The Homeschool Journey

Wonderful Halloween

What a great Halloween we had in our family! What a wonderful festival - though unless one is a follower of Celtic traditions, I'm not sure 'festival' is the correct term. 'Excuse for fun' or 'evening out of the ordinary' might be more apt descriptions.

 

Why do I enjoy Halloween so thoroughly? Because it is the one night of the year that children can run around town, often unsupervised by adults, approaching strangers and receiving smiles and treats! How often does that happen in the life of the average Western child? Is there any other evening when bands of children - and teens - running around the streets elicits indulgent smiles and kind words from adults?!

 

What a wonderful thing for a child to be able, in trust, to knock on the door of someone she does not know and know that she will get some small treat, a few words about her costume, perhaps, and generally enjoy the wonderful feeling created by adults who care enough about to children to take the time, the effort and the money to decorate their homes, to dress up themselves perhaps - to buy or make treats!

 

Ok - sure - there are horror stories, there are always those unfortunate souls who prey upon children or who put up little signs declaring "no trick-or-treaters" (and who might have a good reason for this). And there is the sickly amounts of sugar that the children stuff down themselves. But it seems to me that such risks are worth it - that the price of fear of Halloween is a mistrust in the world and in the unknown - and, unfortunately, not the unknown ghoul but the unknown human being. As for the candy - for sure there are children who cannot, for health reasons, eat pounds of Snickers bars and tootsie rolls - but nowadays many people give out stickers or healthy alternatives.

 

Having said that, as a parent of boys blessed by an abundance of hearty health, an orgy of sugar does not trouble me. I am so pleased by their experience of the kindness of strangers, of whole neighborhoods being decorated to please the children, of free explorations in the dark - that I don't care if they over-do it. They get over it. And what they are left with is a positive picture of adults welcoming children in a warm and positive way. To me that's worth a few tummy aches!

 

School or Family?

From the earliest days of catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, well-meaning proclamations were issued from governors and other politicians or civil servants from affected states that schools would accept children from displaced families. Reporters talking to families or relaying the seriousness of the situation repeatedly emphasized the need to get children into school .

 

This seems so bizarre to me. The whole mind frame that says "school = normal for children" also says, by implication, "school is where children learn about life." Instead of an emphasis on keeping families together and helping them cope - find new homes, clothes, jobs, support - and school at some point! - the children are issued through one door and the parents another.

 

How are children meant to learn about real life, its problems, hardships and challenges and, most importantly, how real adults cope in such situations (or, of course, don't cope)? I suppose they will learn from the myriad of books on the subject, brought out by caring teachers during a civics class.

 

And what about the emotional toll on these children? They've just lost everything, probably seen dead bodies and a catalog of other horrors, have been surrounded by angry, frustrated, desperate people, shipped off to God knows where in some strange town - and then they're supposed to go to school?! More strangers, more new situations, more adjustments to make! C'mon - would you do that to your child? I wouldn't.

 

People point to the Tsunami relief efforts in the Indian Ocean, to the importance of the efforts to rebuild schools and bus in teachers to help the children gain a sense of normalcy and to cope. In those examples, I would say yes, that was a great thing. School, in those cases, was brought to the children and an effort was made to recreate what had been before. But in the Gulf States at present, this is not the case. Children, adults, families, neighborhoods, friends are scattered in a dozen directions, away from their homes, their land, their cities and towns.

 

My fear is that the alienation that so many of these people live with anyway will just continue to be fed and deepened. Instead of building on a unique opportunity to strengthen families and individuals in the aftermath of disaster, I fear that a continued state of disconnectedness and vulnerability - of adults and children - will go unchallenged!

 

 

Katrina's Orphan

So many awful images from Hurricane Katrina - the ones involving children stand out for me. A desperate father holding up his three week old baby, crying out for formula. Babies in intensive care whose parents were evacuated. And, most poignantly of all, a quick pan over from the camera catching a little boy of perhaps 5, holding onto a white emergency personnel officer's pant leg, his words caught in passing by the camera crew: "My mama dead. She got push in the water." His words, his face, his plight haunt me. Who is that child? Does he have a grandmother, a big brother, a cousin or aunt who will care for him? If so - where are they? Why was he with the rescue person and not someone he knows, someone who loves him? Were they all dead too, slaughtered by the inaction of a government heavy on moral posturing and light on compassion? And would this scene have been televised without fanfare had he been a white child or from a more affluent neighborhood?