Welcome to the first Galaxy Guide pack release!
Galaxy Guide: A TJ Parenting Portal is a digital media project about how the political framework of Transformative Justice has informed the values and practices of parenting people.
Exploring Bodily Autonomy and Healthy Sexuality for Children is a 3-part series featuring an interview with Queer Black Mama, Kristianna Smith.
This pack is for all of the parenting people attempting to disrupt internalized rape culture, misogyny, patriarchy, and fatphobia so that they aren’t using systems of oppression as tools to control or coerce compliance in children as a way to manage their own unmet needs, anxieties, triggers, and trauma responses.
Or as my friend Kristianna texted, “How do we give young kids the freedom to explore their sensuality without getting triggered by the fucked existence of the world?”
When I read Kristianna’s text, I knew we had to record the conversation for an upcoming Galaxy Guide pack. I’m so glad we did because even though I joked that we couldn’t, we imagined a lot of possibilities and discovered a few practices to experiment with by sharing our parenting stories.
[Image description: A text thread with white text on a black background that reads: Can we hang soon because I have parenting curiosities that I want to dig into with you. For later when I forget: how do we give young kids the freedom to explore their sensuality without getting triggered by the fucked existence of the world. Or with dealing with the triggering? Idk I’m just like AHHH I HAVE NO ROADMAP FOR A HEALTH WAY TO DO THIS.]
Kristianna’s brave and vulnerable question allowed us to discuss how our traumas - past and present - impact our decision-making as parents and ways that we can tend to ourselves so that we are less likely to inadvertently pass those hurts and harms on to our children.
In our Galaxy Guide Pack 1, we confront some big Transformative Justice Parenting questions about internalized rape culture.
When you know that there be dragons all along the path waiting to hypersexualize, exploit, harm, and abuse your child, how do you protect them? How do you prepare them?
And how do you quiet the voices that tell you that if you allow your child to be free to explore their sensuality and sexuality, you will make them less safe?
It is really hard to give your child the freedom to explore when you have spent a lifetime being told that your body, your clothing, and your choices are at least part of, if not the entire reason that you were hypersexualized, abused, or violated as a child.
Subscribers can click here to access the full pack when it’s released.
Check out our Star Maps for curated and created resources intended to give you activities, tips, and tools for practicing parenting strategies aligned with your Transformative Justice values.
And don't forget to share the Galaxy Guide with your Parenting Pod Network!
We hope this project inspires you to have important conversations and build meaningful connections with yourself, your partner(s), and your children so that you can create new generational cycles of healing, accountability, love, and liberation.
In solidarity,
Tashmica Torok
Do you have a TJ Parenting question? If you’d like to participate in an upcoming Galaxy Guide recording session, message me today!
We’d also love to hear your thoughts on this pack! Send stories, artwork, or poetry inspired by this pack and created by you, your child(ren), or your parenting pod and it might be featured in an upcoming pack or on our TJ Parenting Instagram account.
Follow TJ Parenting on Instagram for more insights, funny reels, and prompts designed to build our collective imagination for transformative justice parenting strategies.
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