Children’s Rights, Partnership Systems, Education, and Masculinity

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler discuss children’s rights, partnership systems, education, caregiving, gender roles, masculinity, and domination hierarchies. Eisler explains how relational dynamics connect childhood experiences with broader patterns of violence and inequality, emphasizing alloparenting, family structures, and alternatives to punitive socialization. Their exchange also examines restrictive masculine norms, historical corporal punishment in education, women’s enforcement of patriarchal customs, and the importance of organizing social relations around partnership rather than domination.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. As far as I am aware, it is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. The United States remains the only country that has signed but not ratified it. The United States signed the Convention in 1995, more than 30 years ago.

UNICEF’s Frequently Asked Questions section confirms that the United States is the only country that has not ratified the Convention. That is indicative. The Center for Partnership Systems also proposes a Children’s Bill of Rights as part of its Caring Family Policy Agenda.

How is this similar to the Convention? And in what ways does the Children’s Bill of Rights build differently on principles found in instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

Riane Eisler: The virtue of studying relational dynamics, which is my methodology, is that it looks at interconnections. It connects the dots. It has been a while since I looked at the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but my recollection is that it does not really connect the dots in that way.

We also held a virtual summit called Peace Begins at Home, which follows this relational-dynamics approach. The summit examines connections between early patterns of domination within families and wider patterns of social injustice and violence. It shows, for example, that when children are brought up to obey their parents unquestioningly out of fear of physical punishment, they may be learning patterns characteristic of a domination system.

That is what we sought to show by connecting the dots. If you look at my introduction to that virtual summit, you can see these connections. Some of the other speakers also addressed related questions from their own disciplines. The broader point is that these experiences should not necessarily be treated as isolated phenomena. Our academic disciplines often encourage specialization rather than connecting findings across fields.

Jacobsen: The Children’s Bill of Rights proposed by the Center for Partnership Systems is part of its broader Caring Family Policy Agenda, which also includes Caring Family Values and a Family-Friendly Economy. Its general purpose is to strengthen the social conditions that allow children to develop safely and thrive.

Let us start with three areas commonly associated with children’s well-being: care, preschool or early-childhood education, and quality education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child itself recognizes rights relating to education, health, protection from violence, an adequate standard of living, and access to child-care services for children of working parents.

In most advanced industrial societies, children spend a substantial portion of their lives in schools and other educational settings, where adults other than their parents assume significant responsibilities for their learning, safety, and development. That creates a substantial relationship of trust between children, families, educators, and institutions.

How does the principle of care for every child fit into that relationship? How does preschool for all fit into it? And what does quality education mean within the framework of partnership studies?

Eisler: You really have to go back to what I would call the original partnership-oriented societies. They practiced alloparenting, which is very important because we have heard so much about bonding, but often only in terms of bonding with the mother. In these societies, children also bonded with people other than their mothers. We need alloparenting. The notion of blaming the mother for everything that goes wrong with a child is, if you will, a product of domination systems, in which women are blamed and shamed for problems involving children.

It is interesting because, in more rigid domination societies, boys were taken away from the care of their mothers at a fairly young age to be disciplined by their fathers or other males. That system of blaming the mother while then taking over the “care” of the child is part of our domination heritage, is it not? In classical Athenian society, to my knowledge, boys were subsequently placed under male supervision and discipline.

No society is ever completely a domination system or completely a partnership system. But in domination systems, women, particularly those regarded as “good women,” tend to be socialized to act as agents of male-dominated norms. You can see this, for example, in practices such as Chinese foot binding.

The norms may be imposed within a male-dominated system, but women can become the immediate enforcers of them. We also see this dynamic in female genital mutilation, which is still practiced in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It is an unhealthy system, shall we say.

Jacobsen: In some sense, it forces women into overperformance in certain skills while simultaneously devaluing those skills. It also distances men from part of themselves while valorizing that rejection of emotional and relational development.

Eisler: Absolutely. The problem is that this is considered normal masculinity in domination systems, and you can see it reflected in the vocabulary we have inherited. A man who does not conform to that model, particularly a more caring man, may be despised or demeaned.

Jacobsen: Yes. From personal experience, some people can be incredibly mean toward men who do not conform to restrictive gender stereotypes. I do not mean having a deep voice and broad shoulders, which I simply happen to have.

Eisler: The good news is that there are also trends in the opposite direction. Men are increasingly rejecting some of these expectations, and there are organizations such as Equimundo that focus on men’s caregiving roles, gender equality, and healthier models of masculinity. But again, this is part of a larger system.

I have always felt that we have to pay a great deal of attention to that movement. By that, I mean the movement to disentangle “masculinity” from domination, violence, the stiff upper lip, and uncaring behaviour.

Jacobsen: I used to like, and still like, the work of the late Helen Fisher and her approach to certain relationships. Fisher was a prominent biological anthropologist who studied romantic love, attachment, relationships, and human mating.

Another person, psychotherapist Esther Perel, has discussed the relative fragility of masculine identity. In one formulation, she has argued that the construction of gender identity can be more fragile for men and that masculinity is often defined partly through the rejection of traits culturally coded as feminine.

The frame I took from that argument seemed accurate but historically limited. Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years, whereas complex urban civilizations and states arose much later. So when we say that masculinity has “always” been fragile, the word always depends heavily on the historical frame being used.

I was considering her point through your partnership-studies framework because I think her analysis captures something real but partial. Your framework attempts to place those gender dynamics within a much broader account of social organization.

Eisler: Absolutely. It takes into account that we have a partnership alternative and that everything, and I mean everything, is different when social relations are organized differently, beginning with gender roles and relations.

The marginalization of family, childhood, gender stereotypes, and gender ranking as merely ancillary matters, or simply as “women’s issues” or “children’s issues,” is part of the fragmentation of consciousness. It is also part of the trauma that helps perpetuate domination systems.

Jacobsen: That is also reflected in coded expressions and epithets. Consider phrases such as “don’t be a boy,” “be a man,” or “man up.” These expressions can imply both that childhood is inferior to adulthood and that masculinity must be demonstrated through conformity to particular behavioural expectations.

In that sense, they can exert punitive pressure on boys to construct an identity around a restrictive model of manhood. How does that dynamic become embedded in educational systems when children themselves are treated as secondary or subordinate?

Eisler: The conventional educational systems we inherited were historically shaped, in many places, by highly hierarchical structures. Corporal punishment was once routine in schools and was widely regarded as a legitimate means of discipline.

If you study the history of education, you see that physical punishment was accepted across many educational traditions. Teachers and school authorities were often expected to discipline students physically, and failure to maintain strict discipline could be interpreted as weakness or ineffectiveness.

This fits within a broader domination hierarchy. Men may receive certain compensatory privileges within that system, such as being treated as the authority within the household or being permitted to dominate women and children. But most men are themselves situated somewhere within a larger hierarchy.

Many men historically occupied relatively subordinate positions and could ultimately be required to give their lives in wars ordered by political or military leaders. We can see a contemporary example in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where Russian forces have suffered substantial military casualties while the war has also inflicted enormous losses on Ukrainian civilians.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.