A Manifesto For My Daughter

At some point, quite soon, I suspect, I’m going to have to talk to my daughter about why she faces discrimination. Frankly, it’s a conversation I dread. I used to think talking to children about topics like race relations was rather off-colour, on the same level as talking to them about sex or speedboat accidents.

I used to be a part-time believer in “Kurdish Recruitment” and wondered whether exposing a child to things like Kurdish folk music should be included under anti-terror legislation. It turns out that it’s the only music my daughter is willing to listen to. I’ve actively encouraged her to listen to Baby Shark and Cocomelon, to no avail. I suppose that’ll be a blessing in disguise in a few years’ time, though I still feel the need to describe her cute little personal preference as a “bad habit” and explain that “she’ll grow out of it”.

I used to think giving a child a Kurdish name was the eighth deadly sin. It was honestly quite difficult for me to admit that a Kurdish name was what my daughter needed. Both her parents have experienced identity loss, so we agree that a stable identity is more important than a name that everyone she meets knows how to pronounce.

Everyone has their opinions on how to raise a baby. I’ve been called crunchy and a hippie for mine, just for following my cultural norms. Did our older generations abandon their babies in various sets of artificial arms? Did they pass them around in human display cases? Absolutely not — they held their babies and set them down in wooden beds or on mats when they needed to complete a task. Some would put them in backpacks when working outdoors.

A wise medical professional once congratulated us on being a “low-equipment family”. In that case, surely we’re doing something right. So why do I hear it from even my own people that I’m spoiling my daughter by not joining in with the world’s plans to oppress her?

My daughter starts eating when she’s hungry and stops when she’s full. She’s in the 90th percentile for weight, but we buy her bigger onesies instead of a fridge lock and a teeny-tiny treadmill. Even more controversially, she doesn’t have a bedtime. Most Kurdish kids don’t — they engage in the art of intuitive sleeping. Yet I still have to fend off questions of “Are you sure you’re not feeding her too often?” And “How come she’s not sleeping through the night yet?”

I think, we think, setting a goal for a two-month-old of sleeping for ten hours a pop is like declaring a permanently injured man fit for work as a forklift driver. it’s unrealistic, unreasonable and somewhat barbaric. Expecting a baby of any age to eat exactly once every three hours is reducing them to a maths equation, and you can’t mathematise the early stages of being human. I tried many times to hold my daughter to these standards, I failed, I felt like I’d failed as a parent, but I’ve succeeded in recognising that expecting these things of our baby isn’t for our family. Every time I’ve tried to put her on a schedule “like everyone else does”, she thinks she’s being oppressed.

I’ve never understood how this “Western Way” of treating one’s baby as an inconvenience is considered good parenting, while actually meeting the baby’s needs is considered poor parenting and leads to them getting stolen by social services and shipped off to be raised “appropriately”. I was one of those babies, and all being raised “appropriately” did was make it harder for me to know what I want and express it.

Another question I’ve received is whether she’s a “good baby”, and if that means an unnaturally low-maintenance baby, then no, she isn’t. She’s closer on the continuum to meeting Sears’ definition of a high-needs baby. And she’s not going to be a “good” kid or a “good” adult either, because for her, “good” is a racialised concept. She was unlucky enough to be born into a world where being a member of her race is “being bad”. I was referred to my school’s safeguarding unit for wearing a piece of string in the wrong colours. I can see this happening to my daughter even earlier in life and for even more mundane things. We’re both Kurdish — she’s just much more visible than me.

As a young person, far too many of my friendships involved the other person appointing themselves as my “accountability buddy” for assimilating into Western society. At the same time I was discouraged from forming friendships with anyone who showed a modicum of open-mindedness. I remember how I kept cancelling plans to meet my online friend, Zilan, in person because I wouldn’t have known how to interact with a friend who didn’t think there was something wrong with me. I want most, if not all, of my daughter’s friendships to be actively affirmative of who she is.

I want this to be a learning experience. I hope to become less uncomfortable with seeing kids at protests, and to bring her to one sometime. I hope I can stick to my plan for my daughter to learn her language. I was discouraged from doing the same and told “it’s a cultural language, not a business one”. I attended an evening class, where I was actually ahead of everyone else after only a few weeks. I still dropped out because of the overwhelming guilt about how I could be using that time to do something more profitable. I didn’t even grow up poor and I still struggle with this internalised capitalism. My daughter should never feel like she has to abandon her identity for something she can make money from. Money can’t buy an identity.

Second-generation Kurdish individuals usually have a better experience in the UK than their first-generation counterparts. I have the option to make my daughter’s experience even better by not subjecting her to the same shame cycle that I’m still trying to get out of. I can start early to raise her in a way that respects who she is.