to Kingston and in '84, came to Boston, Dorchester to be precise, Ashmont area.
Janice Johnson Dias:
In Jamaica, I had completed my common entrance exam, which is probably analogous to your SATs in order to enter high school. It is probably one of the first times that I actually talked much about my name because I have a family name, and then when you go to school, you have a formal name. When I came to the United States that fall, my mother enrolled me in Woodrow Wilson Middle School, which was one block away from my house. I entered the seventh grade.
Janice Johnson Dias:
In the seventh grade in the United States, at least in Boston in the 1980s, you had to learn grammar and you had to learn the parts of speech. I had a classroom, and I was filled. So I'd only been here a couple of months at that time, and the teacher... But I had been really well versed in grammar. Jamaicans and the British are very serious about grammar. The instructor asked about different forms of punctuation. He asked, "What do you put at the end of a sentence if you're surprised?" We'd raised our hands, and he call on people. Exclamation mark. What do you put at the end of a question? A question mark. Then he asked, "What do you put at the end of a declarative sentence?" And I raised my hand and another student did as well, and he called on me. I said, "Full stop." Apparently that's not an American phrase, a full stop. So the other student and several students started laughing. They were like, "Oh my god, you put your period."
Janice Johnson Dias:
The only context in which I knew the word period was for menstruation. I thought it was absolutely impossible that one could put one's period at the end of a sentence. So with a thick Jamaican accent, I said, "Well, you don't have no sense. You can't put your period at the end of a sentence." And that led to laughter everywhere, and the teacher looked at me and said, "Well, what is your name?" I said, "My name is Janice." He responded, "Janice." From that day on, I became Janice.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Because of the laughter and because of that space, of all the things I wanted to do, one I did not want that level of attention, and it was easier to simply comply with being Janice rather than being Janice.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So fast forward 33 years later, I am doing the audio recording for my book, and the director of the book is a person who is from a colonized country like mine. And she said, "Well, how do you say your name?" And I said, "Well, people call me Janice." And she was like, "Why do you say people call you Janice?" I said, "Because my mother really named me Janice Johnson, but nobody called me Janice Johnson."
Janice Johnson Dias:
Since I was doing the audiobook and much of the book itself takes you back and forth between my life in the US and my life in Jamaica, she said, "How would you like to proceed forward?" Now if you've read the book so far, you will see that I have a lot of thoughts and ideas about my mother, my grandmother, and the way I grew up. Some of it in the audiobook is really in Jamaican dialect. To honor my mother, especially since I have really quite a strong critique of her, and to honor my heritage, I decided that going forward that I would make this reclamation and I would reclaim that moment and that laughter and that decision and begin to refer especially as I speak about the book as Janice.
Janice Johnson Dias:
People ask me a lot about, "But I've known you your whole life as Janice." I am very much still Janice because who I am after all these years is not as fully Jamaican as I once was, and I will never be fully American as I am. So I am both comfortable with Janice, as well as I am with Janice.
Jennifer London:
Thank you, Janice, for sharing that story. I think it holds so much power, especially in relation to how much influence adults have in children's lives, and especially as we talk about parents and caregivers. Teachers are oftentimes significant caregivers to our children, and the fact that that one person in that context had so much power over your identity, I think makes us all reflect about how we interact with young people, whether we're parents or not. So I really appreciate you sharing that story. I know certainly as a former educator, I took it when I first heard it really... Lots of emotions attached to hearing that story. So I appreciate you sharing it with all of us.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I've been thinking a lot about that moment in that classroom because a part of what occurred in that moment now having looked back is that the laughter that was allowed to really occur was really quite striking for me. It made me feel quite small in that moment, and the be nice that so many teachers talk about has a way of erasing us. I didn't feel like erasure. I really just wanted to get along. I was already here. I had a lot of hostile feelings about migration. My brothers were quite excited to come to America. I was not very excited about coming to America because I had such really close girlfriends. I did not fantasize about what America is, but they did. So they were very excited. My mother worked really hard to get us here, but I was quite antagonistic for the first three years. And this was yet another thing that I was like, "In Jamaica, I wouldn't have to explain myself. But here I am in America, and I have to explain myself. I'm not going to do that. So I'll comply with whatever it is."
Janice Johnson Dias:
When I think about that moment now every time I hear people say Janice, I just did not have the power or the agency to advocate for myself in that time, and it feels good to get to that place where I can advocate. And I know for my friends who are Asian, my friends who are from the continent of Africa, they too just simply find shortcuts of navigating the classroom space because it's so difficult, and it's not even like the difficulty is simply the correction. It is difficult to push against the kind of Americanization of everything, and when you're the lonely child in the classroom, it's easier to just comply. That erasure has so many different ways because it's not just name. It's in all these different places, and caregivers do that too as well.
Jennifer London:
I think that's one of the themes in the book that you talk about is how to avoid your child being the only in situations so that they have someone to stand with them and support them in those moments so that they're not the only person. Sometimes you can't avoid those situations, but when you can, that's something I think is really important that you talk about in the book.
Jennifer London:
So speaking of the book, one of the things that I know I enjoyed about it was the stories that you told about your life both as a child and how you were parented and brought up, but also as a parent. And I don't want to give that way for those folks who haven't read it yet because it really is beautiful storytelling. So I do encourage you to read it. But I think one piece that you didn't tell in here, and I know it's something that has shaped you, is your time at Brandeis. So since we're here at an alumni event and I think because I knew you then, I had a little insight into that time. I would love to hear about your time at Brandeis, your experience at Brandeis. What about that has shaped you as a parent, as a scholar, as just a human being in the world? Tell us a little bit about that experience and how it shaped you.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Brandeis is a funny experience for me. So I came to Brandeis two days after finishing basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I am the first in my family to go to college. My mother did not complete primary school, and much of my other folks really did. So again, to take you back to Retreat St. Mary, we went to an all-age school, which means from the time that... Jamaica's not an age-based system. So if you can read and you're ready to go to school, you go to school. So kids as young as three are in school with kids as old as 16. 16 is typically when you graduate high school in Jamaica.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Many people had to work. My mother left home very early. So she didn't finish her formalized education, even though she is quite brilliant. My grandmother was born in 1901, and so education, much like the US in an agrarian society, you get a lot of education from church.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I came to the US. I had no intention or interest in going to college. I'm from a country that has a flat or then had a flat culture. You went to high school, you got a job, et cetera. And a few privileged people went to the University of the West Indies at Mona or the College of Arts, Science, and Technology for architecture. So I had no aspiration, and I actually don't have much occupational aspirations, even to this day, even though I've done so much.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I went to Boston Latin Academy, and the teachers there... How I got there is a funny story in and of itself, but the teachers there insisted that I needed to go to college. I found this mostly to be an irritation.
Jennifer London:
Really.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Because I had no interest in college. What was I going to go to college for? But I performed really well in school, and therefore they thought college was the next appropriate thing. And they rank you quite rigorously at Latin Academy, and they selected all the schools they thought fit my profile. And Brandeis was one of them. I did not want to stay in Massachusetts. My mom got quite ill, and I ended up staying because the expectation was that she was going to die. So I would just stay. I would be close to home. She would die, and then I would go on to study in some other place in the country, primarily DC.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Now again, Americans don't think like this, but really it's really how the situation was set up.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Well at the end of my high school senior year, I had a couple of friends from the football team who were like, "Well, how are you going to pay for college?" And I was like, "I don't even know what this college really is, but they want me to go. I said I would go. They're going to fill out the financial aid, and that's whatever it is. We'll figure it out." So they were like, "The military will pay for you to go to college." And I was like, "Well, that means that's no stressor for my mother." So I joined the military and forgot one small but very important detail, I didn't tell my family that I joined the military.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I went to basic training while my family was away in Jamaica for the summer because my aunt had died, and I stayed to graduate high school by myself. I went to basic training, and I returned from basic training to go to this college. And my brother dropped me off, and I was at college.
Janice Johnson Dias:
This is 1990. My accent was fading but it was still quite there. How I summarize Brandeis, and the reason I tell you all of these things because they become quite important about my Brandeis experience.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I don't know at that point how America's racial politics is. I went to Woodrow Wilson Middle School, was very integrated, a lot of Asian, primarily Chinese people. Jamaica's 8% Chinese. Chinese people are not foreign to me. White people are very foreign to me. I don't know anything about Jewish people. I don't understand it. I don't know Jewish history. I don't even understand Black American-ness. I know that there's a Caribbean and there are African people in the Caribbean.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So my first day in Usdan Hall, a Black student says something to me like, "What are you?" The question was so particularly strange to me. And I was like, "What am I?" They were like, "Well, what are you?" I said, "I'm Jamaican," because that's my answer to almost every question. They said, "Well, are you not Black?" And I looked at the person, and I said, "Look at me, of course I'm Black." I didn't know where to put the question because there was an ongoing interracial challenge between Indigenous Black people and Caribbean Black people, and then there was the interracial challenge of Christian whites, Jewish whites, and all of it. I had no sense of that.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So at Brandeis is when I discovered Blackness and I discovered what it meant to say that I was Black. It was at Brandeis that I began to learn African and African American history in order to be able to place myself in the conversations regarding race.
Janice Johnson Dias:
It was also at Brandeis that the beginning thoughts, not very highly developed thoughts, notions of intersectionality became important because gender and sexuality was abound. They had a lot to do with how people saw themselves, and I had been firmly socialized as a heterosexual and a bigot. So I never had any reason to have any considerations of people who were gay and gay and Black and gay and Jewish and gay and international. So all of those things really Brandeis taught me about.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But it was Brandeis that gave me the formalized as well as informal training around the power of social science research. I got to go to Granada to study the revolution invasion with Dessima Williams, and I got to study a lot about Israel and Palestine with Gordie Fellman. And I got to study a lot about organization dynamics and regulating the poor with Sirianni.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So finally, the stuff started to make sense. America started to make sense to me because this whole notion of regulating the poor that Gordie and Sirianni were so serious about, I could see it in the Caribbean. So when I went to Granada, I started to study the structural adjustment program and its impact on the dynamics of the culture. America made sense to me from going to the Caribbean because I could see how American policies were affecting, but I also simultaneously got to situate myself as a Caribbeaner. But as a Caribbeaner living in the United States and the implications of that.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So Brandeis did that for me in a way that I'm not sure any other school could've really done it. I was open. I was optimistic, but I was also so deeply ignorant. Plus, I caused a lot of trouble at Brandeis. Caused a lot of trouble.
Jennifer London:
Uh, yes. I can see some people who knew you then nodding their heads. I see nodding your head. You did, but I think... Thank you for answering those first two questions because we are here to talk about Parent Like It Matters, which is the topic of your book, but I think it is important to set some context about who you are because it does really play a role in this book. Your personality certainly shines through in the book in terms of the way just the language of it but also the way you think about all of these structures in our systems is so deeply researched and leaned on to make these arguments in this book. So I really thought it was important to set a little context there through the lens of Brandeis since we're here at a Brandeis alumni event.
Jennifer London:
But let's get into the topic at hand, which is Parent Like It Matters. I want to talk about joy because as the book says in the title... Here's the book here. It's not just change-making girls. It's how to raise joyful change-making girls. We see a lot on social media about joy and finding time for joy and all of those things. One of the things that you talk about here is... Because much of what follows in terms of how to raise a change-making girl or children generally, specifically the interrelationship of joy, gratefulness, and equity. And you're wanting us to engage in being internally serene while also teaching our children about difficult and disruptive social issues.
Jennifer London:
That could not be more important right now, yeah?
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yeah.
Jennifer London:
So I want to talk about those finding ways to create and sustain joy, both for ourselves as parents but also for our children, especially in the most traumatic times maybe our generation has lived through and certainly our children have been part of that. It is not to say that the systemic racism, the anti-Asian hate, all of those things are new. They've been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. But they are currently at an all-time high as it relates to visibility, and there's a lot of retraumatization for people and even for people outside of those communities, like myself certainly. It makes the whole mix really heavy, not to mention, hello, we're in a pandemic.
Jennifer London:
So let's talk about the joy piece because I know how important that is both for ourselves as parents but also for our children. So talk a little bit about that.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yeah. So I mostly just to kind of punctuate it. I mostly reject the common conversations about joy. I find them performative. They don't align with my definition or notions of joy. So in the book, I make a clear distinction between happy, which I define as performative, outward, kind of facing things where we're pretending with our emotion and it's temporary. And I really think about joy as being connected to two core things. I think of joy as a reservoir of optimism that lives within us, that peacefulness. And I think about joy as agentic, as action oriented, and those two principles are quite related.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So for me, much of what I see in the public space is people who are deeply unsettled in who they are attempting to create things that they argue is going to make the world a better place. But I think that that's quite difficult if the work doesn't begin with you. Much of what you hear me say no matter where you hear me say anything is that I really think that if we want something external to us, whether it's in our children, whether it's in our workplace, whether it is in our families, we have to be able to have those things internal to us.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So if we want a non-bigoted child, we really have to work on not being bigoted. If we want a peaceful society, we have to really work on peacefulness for us. If we want informed children, we have to become informed. So the times in which I grew up, whether it's Jamaica or the United States, much of what we wanted we simply projected out. We told our children, "You need to be better than me." We told our workplace employers, "You need to be better than me." So much of those things I reject off the top.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But what I have to say around issues of inequity in this moment is this is in fact a traumatically challenging times on many front. But each of us if we are to survive this and potentially thrive through this, then we have to decide where we are going to act. If we make a commitment to some action, I argue that it will invite joyfulness into us and will move us out of the stalemate and the inertia and even the overwhelming feeling that this is a forever space. That it is in the process of acting, in the process of trying to achieve equity, in the process of attending to who we are, that we actually find joy and can make the world a better place.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But to do that, we have to do a thing that I think many people find challenging, which is we have to be connected to other people. That connection is really quite un-American. Right? Is that in America, the notions of individualism aren't just theorized, they're actually really well-practiced in families. The focus on you and yours, the focus on myself, the focus on my family, the focus on making sure my child is better than your child disrupts connection. Connection is really what we need in this moment more than space, and we need to physically distance. I get that, and I'm saddened by the fact that we have been using the phrase social distancing, but whatever. That's for another conversation.
Janice Johnson Dias:
We need to physically distant and we also need to be more socially integrated. And if we do that, I think we're moving ourselves towards more joyful people and also more equitable people that can move us along towards a better society.
Jennifer London:
Yeah. Give us an example. Maybe one from the book that you think illustrates this. Because it's so important to this book and what it's all about, I think it would be important maybe to follow up with a...
Janice Johnson Dias:
Okay. I would love to give you one not from the book.
Jennifer London:
Or not from the book. Yeah because we don't want to give away anything from the book.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Right. So I encourage you all to get the book clearly and to read the book. But here is an example. Thank you. So here's an example. So right now, we're coming off of a very divisive, I'm going to argue 12 years. Some might say four, but I'm going to say 12 years. Some of us hate our neighbors. We hate them because of our politics. We hate them because they supported candidates we didn't support. Yet we live in the same neighborhood. If anything happens, we are going to need that neighbor. We're going to need that neighbor if they smell smoke or gas. We're going to need that neighbor if somebody suspicious is outside of our door. We're going to need that neighbor if we're delayed in getting our children, et cetera.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But some of us find it really hard to talk to neighbors whose politics are not our own. And I would argue that no amount of data has ever changed a person's mind. You could present to me every bit of evidence about why racism is illogical, sexism, homophobia, transgender, hate is illogical because really these things, they tap the social resources of society.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But what I would say is if you have decided that you really want to convince your neighbor that equity matters, then you're going to have to talk to your neighbor and you should begin by talking to your neighbor about the most basic things that we can talk to neighbors about. If it's the building, the building that you live in. If it's a suburb like mine, it's the traffic on your street. It's that when you develop relationships with people, you can understand what undergirds their thinking and you can find points of connecting. And you can have your own agenda about how you're going to move your neighbor forward.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Now bear in mind your neighbor maybe trying to move you forward too to their standpoint. But you can begin to build coalitions that way. And the same can be done in your workplace.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So that peacefulness that comes about like, "Oh, I talked to them. That's how they put it together." That is often the challenge for us. How do people put this logic together? And I say take the moment to talk to your neighbor, your colleague about how they're putting it together so that you can understand how you could potentially reach them because we are a need to be more persuasive in order to move people forward. Anger, frustration, screaming facts and data will not move people towards equity. It simply will not. I've never been convinced. "Aha, it turns out that..." That's never moved me towards being kinder or better towards people. Knowing, feeling, empathizing, that's moved me.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I'm urging us to do that in everything that we do. And if you're tired and you're sick of having to explain to people, don't do that. Instead form relationships with people. It is the relationships, it's the connecting that moves people forward.
Jennifer London:
And I think that it's connected to one of the things you talk about in the book as it relates to, especially in young children when you're doing a lot of limit setting, and that just saying no isn't going to work. I mean, it will work, but it's not going to help the child understand your reasoning. And it doesn't help you understand your child's point of view. So you have this great section in the book about how to negotiate those things to understand your child's point of view because it helps you understand your child just as a person, how they think. So in some ways it helps you kind of manipulate maybe in the future. But it also helps them understand how to build an argument and how to have their own perspective. I think that's a really powerful progression...
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yeah, it's really also really important for relationships. So many times, many of you are hearing on social media and in other places, "No is a complete sentence," or you said to somebody, it's like, "Racism is wrong." Okay. That just doesn't advance us in any way. Racism is wrong, but why? Why is no a complete... Because when we understand people and we can relate to people, then we can move people in different directions. What happens is that a lot of our angst comes from the fact that challenging, being in relationships that has conflict and disagreement is difficult for us.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So back to the Brandeis question, one of the things that I really enjoyed at Brandeis and is a part of my world is that we must embrace disagreement. Disagreement is actually really good for relationship building because then you have to find a way to be more convincing, which is coupled both with emotion, information, and passion. But many of us don't have the bandwidth for disagreement. We treat disagreement as the end of a relationship.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So this relates to parenting, a part of what we want is we want children who are thoughtful, who can negotiate, who are inquisitive, and yet we don't have democratic processes in our parenting. And those democratic processes of asking, listening, inquiring, convincing, we have low tolerance for. And then when we see that dogma in our children in other places, we're like, "How did they get so dogmatic?" Well, we never gave them any of the toolkits to be anything other than dogmatic.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Now I want to be clear for those of you who are out here, my home is not a democracy. It's a full oligarchy with democratic processes. I want to say that. Sometimes people get confused. They're like, "Oh, she's wishy-washy." No, they're democratic processes but I am significantly older. I am in charge of my child's health and well-being, and that does require some authoritarian practices. But the democratic processes of thinking through and letting her know how I come to these conclusions help her to negotiate things in other places. But it isn't a full democracy.
Jennifer London:
Yeah, and I think to use another term too and you use it yourself in the book, is I think both you and Scottie are incredibly intention in your parenting. That is something that I think we all need to be, both about not just in our parenting but in our relationship with whoever we're co-parenting with, whether it's a spouse or a significant other or a grandparent or a neighbor, as you said. How are we intentionally raising our children in... I love the oligarchy with the democratic... That sounds about right. I love that.
Jennifer London:
You talk a lot about that in the book throughout, again about being intentional, about how you're taking care of yourself and your partnership and what that partnership looks like, and who's responsible for what, and where do those things overlap. But also in the spaces that you make for your child to be intentional about her own decisions.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yeah. I mean, in the end, children are their own human beings. It is very irritating that they're their own human beings. It's very irritating. Because I think sometimes when people have these imagines of me, they're like, "Oh my god." And I'm like, no, kids are irritating at multiple levels to adults, but they're mostly irritating to us because we're old. It's not that they're just intrinsically irritating. We were irritating. They're irritating. But a part of what we want is we want a more equitable and just world.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I'm just really clear about that, and I think each of us want it. And what I argue is that the locust of control for having that equitable world is within the framework of our control. We want to make sure that when we show up at workplaces that the people that we sometimes see in our workplaces, in our classrooms, et cetera, we're just, "Who are you? And why are you like this?" So in sociological terms, I think many of us forget about the saliency of socialization.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Primary socialization is critical to the people that we're seeing now. Our value systems are developed in these moments in our parenting practices. So when we see people engaging in an unjust behavior, their notions of truth, their notions of value of life, their notions of critical thinking, the fear they develop of others, a lot of that is within the way they have been parenting. And what I'm urging people to do is to be intentional about that desire. You want that outcome, then you have to be willing to think about your role in it and how you're attending to the children under your guard in making that goal happen.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I really want a just world. I want a world where little kids can actually play outside, and I'm not afraid that they're going to get snatched up and killed and taken away. So I need to be in relationship with my neighbor. I also need to teach my child how to be kind to others. I need to teach the other children how to be kind to my child and to other children because I want that. Every day I want that. So I don't relinquish that any day. It is top of mind every day. So I've got to do something to make that happen, and I'm prepared to do that. And I think we all can be prepared to do that. But we have to be quite intentional about it.
Jennifer London:
Yeah. Absolutely. So I think for some folks who have read the book or who are planning on it. So my daughter is 18, about to go to college, a year ahead of Marley, Janice's daughter in school. Yes, the whole college thing, that's a whole other conversation. But we're going to get to that actually. So for me, it was really interesting reading this book at this junction because much of the book does relates to what I would've done with Audrey when she was younger and certainly I was like, "Oh, I did that. Yay!" But for me, it kept me thinking, and I know Janice is thinking this too as Marley starts looking at college and they're starting to dip their toes in the water of independence.
Jennifer London:
So my question, Janice, to you, and my guess is you don't have an answer but probably some thoughts, is how do we evolve as parents? As our children get older and we have a little less control and they need something different from us. I know already that certainly Audrey needs different things from me now than she did when she was five, and she's going to need different things from me when she's away at college. How does our role as parents evolve with our children and continue to be focused on that joy, that real joy, and that change-making intention?
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yes. I'm here, right?
Jennifer London:
It's maybe a sequel to the book. Parent Like It Matters: The College Years I think we talked about.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So a part of it is that I think that we always have to be prepared to be consistently changing, and in some ways, I used to say to my husband, I was like, "The mother that Marley knew up until she's nine is not the mother she knows now." So for example, I have a really great potty mouth, and anyone who knows me knows that. But before nine, I made a full commitment that I was not going to introduce her to this mouth until she was nine. I just arbitrarily choose nine. I just want to let you all know. Much of the things I know are scientific, but I was like, "I think I got it in me for nine years. I feel like I can do that."
Janice Johnson Dias:
So right around nine and 10-
Jennifer London:
I'm impressed, by the way.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Right. Because I was committed. I'm very good at commitment. Right about nine or 10, then the F bombs would roll when they felt like it. Not at her but it was like the kind of control in my tongue was loosening up. Then she turned around 10 and 11 and in the book you will hear me talk a lot about the watching and critiquing of the media that she has access to. So around 10 or so, it changes in dynamics. She then has to tell me what she's watching. I can see also with all the different controls. She has to tell me what she's watching. We really have to have a conversation about it. We're the regulations.
Janice Johnson Dias:
But I think from 10 to now 16, what has happened is I've started to introduce her more and more to me. Who am I? I've always kind of reminded her that I don't exist to serve her but that I exist in relationship with her. But now it is about who am I, what are my insecurities, what are the things that I'm thinking about, what are the errors that I've made as a way to help her understand that her humanity has to take precedence. She has to now begin to think of herself not as my child but as a person really growing into her own and that missteps are going to be central to this. In fact, I would say more and more in this house we talk a lot about errors, and what I've started to do, I started last year, was she has a set of aunties. I don't have any sisters, but my friends who are auntie figures. I've had to have them tell their stories of their college errors.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I have a bunch of friends who have PhD, and she sees them as like fantastic. So many of them dropped out of school, went back to school, drank too much, did all kinds of things, and I've had them now been telling her stories of their mess-up because my concern is that children see their parents as flawless and that they see adults as the end of errors. And I really want her to get the idea that the road is a windy one, and she's ahistorical. So she only knows this mother. But this mother is not all of who I am. A part of the introduction of the F bombs and others and a part of learning about my errors and my missteps is for her to see me as human, which gives her permission to see herself as human. And that is what I think will be going forward.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Now certainly I really started the conversation around sex and sexuality very early. She really don't really want all of the details, but I'm here for all the details because that subject I knew I was going to be good at. I knew. I was like, "I'm going to be good at this one." But these other issues I'm learning, and also she's a different American. She's an American in this moment in ways that I was not. So issues about privacy, issues about choosing to resolve conflict face-to-face she and I bump heads on but she's beginning to finally see my side, which is to say no conflict can be resolved electronically. You must choose to FaceTime or to meet in person because that is a different thing than what you're doing right now.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I think if I'm human, it gives her permission to be human. That's how I kind of see us going forward.
Jennifer London:
Right. So we have about 10 minutes left. I knew this would go by very quickly. So if folks have any questions, certainly can put them in the chat. I see a couple things that I'll just address here with you, Janice. But if you have a question you'd like to speak out loud, please click the raise hand thing if you can. If you can't, just let me know in the chat. You can unmute yourself. I think one person had a question, how old? So Marley is 16.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Marley's 16. I started talking to her about sex at around nine, and sexuality identity was always a part of it because we have many family members, really for me when I say family, my friends also family who are in same sex relationships and have same sex families. So she grew up with that as a kind of normative part of it, but she didn't understand people's hostility to it. So we've had to talk a lot about that.
Jennifer London:
Yeah. Great. And one person mentioned that they have an 18 year old as well, and definitely finding it difficult to negotiate those bigger decisions and how much control the young person has over what they have in terms of... For instance, they mention the college decision making process. I think I'll just say I can look back to the high school process, which was probably for me the... Because I live in New York City for those of you don't know, you can choose from basically any city school, any school in the city. There's some that you might have to audition for, take an exam for, but otherwise if you live in Manhattan, you could go to high school in the Bronx. If you live in the Bronx, you could go to high school in Brooklyn. Anywhere. So we were going through that process with our daughter, and my husband and I really wanted her to stay at her middle school that went through 12th grade. She had very different idea about that. She wanted to go somewhere different.
Jennifer London:
We decided that it was important to let her make that decision. Even though as a former educator, as a parent, I felt really strongly that it was not the right choice. But we let her make that decision, and I have to say it was the most difficult decision I had to make and allow for but it felt like the right thing because I knew she would be resentful and unhappy if she didn't get to make that decision on her own. And it ended up being totally fine. She did great, and she got into every college she applied to from the high school she went to, and it was all good. But it was something that I think is hard to negotiate, and you have to make those decisions for yourself what feels right for you.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Yeah. I would say that I make a lot of errors, and how I define something as an error is if after I've made the decision, sometime later, not like immediately. Immediate errors I usually just try to correct for. Sometimes I used to say that when I've done something where I'm like, "Oh, that's one for the couch. That one's going to stay." It didn't land the way I thought it would. That decision was not quite right. I'm now completely willing to forgive myself. I've had some big dousies that didn't work out. Don't work out looks like this, which is six months to a year later I felt like the decision was either rushed, the decision was not fully informed, the decision was made out of fear.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I really work hard at not making decisions out of fear, and that's difficult as a Black woman living in a white suburb with a public child is that I get concerned for her emotional and physical safety. And every once in a while, I make a decision where fear is the center. And I argue again so that for myself and I really encourage all caregivers not to make that decision where we think the stakes are so high that fear drives us.
Janice Johnson Dias:
As to the college process, a part of the challenge of raising a joyful change-making child is that they have a lot of words and a lot of opinions. So the one great input I get to make around her college application process is can we agree whoever gives you the most money is where you're going to go though? Because we are the first out. That's how I try to describe it. We're the first not mired in poverty, and we really want her to not have some of the economic challenges that we have. So she has a chance to interrupt the history of being African people, poor people, and so I'm like, "Can we talk about whoever give you the most money?" So apply to only schools you want to go to for real, and whoever gives you the most money can we go there though because our economic situation...
Janice Johnson Dias:
Much of Marley's work is philanthropic. I work as a college professor. Much of my work is philanthropic. So money matters. So she needs to select. This summer's a selection. Please select schools you actually want to go to because the money's going to matter. So just so you know because I don't want to say no to my child because I don't have the resources to support her education. But I also am quite practical about those things.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I see somebody ask me a question.
Jennifer London:
Yeah. So we have a couple things. One is just a quick question. So for those of you who don't know who Marley is, Janice's daughter, maybe you want to say a little bit about her because someone asked if she does activism coaching for kids. So maybe her book would be a great-
Janice Johnson Dias:
She does quite a bit of that. So Marley is, she is the founder of the 1000 Black Girl Books Campaign. She is also the host and executive producer of Netflix's show Bookmarks where Black celebrities are reading books around social justice, identity, and others. And it's active on Netflix. You can watch it. She has been in her fifth grade class when she was 10 years old, she became frustrated that none of the books had Black girls as a main character and set out to collect 1000 books with Black girls as the main character. She's now collected about 13,000 books, and has an online resource where you can find Black girl books by different ages.
Janice Johnson Dias:
On Sunday, I leave for Jamaica to donate 500 of those books. We donated already 1700, and she's donated books across the globe. You can also find her online. She is usually the person in conversations with some of the top leaders, from Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, et cetera. And she has written a book published by Scholastic titles Marley Dias Gets It Done and So Can You. And most people think of our books as companions. So what she does in the book is she lays out how young people can tap into their skills and passions in order to make a difference in the world, and my book is really about what caregivers can do to support young people who really want to engage in this kind of level of activism.
Jennifer London:
Yeah. And I want to say that I think that being joyful and change-making doesn't mean being Marley. That looks different for every kid and that the goal isn't to produce all these Marleys because that wouldn't work. Not every kid has that personality. So I think that's really important. No pressure, folks. We're not-
Janice Johnson Dias:
And also the book is not about Marley.
Jennifer London:
No, it's totally not. Right. Exactly.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So I run the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, and all children look different and all caregivers look different. What I hope you extract from the book, which I think Jen and I took for granted, is that your child... You have to raise the child you have, not the child you wish you have. You have to tap into the joy that is possible for your child in your change-making.
Janice Johnson Dias:
So for me and for Marley, change-making looks a particular way. But for others, Jen does change-making work that looks strikingly different. Some people it is policy. Some people it is environmental. Some people it's through the creative arts. So it does not matter what field you're in. What I want us most to focus our attention on is how can we use what we have as caregivers in the way that we are parenting our children, coaching, educating our children in order to help them recognize that connection to people matter, that equity is an attainable goal, and that the peacefulness that they can have inside to help them do this in a sustained way because there's no... This is not a sprint. One in equity has to become a way of life. It has to be in everything that we do, and so ubiquitous that it feels almost like a religion. That is my hope for the way that we think about and do this work. We live it rather than we perform it.
Jennifer London:
Great. Well, we are just at time. So I think I had at least three more questions, but I knew we wouldn't get to them. There's too much to talk about. I wanted to thank all of you for joining us today, and thank you so much Janice for inviting me to have this conversation with you. It was certainly a privilege, and I'm going to turn it back over to the Brandeis folks to close us out.
Courtney Suncar:
Great. Thank you so much, Jen and Janice, for being here with us today and for this great informative conversation. So many really great takeaways. For anybody interested, the link for the book is in the chat. You can also find out more about Janice on the website as well.
Courtney Suncar:
Thanks again everyone for joining us. Thank you to all the participants here on the call today, and we wish you all a great day. Thanks so much.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Thank you all so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Jen, that was fantastic. I knew you would ask me fabulous questions. So nice to see my peers. It's really quite wonderful, and I'll have to take my Brandeis pictures now with my sweater, my Brandeis sweater and my Brandeis sweatpants.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, my website I assume was paste in there, which is just thedrjanice.com and you can find me in all the things that there is to find about me.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Next time we're going to have to put together three hours, Jen, at this point.
Jennifer London:
I know. I know. Hi Theresa. I see you in there.
Janice Johnson Dias:
I can't see Sherena. She's probably at work listening in. Hi, Amy. Oh, it is good to see good people in this way.
Jennifer London:
For sure.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Now I have to go. I have 300 books that I have to now go sign in my kitchen.
Courtney Suncar:
Thanks again everyone. Thank you so much.
Janice Johnson Dias:
Thank you.
Jennifer London:
Bye-bye.
Courtney Suncar:
Bye.