nothin Who Is Raising Our Children? | New Haven Independent

Who Is Raising Our Children?

Two of my best friends, both with professional, high-stress, high-paying careers, came over for dinner. Their children were not with them but at home with the babysitter. As we were talking about child care, they were excited to inform me about the new gem they had found for day care.

They drop their kids off at a day-care program from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. The woman who runs the child-care program feeds the children breakfast, gets them to school, and also makes sure they get to their scheduled afternoon extracurricular activities. If the children were sick and couldn’t go to school, the woman also had a designated sickroom where they could stay in bed all day. And for an extra fee, she even provides dinner.

My friends were also relieved that in addition to their child-care provider, they had a wonderful sitter scheduled for three evenings a week to allow them to maintain their busy volunteer, civic, and nonprofit commitments.

Who is raising our children? Haven’t we learned that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world?

When we leave our children in the care of others, those others inevitably teach their thoughts and beliefs to our little ones. No wonder we wake up in the middle of the night, look at our children, and wonder who they are and how they got to be that way. There is no mystery to the insecurity and violence of our youth; it’s the direct result of abandoning them to TV and surrogate, paid caregivers.

I told my friends at dinner that I thought it was a disservice to their children that they spent the majority of their early years under the care of other people. The women responded defensively that families need two incomes to survive.

Yes,” I thought, you need two jobs to drive the best new car and live in a yuppie neighborhood. But what kind of values are those?”

Kids are not a fashion accessory. You don’t pull them out and show off how smart they are, what overachievers they are, or how beautiful they look. They are spirits on a journey, and they need guidance. As parents, it is our job to guide them toward what their unique experience should be, as opposed to pushing them toward how we want them to be.

I think that we are disintegrating as a society because we are losing focus on what is most important. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, there has been an approximately 1.3 percent increase in suicide deaths in teens since 2003. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that within the past 30 years, childhood obesity has more than doubledin the United States and has quadrupled for U.S. adolescents.

(The CDC also reports that more than 750,000 children are treated in hospital emergency rooms every year as a result of assault and abuse, and the National Center for Health Statistics reports that 1 in 13 children in America is on at least one medication for emotional and behavioral problems.)

Truth be told, if we are not around, there is no way of knowing what kind of unhealthy world view and moral code our kids are absorbing. Little wonder that our kids are deficient, hyperactive, and obese. All these problems can be traced back to the lack of a stable home environment. It becomes a struggle for children to find security and discipline, which are two necessities in building a strong character. When our children are showing symptoms such as chronic sickness, agitation, or nightmares, or are expressing a refusal to go to sleep or school, we now label them as spoiled, difficult, or unruly. Yet we never look deeper than these symptoms to decipher what the root of the problem is. These symptoms” are classic signs of separation anxiety in children, or an indicator that the child is not feeling secure.

I have a friend who has been pushing his children since birth, in preparation for them to attend one of the top schools in the country, such as MIT or Yale. One of his sons has panic attacks that are bad enough he can barely leave the house. He is the brightest young man in his classes. You would never know that he suffered from anxiety, when you interact with him one-on-one. Yet his parents do not see a correlation between his issues and their absence in his day-to-day life.

His brother is a food hoarder, and any psychologist will tell you that children who hoard food are struggling with safety issues.

The son of my home health aide would continually run away from home. She could not understand what made him run away, since her other children never responded to their overbearing father in such a manner. When this boy ran away, he would always end up at the babysitter’s house.

One of my very religious friends came by my house one day and, when a particular song came on the radio, she said she would never let her kids listen to that kind of music. When we all got in my car, her 6‑year-old son turned on the radio, and that very song started playing. He started to sing along. The look of shock on his mother’s face was indescribable.

Her response? He must have heard that at the babysitter’s, because we don’t allow that kind of stuff in our home.”

There was a time when parents who had to work could leave their children in the care of a grandmother, aunt, or another family member. Though this is no longer possible for most families, it should remind us that there are alternatives. We could work less, buy less, and spend more quality time directly with our children. When we are absent in our children’s lives, we wreak havoc.

Dr. Shefali Tsabary writes, Parents unwittingly pass on an inheritance of psychological pain and emotional shallowness … and then look for clever techniques for control and quick fixes for dysfunction.”

Now is the time when we need to sit down and reevaluate our priorities. Our children are the future; we must make it our priority to raise them in a nurturing, structured environment, so that we can ensure a healthy future for them.

Crystal Emery is a New Haven writer, filmmaker and activist who is also a recovering quadriplegic.

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