Parenting Grief Seminar
What we carry as parents and what we carry from being parented.
Parenting Grief.
A live grieftending seminar for adults. Whether you're parenting now or making sense of how you were parented, this is for you/us.
Some of what we grieve inside parent-child relationships has nothing to do with whether anyone died.
Some of it is anticipatory. You may be caring for a parent whose health or capacity is changing while you are already grieving what the two of you no longer share.
Your child may still be young and living through something you cannot fix, and you are trying to support them without letting fear take the wheel.
Some of it is kananápo: grief rooted in the ending of a relationship, an identity, a dream, or an expectation while bodies remain standing. A parent may still be alive and unable or unwilling to talk about what happened. A parent may have died, taking all possibilities of repair with them.
The grief can get complex because love and harm may be part of the same relationship. You may be living through estrangement from your child, or learning how to respect their autonomy while tending what a change in closeness brings up in you.
You may understand what your parent survived and still be living with the effects of what they passed down.
Sometimes everybody is still here, and something has still ended. Sometimes you can see an ending coming while you are still handling the ordinary work of care.
This is time for us to look at what changed, tell ourselves the truth about how it has affected us, and consider what care might be needed now.
- Wednesday, 11 November, 2026
- 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 6pm SAST
- Two hours, live on Zoom
- No recording
- 25 seats
I am coming to this from both directions.
I am a mother. I am also somebody's daughter.
Back on Fare of the Free Child podcast, I kept saying that freedom is for your grown ass too. I meant that. This work includes people who are parenting differently and adults trying to understand what happened when they were the child. Many of us are doing both.
We may be parenting someone whose needs keep changing while we're living with what we received, what we missed, and what we are still negotiating in our relationships with our own parents.
Some of us are close to our parents. Some relationships have been altered by estrangement or death. There are also people who remain in regular contact while knowing the relationship has changed in ways that cannot be ignored.
Parenting grief is the grief we carry as parents and the grief we carry from being parented. Both directions bring us to the same question:
What changed or ended in this parent-child relationship, and how is it still influencing how I live?
I have been inside this conversation for years.
Raising Free People book came from years of examining adult-child relationships and the ways authority can become control inside our homes.
For nearly eight years, Fare of the Free Child held conversations about what those changes ask of parents, young people, and the adults we become.
I've spent years publicly examining what happens inside parent-child relationships when domination, obedience, belonging, autonomy, identity, and responsibility are questioned.
I used the word schoolishness to name the habits adults use to control children, often because those habits have been normalized as care. I also used it to help adults recognize what happened to us when we were expected to perform obedience and ignore our own knowing.
When we become adults, those experiences can affect how we relate to a living parent and what we continue carrying after a parent has passed. They can also shape what we do when a child's autonomy brings us face to face with our own untended grief.
As I developed my grief literacy, I started noticing another layer. Sometimes we reach for control because something has changed and we have not tended what the change brought up in us. We are sometimes responding from an old loss we haven't yet recognized as grief.
In this seminar, I want us to turn toward some of the grief inside these relationships, especially when roles, expectations, closeness, access, and our understanding of what happened begin to change.
There are many ways into this conversation.
- Your four-year-old may need comfort for something you were punished for at the same age. You want to meet their need, and you might feel your own unmet need right there with you.
- Years later, that child may ask for more privacy. You can honor what they are asking for and still notice the fear that can come up when access changes.
- Your grown child may make choices you do not understand. You may have to learn how to love them without using access to their life as proof that you parented well.
- You may be helping an aging parent manage daily life while the old power dynamics between you remain fully intact.
- Your parent may have passed years ago, and you may still find yourself arranging part of your life around what they would have approved of.
- You may finally have language for something that happened during your childhood, but your parent cannot hear you, will not discuss it, or is no longer here.
- Maybe you are grieving the parent you used to be or the child you were expected to keep on being. The family story may no longer feel true either.
We will stay with our own lived experiences in this seminar. Nobody needs to prove what happened or articulate an entire family history before their grief can be acknowledged.
What I learned when Fare of the Free Child ended
When Fare of the Free Child ended in 2023, I treated it as a death. I held a funeral for the final season because I needed to mark what had ended without pretending those years no longer mattered.
I understood endings differently after that. Something can be complete and still influence how we live.
That understanding belongs in our parent-child relationships too. We do not have to erase a relationship or deny what it gave us in order to tell the truth about what ended. We can acknowledge what happened and decide how we want to live with its influence now.
What we will do together
If you know my work, you know I believe in madd question askin'. We begin the ILID practice with one:
What happened here?
During our time together, I will guide you through the four movements of ILID:
- 01
Investigate:
What happened here?
- 02
Look:
Now that we've spotted it, let's really see and say what's true.
- 03
Intimacy:
Now, let's get even closer to the truths here.
- 04
Death Care:
What practice, ritual, conversation, boundary, or release is needed now?
I will share from my work with Raising Free People, Fare of the Free Child, and the grief study and practice I have developed since then. You will have time for one contained ILID reflection connected to your own experience.
There will be room for discussion, and you can also choose to listen. Some parts may be easier to approach through private writing. Your particular family's details can stay private.
We will speak from our own lives rather than diagnosing a parent or deciding what a child's behavior means. Nobody in the group will be asked to represent a generation or explain somebody else's family.
You will leave with language for one ending that has been influencing you and a way to begin tending it.
Why no recording
We will be talking about family relationships that may still be active, complicated, and changing.
I am limiting this seminar to 25 people. There will be no recording, and everyone who attends will be asked not to repeat another person's story outside the group.
You can come with something you already recognize as grief. You can also come because something in a parent-child relationship keeps affecting you and you want to understand it differently.
Payment Pathways
Payment is part of how you enter this experience, so I want you to choose your amount without explaining or defending it.
Every option gives you access to the same live seminar.
- $25This is what I can offer right now.
- $60This amount works for me.
- $100I can meet the sustaining rate.
- $160I can help widen access.
- $250I can offer more toward continuation of this work.
You may purchase a place for yourself or gift one to someone you know.
I have also reserved free (no-cost) community-supported places. If you need one, email she@raisingfreepeople.com with SEAT in the subject line. You will not be asked to share your financial circumstances or anything that isn't me minding my business.
About my work
I wrote Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work after years of examining what happens when adults question obedience, ownership, and fear inside our relationships with children.
I hosted Fare of the Free Child for nearly eight years, closing out in 2023. Since then, I have become a Certified Integrative Thanatologist, created the ILID grieftending practice, and continued facilitating grief conversations through What I Let Die and the monthly Grief Affinity Circle at Kripalu.
I am bringing that history into this seminar because conflict or distance inside a parent-child relationship may also include an ending that has not been tended. Something that happened years ago can still influence how we parent, how we respond to a parent, or how we understand ourselves now.
For me, savoring a parent-child relationship includes admitting when I miss a version of it. A season can be beautiful and complete. I can still grieve that it ended.
It also means telling the truth when the relationship caused harm or could not become what I needed. I can understand what someone carried without making their history more important than my own experience.
That is some of what we will practice together.
Parenting Grief. What we carry as parents and what we carry from being parented.
- Wednesday, 11 November, 2026
- 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 6pm SAST
- Two hours, live on Zoom
- No recording
- 25 seats