Wise Words - Raising African American Children

[Im The Truth]

Wise Words - Raising African American Children
Ylonda Gault-Caviness


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Our leading child-rearing experts offer 30 pointers for raising confident, caring, competent kids

Spare the rod, spoil the child. Children should be seen and not heard. Many of our parents and their parents before them had little else to lean on but adages like these. But as we enter the twenty-first century, we now know that rearing strong Black children is more complex than that. In the past 30 years alone, growing cadres of African-American scholars have uncovered information that soundly debunks many of the old-school rules of parenting. They've made unprecedented strides in understanding the fertile minds of our uniquely talented Black seeds and, more important, how best to guide and nurture them. Their words of advice:

Self-esteem

"An anonymous sage once said, `If you don't want to be criticized, don't say anything, do anything or be anything.' Don't [let your children] be afraid of failing. It's the way you learn to do things right. It doesn't matter how many times you fall down. What matters is how many times you get up." --MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, president-founder, The Children's Defense Fund; author of The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (HarperCollins, $10)

"Respect your child as a person. Children need to respect their elders, but they must also respect themselves. That doesn't mean children should do or say as they please. But parents should be careful to discipline without putting a child down." --DR. ANNE BEAL, pediatrician, Harvard Medical Center; ESSENCE columnist; coauthor (with Linda Villarosa and Allison Abner) of The Black Parenting Book: Caring for Our Children in the First Five Years (Broadway Books, $20)

"Many of our children have come to accept the notion that they are what they wear--designer clothes, expensive sneakers. We show our kids what we value by what we spend our time and energy on. Take care to develop and nurture the inside as extravagantly as the outside." --GEOFFREY CANADA, president, Rheedlen Center for Families, a nonprofit community-based children and family services agency; author of Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America (Beacon Press, $12.50)

"Every child should sense that gleam in the parent's eye. That's where self-esteem starts--the sense of being loved and admired. As parents, that means putting in the time, getting on the floor, playing with and delighting in your child." --DR. MARILYN BENOIT, program director, Children's Psychiatric Services, Howard University Hospital; president, American Academy of Child/Adolescent Psychiatry

"Don't kill the child's spirit. Nobody is happy all the time, but if a child is unhappy most of the time, something's wrong. Give your children regular chores so they can learn to stick with tasks. Then praise them for what they do more than you criticize them for what they can't or won't do." --DRS. JULIA AND NATHAN HARE, founders of The Black Think Tank, a group of scholars and contemporary intellectuals devoted to the study of the Black family; authors of Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood The Passage (Black Think Tank, $6)

Social and Moral Responsibility

"From the very beginning, love and nurture your child so he can begin to feel connected to others. It's only when we can feel a connection to others that we learn to respect the rights of others. But first and foremost, that child must feel loved and secure." --DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT, clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical Center; coauthor (with Dr. James Comer) of Raising Black Children (Plume, $14.95)

"Empathy is what I often see lacking in our interactions with our children--a mother snapping at a 2-year-old who won't sit still. Toddlers are not meant to be still! When you don't learn empathy, you can beat your wife, snatch an old lady's pocketbook. Children who haven't been shown empathy grow up broken, with no souls." --DR. FRIEDA HOPKINS OUTLAW, D.N.S.C. (doctorate of nursing), professor of psychiatric mental health, University of Pennsylvania

"Be a role model. I learned social responsibility by tagging along with my mother when she took `Granny' a plate of food. Granny was no relation to us, but she was on in years and couldn't get around so well. We need to show our kids how to be good toward those less fortunate." --DR. JAMES COMER, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry, Yale University; author of Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can't Solve Our Problems--and We Can (Plume, $13.95)

"Remember, your role as a parent is not to be your child's best friend. It's to guide them into becoming productive people who honor themselves and their community. Know that your child is learning your values by how you live, not by what you say." --PATRICIA REID-MERRITT, PH.D., professor, African Studies, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey; founder of Afro-One, a rites-of-passage arts program for African-American children

"Leadership and service are by no means limited to visible, public roles. Use your political and economic power for the community and others less fortunate. Be a quiet servant-leader example. Just doing the right and decent thing can set the pace for others to follow." --MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

Racial Pride and Identity

"A child's primary identity comes from the parent. It's only at ages 3, 4 and 5 that kids even begin to think about color. Black kids need to see themselves reflected in all we expose them to, especially books and dolls. Also be aware of some of your own attitudes about skin tone, hair texture and the like. Too often, Blacks unknowingly translate negative messages to children." --DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT

"As you help them understand that Blacks have been denied as a group, be careful. The more rage and anger you express, the more you're playing up the victim role. Stress the ways Blacks have succeeded, and be a role model through your own personal development and excellence." --DR. JAMES COMER

"Kids today need to know who they are and where they come from. That's missing. Connect your children to what it means to be of African descent. There's no one way to accomplish this; there are several. It's role modeling with Kwaanza celebrations and expressing your own Afrocentric tastes. It's exposing them through reading and education. It should be woven into the fabric of living our lives." --DR. FRIEDA HOPKINS OUTLAW

"History has to be talked about. Jewish people teach the evils of the Holocaust. The Irish and Italians tell their children who they are. We have to stress our history, including the Middle Passage and slavery, post-Emancipation and back to the beginning of time. That way our children will know that the legacy must continue." --DRS. JULIA AND NATHAN HARE

"Remember your roots, your history and the forebears' shoulders on which you stand. And pass these roots on to your children and to other children. Young people who do not know where they come from and the struggle it took to get them where they are now will not know where they are going or what to do for anyone besides themselves. All Black children need to feel the rightful pride of a great people that produced Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass." --MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

Academic Achievement

"Start with a healthy pregnancy. Don't neglect proper nutrition and prenatal care. From the time the child is born, coo, sing, talk--do everything you can to stimulate the baby. Parents are a child's first teachers, so read to children even before they can talk. Take advantage of nature and cultural experiences that are free and available to us all." --DR. ALVIN POUSSAINT

"Many public schools are not able to offer our children a high-quality education. As public-school systems continue to struggle, we need to be intimately involved in our children's learning process. It's not enough to simply send them off to school anymore." --GEOFFREY CANADA

"Nurture your child's natural curiosity. Go see a waterfall and encourage her questions about what makes that happen. Read to your child early--not to push him into saying words, but to create a love of learning in him." --DR. MARILYN BENOIT

"Encourage your child to think for herself. One goal of parenting is rearing a centered, independent child. Independence requires good judgment and problem-solving skills, which you can help develop in your child at an early age." --DR. ANNE BEAL

"We need to explore alternative or parallel educational forums to help our kids become well-rounded individuals. The public-education system is not going to provide the cultural or spiritual education you might want your child to have." --PATRICIA REID-MERRITT