"It Takes A Village..."

“It takes a village to raise a child.” –African proverb

            After reading Whatever it Takes by Paul Tough and an article in The Washington Post entitled, “Does the NAACP think its okay to hit your kids?,” almost nothing is more clear to me than the proverb above. Children are products of their environment. When I say that I do not mean that they are passive sponges, but rather, they have the potential to rise or sink to the expectations and the norms with which become customary.  That is a main reason why Geoffrey Canada believes the best way to change the life outcomes for children is to revamp and restructure the entire environment so that it becomes “contaminated” with positive choices and behaviors. The hope is that the child has no other option, but to follow suit and jump on the productive life-path trail. This citywide transformation model confronts the fact that it is impossible for a single positive influencer to be in the presence of a child for every second of every day. Therefore, parents, teachers, caregivers, and community members as a whole, must be able to rely on everyone “in the village” to support the child in his or her journey to a prolific and healthy adulthood.

            Canada’s first solution to creating this safety net started with the parents in Baby College. In these classes he presented information, grounded in research, concerning parenting techniques that best promote social, emotional, and academic development. These practices were discovered to be advantageous for children in school and throughout their lives. The Baby College teachers promoted strategies that did not involve any type of corporal punishment. These strategies favored time-outs and taking away privileges over spankings, and beatings. As relayed by Tough, many parents had a hard time coming to terms with this knowledge, partly because violent punishments were the most feared and had the greatest impact on them during their respective childhoods. Yet, Canada felt that it was part of the responsibility of the Baby College to provide disciplinary instruction to parents in Harlem in the hopes that they will abandon physical punishments in favor of other methods.

            Does the NAACP have the power to demand the employment of these same disciplinary tactics across the nation, or is telling parents how to raise their children an issue outside of public authority? On Sunday, Stacey Patton reported a story in The Washington Post about a 15-year-old girl who called 911 on her father (a pastor) for choking and slapping her, and, as a result, he was arrested. The violence was orchestrated due to the disrespectful act of disobedience that the daughter executed by “arguing about attending a party that the father deemed off-limits.”  Does a legal governing body have the right to pass judgment on how a parent disciplines his or her child, or can we as a society draw a line on violent punishment because research has proven this is not beneficial to a child’s development? The verdict is up in the air for this particular case. Generally speaking, I am personally unsure where to draw the line. I think it is important to consider the effects that a community’s laws and norms have on the children and consequently the adults those children grow to be, but yet appreciate the privacy that parents desire. However, if, like Canada, the national aspiration is to create opportunities for all children to develop the best futures possible, maybe governing bodies and outside authorities should influence the techniques of parents, considering how large their role is in our village.