One of the most common expressions in regard to raising children is “it takes a village.” I think about this expression a lot, especially as I drive through the streets of my village.
Two schools are within walking distance of my house and every weekday I see the kids in my neighborhood heading to school. Some mornings they’re very animated while other days it looks as if they should have gotten more sleep, with backpacks barely hanging on and feet dragging.
I know a lot of the kids in my community. It helps that my own kids have lived here their entire lives, allowing me the opportunity to watch them all grow up together. It’s not unusual for the kids here to wave at me and say hi when I’m driving by. A few of them call me “mom,” which makes me laugh and makes my own kids embarrassed.
As the kids age and change, so do the conversations. Now, instead of hearing a funny story about what (this girl) did in class, I’m hearing stories about how she was suspended for fighting in school. (This guy) was caught vaping in the bathroom. (This guy) was having sex in the parking lot. The other night we drove past a group of boys that I didn’t recognize and one of my kids said, “Mom! That’s the kid who (overdosed) and almost died!”
Just this morning, in fact, I was told about rumors of drunken kids. My daughter said, “I just delete them from my friend’s list because I don’t want no part in that mess.” Here it was, not even 8 a.m. and this conversation was taking place.
I asked, “What’s the difference? What makes you not do that?” She huffed at me and said, “I don’t want to die.” I said, “No, we’re missing it. We need to learn why some kids do and some kids don’t. What’s different in your lives or in your heads that help you to make better choices?”
I was told that she didn’t know and didn’t want to talk about it anymore because I was being a downer. But here’s the thing … I’m tired of watching my village burn.
The other day I read a statistic that 10 percent of West Virginia children are homeless. One in 10 of our kids don’t have a stable place to live, which means that their parents or guardians don’t either. A report in the Charleston Gazette-Mail this summer stated that over 10,000 public education students were homeless. My question is why.
Is it because rent is astronomically priced? If I was to move right now and rent a house large enough to meet my family’s needs, I would be paying over $1,000 a month rent. First month and a deposit would be literally impossible for me. If you’re working for West Virginia’s minimum wage of $8.75 an hour, you make $1,400 a month BEFORE taxes. How in the world do you pay rent and utilities, food, and take care of other necessary expenses?
You can’t, plain and simple. Even working for $10.50 per hour leaves you with a pre-tax income of $1,680 a month for a full-time job. Again, it wouldn’t be possible to pay $1,000-plus for rent and survive financially on that income.
And here’s what we need to remember: Every time adults who are heading up a household fall victim to homelessness, so do the children. For every homeless child, there is a homeless parent as well, and that goes for everything: hungry kids live with hungry parents, poor kids live in households in poverty, and the list goes on and on.
There’s a toxic stress that is associated with poverty. Poverty is one of the biggest public health issues affecting our children here in West Virginia. There’s a reason why poverty is considered an Adverse Childhood Experience, and we need to begin to recognize it on a much larger scale. Moments ago, I had a conversation with a single mom who said that she “did everything (she) was supposed to do,” meaning that she graduated from college, married, and was living a modest two-income, middle-class life.
But her husband became addicted to drugs and the bottom fell out of her family. She can’t work because there is one childcare center in her entire county and the waiting list is years-long. Who will watch her children so she can work? And I have heard this story over and over again from people in counties throughout our state.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth about the state of our economy. One thing I’m told quite often is that jobs are available, but people don’t want to work. I’m going to ask that we start to frame this conversation a different way. There may be jobs available. Our unemployment rate may be falling, but do the jobs pay a livable wage? Are the unemployment numbers improving because people are working two or three jobs to get by? Are there enough supports in place for people to work, such as childcare and transportation?
On a personal note, I believe that everyone who can work should work, but I also realize through my lived and professional experiences that work isn’t always the best option. Sometimes there are too many obstacles and setbacks when a family does go to work that makes it impossible.
Don’t believe me? Try working with no childcare. Try working without reliable transportation. Try working and providing for your family on $10.50 an hour.
If we are going to save the kids in our state then we need to work on developing a system that understands the obstacles to raising them in enriched and stable lives. We need to work and demand that the system be designed to be a hand up rather than a handout because right now the system isn’t working well.
I spoke to an employee at a gas station who shared that she, a single mom, had been so excited because she had been given a raise and promotion. She told me how proud of herself she had been and how exciting it was to her. And then she shared how she lost most of her assistance within a couple of months. Her rent jumped from $450/month to over $900. She lost her family’s SNAP benefits. She lost her health insurance coverage. It all became so overwhelming that she resigned her position and returned to a clerk because that was the only way she and her family could survive.
We shouldn’t be placed in a position to have to make such choices, especially when we’re doing our best to raise our children.
Our legislative session begins this week. I hope we pay attention to the policies that are working to build strong foundations for our families so that we can thrive rather than survive. I hope, if your belief is that people are living on welfare because they’re lazy and unmotivated, you seek to understand why the systems in place are most often to blame and not the people who rely on them.
We all need to grow more aware of what the underlying issues are because our kids are being crushed from the pressure of it. I, for one, will be guarding my village. I refuse to sit quietly, looking the other way, while it burns to the ground, and I hope you will join me.
