It Takes a Village Read Free Page A

myself, I loved being around children, looking into their faces or listening to the stories they told. Like many firstborn children, I learned to care for children by baby-sitting my two younger brothers. As a teenager, I baby-sat for other children too, and at thirteen I got my first “real” job, supervising children at a park on summer mornings. Through my church, I helped care for the children of migrant farmworkers while their parents labored in the fruit orchards and vegetable fields near my home.
    In college, I tutored children, and later, in law school, I got permission to add an extra year to the regular curriculum to study child development. I wondered about children I passed on the streets, and I worried about their journeys to adulthood. As a law professor and a staff attorney at the Children’s Defense Fund, as well as in my private practice, I saw firsthand the results of our failure to invest in children at the most critical stages of their lives. Too often, the best interests of children seemed not to be a priority on either individual or national agendas. The consequences are there for any of us to see: children’s potential lost to spirit-crushing poverty, children’s health lost to unaffordable care, children’s hearts lost in divorce and custody fights, children’s futures lost in an overburdened foster care system, children’s lives lost to abuse and violence, our society lost to itself as we fail our children.
    And then I had a child of my own to love, wonder at, and worry about. Like most mothers, I am the designated worrier in our family. When Chelsea arrived, I went from worrying only five days a week to worrying on weekends too. My biggest challenge was to quell my longing to protect my daughter from everybody and everything that might hurt or disappoint her. As any parent knows, that is mission impossible. Life is unpredictable—and a child’s impulse toward independence ultimately too powerful.
    At four, my daughter refused my request to wear a sweater on what seemed to me an unusually chilly summer day. “I don’t feel cold, Mommy,” she said. “Maybe you do, but I have a different thermometer.” Chelsea speaks up when she thinks I have exceeded the acceptable maternal worry quotient. But, like many parents, I feel there is much to worry about when it comes to raising children in America today.
    Everywhere we look, children are under assault: from violence and neglect, from the breakup of families, from the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism, and spiritual emptiness. These problems are not new, but in our time they have skyrocketed. Against this bleak backdrop, the struggle to raise strong children and to support families, emotionally as well as practically, has become more fierce. It is a struggle that has captured my heart, my mind, my life.
    Parents bear the first and primary responsibility for their sons and daughters—to feed them, to sing them to sleep, to teach them to ride a bike, to encourage their talents, to help them develop spiritual lives, to make countless daily decisions that determine whom they have the potential to become. I was blessed with a hardworking father who put his family first and a mother who was devoted to me and my two younger brothers. But I was also blessed with caring neighbors, attentive doctors, challenging public schools, safe streets, and an economy that supported my father’s job. Much of my family’s good fortune was beyond my parents’ direct control, but not beyond the control of other adults whose actions affected my life.
    Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they are born, they depend on a host of other “grown-ups”—grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly. Adults police their streets, monitor