Every kid needs an adult connection
Past the reproductive stage, our most important tasks as grownups, I believe, can be narrowed down to caring for the children. Not just our kids but as many kids as possible.
It doesn’t even matter if you’ve chosen not to have offspring. That doesn’t exempt you. There are children out there who will not make it without your help and guidance.
We don’t know what is in the future—that’s something between the children and The Almighty. But we should know that, as adults, we all have a responsibility to shepherd the young so they can live a life worth living.
“How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think and who had a champion?” said the late Rita Pierson, an American educator who made an admirable career out of training and motivating teachers. Pierson took part in the 2013 TED Talk Education, in good company with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and British creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson (www.ted.com/
talks/rita_pierson_every_kid_
needs_a_champion).
“Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be,” she said.
It is no accident perhaps that all over the world, organizations like the Kiwanis Club are asking: How can we help the youth so they can be successful in the future?
One of the answers is so obvious, it is staring us in the face.
All children need a caring adult to be around, to keep them safe from monsters—whether imagined or bearing drugs—to model the strength of character to walk away from shady transactions, to teach them ways to cope with the bad breaks so they don’t get stuck in a dark hole and just give up.
Three years ago, we had a seminar for parents and teachers on Internet safety for children. We invited experts, including the authorities, to talk about online bullying, gambling, pornography and other cybercrimes.
One of the parents was so anxious, she just had to ask her question midway through the seminar. Her 10-year-old son had changed overnight, she said. From a happy boy, he had become despondent. In her mother’s heart, she knew that something was wrong. In talking to her son, she found out that an older boy in the neighborhood had come around to play with her son on the computer. Pretty soon, the older boy was surfing the Net and found a porn site.
Most grownups know that sex is beautiful between two people in love but sex that is produced for titillation can be ugly and sex filmed for perverts, even uglier. But kids don’t know that. For all we know, the curious older boy might have been as negatively affected as the younger boy.
Would this have happened if there had been an adult around? Maybe, maybe not. But sometimes, the adult presence is enough of a deterrent to youngsters who are thinking of breaking the rules.
I grew up in a home and a neighborhood where, if you were a kid who was up to no good, if you wanted to smoke or drink beer or kiss your boyfriend, you couldn’t because the grownups were always watching. My mom’s siblings and cousins lived in houses around or near us. We were surrounded by family all the time.
We also had the nosiest but most caring neighbors. The mothers were always out hanging clothes to dry or sweeping underneath the trees. The fathers were always in the garage tinkering with their cars or in the yard conditioning their roosters. So many pairs of eyes!
To keep the boys away from drugs, the older men put up a basketball board right in front of our house. How exactly they did that is still a mystery to me. But it was a structure with a proper board and a proper ring at a proper height—and it worked. My brothers and their friends played basketball until it was too dark to play. That board gave my brothers the right start in life. Basketball led them to scholarships and, later, professional careers as players and coaches.
Now if you were a bunch of taga-labas (outsiders) who showed up in our neighborhood to challenge the boys of Nadurata Street to a round of basketball, you had better play clean. Messing with our boys meant declaring war against their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and practically everyone of their neighbors.
If the boys were screened from harm, imagine what it was like for the girls. While it did scare some suitors away, we were thankful for the protective net that kept us safe.
I remember walking home from a movie once with one of my sisters when a kontrabida-looking guy started following us, walking too close for comfort. He smelled of alcohol, too. We couldn’t walk fast enough. I was about to tell my sister to run when a jeepney stopped and one of our neighbors alighted. He started pushing, pushing, pushing
Mr. Stalker toward the gutter. I remember thinking, oh no, he’s going to kill this bum and end up in jail and we will have to adopt his kids and where will we put them? Luckily, the bad guy sobered up in time to run for his life.
Children have gadgets today in place of the network of adults we had as kids. Everyone is just an iMessage away. Overseas workers are able to do remote parenting via Skype. Teachers are using Facebook to make their lessons more relevant to young learners.
But there is still no substitute for personal human companionship.
I understand that in many families, both parents have to work to be able to put adobo on the table and pay for Wi-Fi. In such cases, a child should be under the care of a grandmother, an uncle, a ninang or any grownup who can think straight.
Outside the home, there should be a teacher, a coach, a mentor or a neighbor who can be a kid’s champion. We all have teachers whom we thank for making a difference in our lives. Many athletes say they have had coaches who pushed them down the right track. People who have had to work at a young age give credit to mentors who made sure they learned their crafts well.
If the young don’t find that kind of positive connection at home, in school and in the neighborhood, they are going to look elsewhere.
(Excerpted from a speech given at the Kiwanis Club of Metro Bacoor induction of officers)
