Your Kids Don’t Suck: Cultivating Closeness with your Kids through Non-Coercive, Conscious Parenting

Fighting Facism & Finding Your Village with Yolanda Williams of Parenting Decolonized

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Aug 1, 2025

Yolanda Williams, an activist and conscious parenting coach, discusses her journey as a single parent raising her neurodivergent child while challenging oppressive societal structures. She connects parenting practices to broader issues like fascism and emphasizes the importance of building a supportive community. Yolanda shares her insights on fostering critical thinking in children, the emotional complexities of conscious parenting, and the necessity of open dialogues about fairness and equity. Her vision for intentional parenting encourages resilience and collaboration.

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INSIGHT

Fascism Embedded in Parenting

Fascism has always been present, especially for Black people, though less visible to others.
Parenting styles can either perpetuate fascism or cultivate liberation for children.

ADVICE

Talk Early About Fairness

Start age-appropriate talks with kids about fairness, skin color, and oppression.
Ask kids regularly what they think about what they see and hear to shape their values.

INSIGHT

Systems Undermine Conscious Parenting

Systems are designed to set parents up to fail in raising anti-oppressive children.
Building community is essential to successful conscious parenting.

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Many parents who reject authoritarian parenting don’t have a clear model to follow. It can feel isolating, overwhelming, and exhausting—especially in a society that prioritizes punishment, control, and individualism over connection and collaboration.

In this confronting and compassion-filled episode, Rythea speaks with Yolanda Williams, an activist and single parent raising her neurodivergent child with intention, autonomy, and resistance at the core. Rythea asks about the connection between facism and childism during this moment in history, and Yolanda expertly breaks this down. How is our parenting directly related to fighting against or participating in fascist patterns?

Yolanda expands on the need for building a village—a local community that supports her child while also inviting her child to actively participate in building that community. She speaks about the moment she refused to let survival mode sever her bond with her child, how she is intentionally shaping her physical environments to support her values and her family’s needs, and how community-building has become part of her parenting practice.

Yolanda’s insightful vision weaves its way through this conversation as she talks about parenting an autistic and developmentally delayed child—and how conscious parenting looks different when collaboration cues are not available. She brings voice to the reality of being a Black, disabled, solo parent, and the ongoing work of balancing self-responsibility with survival, in an unsupportive social and political system.

Key Topics:

Building intentional community as a parenting practice
Parenting while disabled, solo, and under-resourced
Refusing to let survival disconnect you from your child
Creating physical spaces that reflect anti-oppressive values
Conscious parenting with neurodivergent children
Redefining the “village” as real, local, and reciprocal

Yolanda Williams is the founder of Parenting Decolonized, and is currently documenting her journey of building a farm.

Follow along Yolanda's farming journey https://www.youtube.com/@WildandFreeFamilyFarm

Listen to Parenting Decolonized podcast https://parentingdecolonized.com/podcast/

Support YKDS https://buymeacoffee.com/yourkidsdontsuck

Book a mentor session with Rythea https://calendly.com/rythea

Connect with Cara https://www.caratedstonetherapy.com/

We (Rythea and Cara) are white, cis-gender, straight, middle-class women living with financial and societal privilege. Our perspectives are limited. We are committed to featuring guests from diverse lived experiences to reflect the realities of a broader parenting community. 25% of proceeds from this podcast go to creators of color who have shaped our work.

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