FDouglass

I remember when I was kid, there were certain things that we COULD NOT do not around adults.  For starters, if an adult was talking to another adult, talking on the phone, or simply talking then we knew not to interrupt.  We had to wait until they were finished speaking and if it was an emergency, we said “excuse me” and waited for them to acknowledge us.  We could not sit in the room while the adults were gossiping, because it was not for our young ears.  If you walked into somebody’s house and did not speak or did not speak when an adult walked into the house that was grounds for being knocked out.  .  We referred to adults as ma’am or sir and never by their first names.  We did not curse around adults and we did not disrespect our elders NOR OUR TEACHERS.We were raised with a sense of community, everybody that we grew up with were our cousins, not by blood but by love.  Our parents were not afraid to let us go outside and play, and we had a blast.  We made up games and gun play did no rob us of our imagination. If we did something wrong, then the neighbor could come get us and would most certainly tell on us.  There was none of this, that’s not my business.  We were all each others business, because we were a village.   And last but not least, you better be in the house by the times the street lights came on, because you did not want your mother or sibling to come looking for you, *inserts* (laugh out loud)

This was only 15 years ago. And I just sit back and wonder, what happened?  What happened in our community that caused this shift from a village raising our children to the TV and our kids raising themselves?  Every day on the news we hear stories of young people killing one another and for what?  What are we dying to prove?  I see mothers who allow their kids to sit up with them and drink, smoke and gossip and they are not even out of high school.  Do we not understand that we are robbing our children of their innocence?  For the life of me, I cannot seem to grasp what went wrong, I am an 80’s baby, but the 90’s raised me and drugs were there all along.  However, we were not afraid of our own people and we were raised with values and morals.  These are the same values and morals that I do not see many in my generation nor those right above me instilling in their own children, and as a result they are lost in a world that would rather drain their souls than feed their spirits.  When will we have enough and how do we come back to that?  I want their childhoods back for them.

What do you believe that we can do to become better as a community with raising our children?