It Takes a Village

It takes a village to raise a child, but the villages have been pillaged and the survivors have all fled to the city.

Sometimes, as a parent it feels this way. As our lives get busier, the neighbourhood and family supports that used to be there for children have all but disappeared. It is more and more common for parents to live far from siblings and their own parents when they become parents. Parents who do live close may find that relatives are too busy to take on an active role in their children's lives. If parents find they need help, chances are that they will need to seek it from a stranger rather than a relative or trusted friend. On warm spring and summer evenings, when we walk through our neighbourhoods, we find the streets are strangely empty of children and families, who are busy working late or at organized, structured programs instead.


This makes it even more important to connect with other parents when you are expecting and when your children are young. The Ontario Early Years Centres helped me meet some friends in similar situations. It is helpful to know there is someone you can trust with your children in an emergency. It is good for the kids to get to know other families (not just other kids they see at daycare in structured situations). More drop-in style, informal, neighbourhood-based programs where parents (not just the moms) can meet, talk, and bring their children are crucial.

It's time to be the village our children need. This means connecting with neighbours, helping each other out, tuning in to your children and to the children they meet. It means supporting other families without judging or imposing your own will on them. It means slowing down to listen. It means slowing down! It means being there for yourself, your children and your community. It may mean changing your priorities, and clearing time off your schedule.

As a society, we need to make a stronger effort to bring the focus away from commerce and back to the family and especially the children. We need neighbourhoods in which the kids play outside, with their parents, and sometimes without. We need to get to know our neighbours and our extended family (and no, an annual update on the back of a Christmas cards does not count!). We need to value kids for who they are at the moment. We need to start putting them first. We need to create bonds with others beyond the nuclear family unit so that kids have room to learn and grow without being stifled. We need to care about not just our own children, but all children. We need to drop the competitiveness that keeps this from happening, and begin to work together and create community. We need to recognize our true needs and work for those, rather than only the material goods our society so covets.

We need to start placing a much higher value on those who choose to spend their time working with children, whether they be the endangered stay-at-home parent, the daycare worker, or the primary teacher. We hear about women's groups espousing more and better daycare funding, but I'd like to see better support for full-time moms and dads and extended family members who are primary caregivers. I choose feminism over women's lib I guess.
We also hear about increased support for working families--when what is really meant isn't "families that work" in the sense that they encourage the inner growth of all members, but families in which both of the adults dedicate a huge portion of their time to improving the economy. While we do need material things, and we need to ensure that business and commerce runs smoothly, we have a much higher obligation to keep from neglecting our other needs in our current obsession with "more".

I am not going to argue against families in which both adults work full-time and have children; I am arguing that this is only one option and isn't necessarily the best one for most families for the long term good of society. Yet it is the one that has become most respected and mainstream.

We have all read or at least heard about the studies that claim that the first 6 years of a child's life are the most crucial, yet we still continue to recklessly bulldoze our way through them. We allow others to make decisions on our children's (and often the entire family's) behalf. If we all took an active role in the care of our children, our focus on the children would help us deal with the world's problems with a clearer perspective.

These are my views, and happen to be quite similar to the philosophy behind Raffi's Child Honouring (see earlier post) although he is somewhat less "political" about it than I am.