Parenting & Family Quote by Susan Griffin

Griffin’s line lands like an accusation dressed as diagnosis: our culture doesn’t just discipline kids’ behavior, it disciplines their embodied reality until the body feels like an adversary. The verb “punish” is doing heavy work here. It implies not a neutral “socialization,” but an enforced exile from sensation, desire, appetite, pain, joy - the whole messy intelligence of being physical. And “out of their relationship” suggests something relational and ongoing gets severed: children aren’t merely taught rules, they’re taught estrangement.

Her second clause names the ideological engine behind that estrangement: a categorical split between mind and body, emotion and intellect. “Categorically” hints at institutions, not just parents. Schoolrooms that reward stillness, workplaces that treat fatigue like moral failure, medicine that can mistrust patients (especially women) as “hysterical,” religious and social norms that make certain bodies feel wrong. Griffin, long associated with feminist and ecological writing, is pointing at a lineage where the “rational” mind is elevated by casting the body as irrational, feminine, animal, disposable. That hierarchy has political value: people who don’t trust their own sensations are easier to manage, market to, shame, and police.

The subtext is that this division doesn’t produce smarter citizens; it produces compliant ones. When emotion is framed as the enemy of intellect, children learn to mistrust their gut reactions and narrate themselves from a distance. Griffin’s intent isn’t to romanticize impulse, but to argue that wholeness - thinking that includes feeling, reason that includes the body - is a threatened form of freedom.