WHERE HAVE ALL OUR CHILDREN GONE?

Teens with babies, our sons carrying AKAs.  What has happened to our children, can this crisis be turned around?  Our children are growing up so fast; they don’t seem to be children very long.  Before you know it, they are having babies of their own and our boys are on the streets gang banging, shooting up, and lying dead.  What happened to our children?

Did the vanishing dinners at home with the whole family steal our children away?  Remember when the entire family would sit around the dinner table, say grace, and have dinner together?  This time helped each family member establish a place in the family and gave each family member an opportunity to share the day’s triumphs and failures.  Parents used this time to teach Bible values for character molding.  They could take cues from the discussions around dinner to hold follow-up sessions with their children.  Family dinners were times of bonding, teaching, encouraging, and establishing the unit of family support.  Without the family dinner, where do our children receiving training, support, and feelings of belonging?

Perhaps it is mothers, who have to work away from home, who are responsible.  Today about 25% of families are headed by single mothers, most of whom work outside of the home.  Some hold two and three jobs just to make ends meet but yet they represent the poorest sector of the population.  Where are their children while these moms are working?  Some are cared for by babysitters, daycare workers, and grandparents while others are left alone to fend for themselves until the mothers get home from work.  After work, mothers stagger in from an exhausting day, have to prepare a meal, do laundry, bathe the children, and prepare for the next day’s work.  Where’s the training, support, feelings of belonging, and unity of purpose for both mothers and children? 

Maybe we should place the blame on the absentee fathers.  Reportedly 36.3% of families are without fathers.  NEWS BULLETIN: WHERE ARE THE DADS?  YOUR CHILDREN NEED YOU AT HOME!    Some dads may be away in the military, some are in jail, other fathers were only donors from the beginning, and some just have too many children to care for.  Increasing divorce rates are pitting children against children.  Nearly 4 out of 10 first marriages end in divorce with 60% of those families having children; which accounts for over 1 million children each year that experience their parents’ divorce.  Children are vying for their fathers’ attention and support. The divorced-parent children lose; too often, they become divorced along with the wife. 

How about television; is that the thief?  Multimedia exploits youth by representing them as sexy hunks and sensuous sex objects.  Children, as young as seven years old and younger, are depicted in Hollywood in scanty clothing doing sexually explicit dance moves.  Donned with make up and “moves,” young children become our children’s idols–everyone wants to be like them.  Our sons and daughters clamor for the glitz, glam, and physique.  Along with the visual appeal of Hollywood, our children adapt its grown-up, independent bravado and are immediately catapulted from childhood into the adult world seemingly overnight.

Maybe it’s clothing designers who are responsible?  Children’s clothing designers are simply shrinking the sexy, risqué adult clothing into kids’ sizes.  It’s amazing to see two and three year olds sashay around in hip-huggers, halter-tops, and rhinestone-studded jeans.  To accompany the sexually suggestive clothing, our children adapt the attitudes and demeanor of thugs and red-light district clientele. Children learn by what they see and hear then they put what they’ve learned into practice.  In the case of our vanishing children who are growing up too soon, they have learned the life of materialism and family values have been replaced by Hollywood values.

Children are being abducted, sold as sex toys or slaves, even being abused by family members or friends.  Who can we hold responsible for these denigrating, horrific circumstances?   Is it the absence of fathers in the family, absence of mothers due to their need to work, absence of family support, or is it the media or clothing designers?  Who is to blame?

Kudos to those 67% of families who remain together and provide the strong support system our children need.  Continue to stand strong.   As for the rest of us, let’s decide to take responsibility for our vanishing children ourselves.  We buy the scanty clothing, the dolls, games, and the videos that portray children as adults.  We allow others to raise our children while we are absent from the home or we select the television to supervise our children while we are doing other things.  Let’s get back to family dinner and listening to our children when they speak.  Make time for the family to be together.  Let’s regain our children and enjoy their young years before they grow up and vanish from the family.