This Black Parenting Expert Is Taking on Conscious Parenting—and Spanking

Yolanda Williams, the founder of Parenting Decolonized, says her mission to educate Black parents began when she decided to leave outdated discipline behind.

So many Black parenting traditions are a direct result of anti-Black racism. From the way older generations taught children to groom themselves to how we’ve been instructed to engage with white authority figures to the ways we can choose to discipline children, racism has become a key factor in how we guide our kids. At its best, the classic, widely-recognized steering is a series of safety mechanisms. At its worst, it is a perpetuation of mistreatment and a critical misunderstanding of Black children’s most basic needs. Yolanda Williams, the founder of Parenting Decolonized, wants us to take a serious look at the impact of mainstream Black parenting.

The 42-year-old grew up in Southern Long Beach California in the early-to-mid 1980s. The years before her birth and childhood were marked by police brutality, riots, and widespread deprivation. The oldest of three daughters, Williams was raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet. “We moved a lot,” Williams tells Kindred. “So even though I say [I’m from] Long Beach, I went to 12 different schools.”

She’s unflinchingly honest about her internal conflicts with her own parent but ultimately views it as a pathway to becoming a better guardian herself. “My mother is a recovering alcoholic,” Williams shares. “There was a lot of a lot of unstable environments. We went through periods of homelessness. In California, they don't consider it homelessness when you live with other people, but we definitely were.” As the oldest daughter, she found herself being a caregiver and taking on familial responsibilities while she was still a child herself.

“It just wasn’t a happy childhood.”

After leaving a 6-year abusive relationship (“I did not understand life and how things worked and who was dangerous and who wasn't...I was very naive,”) Williams lived in Florida for a stint. She then discovered she was pregnant with her first child in the late 2010s. She relocated to Central Arkansas to be closer to family, since the majority of her loved ones had since moved there. She needed a strong support system to rear her daughter. She also knew that the methods implemented to raise her would not be permissible for her own child.

When Williams became a mother, she figured that self-work had to be coupled with her parenting journey. “I had no idea that I was talking about trauma work at the time,” she says. “I'm just thinking of parenting as separate from trauma work, but really it's not if you are willing to be a conscious parent—positive discipline, or whatever you want to call it— outside the normal type of parenting that we have all been subjected to.” Conscious parenting requires the utmost awareness about the way you treat your child, like adhering to their boundaries, engaging in conversation, and practicing empathy, which makes way for a bond not built on an authoritarian parenting style. Though it’s not brand new, with talk of the philosophy being noted over a decade ago, it still receives pushback consistently. Jokes and backlash across social media even blame it for Black kids’ behavior problems, even though it isn't a universally accepted tactic for parenting. Especially not long term.

A large faction of Williams’s includes shedding harmful belief systems about parenting a Black child. With that comes un-deifying parents and getting honest about physical violence against children—AKA spanking.

According to the Statista Research Center, in 2021, roughly 4.27 million Black families in the United States were led by a single mother. With there being around 15 million single mothers in America, and a culture that puts such emphasis on their labor (in a way that paternal figures aren’t tasked with as often), a glorified, narrow view of them has taken center stage. “Anytime I talk about the Black mama, Black folks are like, How dare you?” Williams says. Sometimes unwillingness to discuss how our own upbringings have shaped us makes it much more difficult to parse through the ways we’re parenting our kids.

As for the highly controversial spanking, Williams says, “I'm very honest about how this is very, very difficult work for me. In being raised the way I was raised, violence is my first response. So being the nonviolent parent, I have to stop myself from hitting her. I have to actually walk away, I'm never going to lie about how hard this is. This journey is for me having the background that I have.” Spanking has been known to have scientific/psychological and, therefore, behavioral drawbacks, making it a hard “no” for Williams and the parents learning from her.

In addition to consistent self-analysis, Williams believes that having a community to uplift your efforts makes a difference. Having a group of people to discuss the not-so-glamorous aspects of parenting, as well as success stories, quickly becomes a source of encouragement. “Finding people who are like-minded so you can have support, because that's a big part of it, too. If you are surrounded with people who still think children deserve violence, it's very difficult to change that narrative in your own mind. So you have to figure out who your people are.” She also acknowledges that your inner circle may not consist of the expected folks. “They may not be your actual people, they may not be your family or your friends,” she says. “They may be some strangers online.”

Williams considers her outlook to be radical from other parenting groups’ because she is keen on calling out how deep the roots of systemic oppression go. “[It’s] not just like, Oh, your parenting and your kids won't like you. It's like, No, you're, you're normalizing oppression in your household,” she notes. “ And when you normalize oppression in your household, you make it okay for them to be oppressed out in the world. I try to make people draw those conclusions. It helps people think more critically about their parenting, which I think is radical.”

She also understands an upbringing not focused on liberation can be dangerous, at one point speaking to how raising children with violence teaches them that handling matters physically is an appropriate response.

All in all, Williams hopes that she encourages parents to heal their traumas, so they can raise free Black children. It’s layered work, especially when you weren’t given that opportunity as a child. It’s also a non-linear journey that will come with its share of hiccups from the parent and the child. “I have to be conscious of the fact that this is not innate and that I am struggling to figure this out,” she says. This is a habit that I have to form—I have to practice this daily. Me having that consciousness about myself, helps me to react to my child's very childlike behavior, in a more conscious way.”

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