As Father’s Day approaches, many families prepare to honor the men who have guided, protected, and nurtured children—biological or chosen. But for those of us walking a path rooted in matriarchal values, this day also offers something more: a chance to reflect on what it really means to parent in a way that supports the flourishing of the next generation.

Whether you are a father, co-parent, uncle, teacher, mentor, or caregiver, the question is not just how do I show up today? but how do I heal what’s been passed down, so I don’t pass it on?

Parenting as Lineage Work

For many of us, parenting is not just a role—it’s an act of reclamation. It means holding space for children while actively working through our own inherited trauma. Sometimes we parent while still healing from abuse, neglect, or community silence. And we do it not because we are healed already, but because we want something better for the young ones in our care.

This is the heart of matriarchal practice: not perfection, but presence. Not control, but conscious responsibility.

Honoring the Fathers, While Reclaiming Ourselves

So yes, let us honor the fathers. Let us celebrate their devotion and the tender, often invisible, work of love they perform. But let’s also stretch the frame. Let’s honor those doing the inner work, often silently, to ensure that generational pain ends with them.

That may look like:

• Seeking therapy or support to untangle a painful childhood.

• Learning to recognize fight, flight, freeze, or appease responses in ourselves.

• Reaching out to trusted adults when we’re unsure how to protect our kids.

• Naming truths we were once forced to deny.

• Teaching our children not just kindness, but discernment in a world of social media, gaming, and endless digital contact.

When Our Lineage Holds Harm

Many parents find themselves caught between a desire to honor their own parents and the reality of surviving the harm those very people may have caused—or failed to prevent. This is not an easy truth to carry, but it’s a vital one.

The work of self-healing is the work of parenting. When we make space to feel, remember, and integrate our pain, we begin to interrupt the cycle. We begin to offer our children something that may not have been offered to us: safety, truth, and unconditional care.

It’s okay to have complicated feelings about your own upbringing. It’s okay to seek help from those who were not harmed the way you were—those with the capacity to see what you might not yet be able to see. That is part of community parenting. That is part of building a matriarchal future.

Truth-Telling as Protection

Today’s children are growing up in a world of unprecedented access—to information, to people, and yes, to danger. That includes grooming and recruitment by hate groups and predators through gaming platforms, exploitation via messaging apps, and emotional manipulation masked as connection.

Matriarchal parenting means we don’t shy away from these conversations. We ask questions. We stay curious. We let our children know: Nothing is too awkward, too scary, or too taboo to talk about here.

Because silence has never protected our young people. Truth has.

Healing Within, Speaking Outward

We are not only inheritors of family patterns—we are also inheritors of larger systems that have caused harm: Native boarding schools, adoption trafficking, and homes for unwed mothers. These institutions broke bonds, erased names, and wounded entire lineages. And their impacts echo through us, whether we remember or not.

So on this Father’s Day, may we honor all who have parented with care—and all who are working to repair what was broken, stolen, or silenced.

May we become the generation that holds complexity with compassion and dares to dream a new legacy into being.

To explore these topics more deeply or find community support for your own healing and parenting journey, join one of our periodic drop-in groups.