As Hillary Clinton said, "It takes a village to raise a child". I read the special section in the St. Pete Times today on "Ninth or Never", the long article about four ninth graders in a local high school. As a teacher and parent of three, I was appalled and saddened with this information. All of these kids came from chaotic families, no fathers in evidence. I realize that the authors of this article, and their editors, must have left out a lot of information. These four children must face a life of being losers, though one of them might have a chance.. The thing is that these children do not have a village to raise them. Their parents do not have a peer group that spills down to the kids.
When I take my two year old grandson to the preschool library program with "Mother Goose", there are at least a dozen parents there with their toddlers. We are that village raising kids and we are on the same page, so to speak. We have the same values about reading books and this seems to be a way of connecting with the importance of reading and with each other. I also take my grandson to Great Explorations. Here, he examines the exhibits with great care, as do all the other preschoolers. I do not know the other parents (and they are a bit unwelcoming of an elderly grandma), but I perservere and eventually they understand that I am one of them- part of the village raising children.
I think that the four kids in the article never had a village in the library, the park, the museum, or in their neighborhood to help raise them. If we are to make headway in the good development of kids we need to pay attention to the "village" culture.
This weekend we had friends visiting. They have two sons, one in college, and the other, Phil, fourteen years old. The younger one was clearly missing his brother but he spent some hours with me in my studio. He was making some clay pots and I was working on my fabric art in the next room. This seemed very comfortable and from time to time I went in to encourage him or give him some tips.
At dinner we spoke about the digital world and gaming- to the consternation of his mother! Phil wants to have a Playstation 3, but his folks think that this will only take him further away from his worldly and academic tasks. I play the devil's advocate, teacher that I am. This is the village that raises the child! Phil knows that all of us are thinking about what is truly best for him. He knows that not only his parents, but the whole village is thinking about him.
The kids in the St. Pete Times article do not have a whole village of friends and family thinking about them. They needed to have teachers from the beginnng who cared about them, but didn't.
I think about a teacher I saw last week in the public school where I volunteer. In the line going back to the classroom after lunch, her class was ahead of mine. Suddenly she stopped. She then proceeded to ream out a kindergartner boy who had been talking(!) She went on and on about how bad he was, what a disappointment he was, and she didn't say it exactly, but she made it clear he was piece of shit. Our line right in back was clearly embarrassed by this. This little boy, maybe five or six years old had the look of hunted prey. Our class didn't want to make eye contact with the culprit. They were totally quiet. We looked at the "pariah", and all we could do was walk past, and after a decent interval, go back to our normal chit-chat on our way back to our class. Are these ninth graders in the article remembering such experiences as this? This elementary teacher who could so diminish and demolish a child in public should not be teaching kids!
If that child who was so singled out as 'bad' had a village of parent and child peers, the people who surround him would make an outcry! How can we make this happen? I think we should concentrate on making 'villages' happen. Peer groups of parents and kids, what we used to call 'neighborhoods, can make a difference.
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