I recently spoke with a friend about the number of challenges children who come from a background of limited resources have to face and how that affects their decision making. (who said this?) my Friend said, you do what you know to do . And the comment stuck with me.
We all understand how common it is for us to follow a blueprint that has already been produced. Researchers have found a child experiences the greatest amount of human growth and development during the first five years of life. What occurs during this period of time will set the stage for future learning. However the impact lasts way beyond those years, and ultimately affects every area of life. We most certainly become products of our environments.
This is troublesome when we have 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. And while having financial stability doesn't translate into happiness or fullness of life, it does offer access to tools and resources available to those within middle and upper classes The poor can't affort such resources.
So we have children growing without the tools to help them thrive throughout adulthood. Can we responsibly say that this is not an entire community's problem? Do we simply look away and hope the crisis corrects itself?
W hatever position we take, it's a situation that has the potential to impact all of our communities.
Educator and Author Ruby Payne in her book Bridges Out of Poverty speaks about the hidden messages in different socio economic classes and how they determine how an individual sets up their value and life system. Children do not elect what group they choose to grow up in but yet they learn these messages. As a society we enjoy the freedoms and liberty of agreeing to disagree but when it comes to our children, agreement is necessary.
The concept of it takes a village, to raise a child still needs to be a vital approach to building a strong child, where there are no divided lines between villages. We are all equally responsible as citizens to care for our communities.
We should not settle for the notion of we do what we know . What we know is we do have the power to support programs that can help others less fortunate than us.