Tag Archives: Family

News

An orphan who lived his whole life in foster care goes to church and asks to be adopted

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Here’s a very sad story that I hope will help us all to think about making better decisions that respect the needs of children. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

As soon as they pulled into the church lot, Davion changed his mind.

”Miss! Hey, Miss!” he called to his caseworker, who was driving. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

In the back seat, he hugged the Bible someone had given him at the foster home. “You’re going to be great,” Connie Going said.

Outside St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, she straightened his tie. Like his too-big black suit, the white tie had been donated. It zipped up around the neck, which helped. No one had ever taught Davion, 15, how to tie one.

”Are you ready?” Going asked. Hanging his head, he followed her into the sanctuary.

This had been his idea. He’d heard something about God helping people who help themselves. So here he was, on a Sunday in September, surrounded by strangers, taking his future into his own sweaty hands.

Davion Navar Henry Only loves all of his names. He has memorized the meaning of each one: beloved, brown, ruler of the home, the one and only.

But he has never had a home or felt beloved. His name is the last thing his parents gave him.

He was born while his mom was in jail. He can’t count all of the places he has lived.

In June, Davion sat at a library computer, unfolded his birth certificate and, for the first time, searched for his mother’s name. Up came her mug shot: 6-foot-1, 270 pounds — tall, big and dark, like him. Petty theft, cocaine.

Next he saw the obituary: La-Dwina Ilene “Big Dust” McCloud, 55, of Clearwater, died June 5, 2013. Just a few weeks before.

In church, Davion scanned the crowd. More than 300 people packed the pews. Men in bright suits, grandmoms in sequined hats, moms hugging toddlers on their laps. Everyone seemed to have a family except him.

In church, Davion scanned the crowd. More than 300 people packed the pews. Men in bright suits, grandmoms in sequined hats, moms hugging toddlers on their laps. Everyone seemed to have a family except him.

Davion sat beside Going, his caseworker from Eckerd, and struggled to follow the sermon: something about a letter Paul wrote. “He was in prison,” said the Rev. Brian Brown. “Awaiting an uncertain future … ”

Sometimes Davion felt like that, holed up at Eckerd’s Carlton Manor residential group home with 12 teenage boys, all with problems. All those rules, cameras recording everything.

Davion wants to play football, but there’s no one to drive him to practice. He wants to use the bathroom without having to ask someone to unlock the door.

More than anything, he wants someone to tell him he matters. To understand when he begs to leave the light on.

”You may be in a dark place,” said the preacher. “But look for the joyful moments when you can praise God.”

Picking at his fingers, Davion wondered what to say. And whether anyone would hear him.

It’s the saddest thing in the world for a child to not grow up with the two people who chose to engage in activities that would make him. Yet we as a society seem to be hell-bent on celebrating behaviors that cause children to be without their mothers or fathers. Or both. We push for policies that make it easier for people to have babies out of wedlock (because we are paying them to do it). We educate children to believe that premarital sex is OK, that hooking up is OK, that moral relativism is OK, that cohabitation is OK, that no fault divorce is OK, and now… that gay marriage is OK. But this isn’t what children need.

We have to look at these situations with motherless/fatherless children and decide that what we promote has some effect on this. It doesn’t happen by accident. Many of the things we support that make us feel “compassionate” are actually causing these problems. The solution is to start pushing for chastity, marriage and parenting. We need to shame behaviors and policies that deprive children of the safety and security that they obviously need. We need to name and shame the forces that cause these problems – secularism, feminism, socialism, relativism, and so on.

Polemics

New Oxford University study links non-family day care to anti-social behavior

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From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children came from within the home itself.

Children raised in poor families with high levels of parental stress or mental health problems were most at risk of developing emotional problems by the time they started school, it emerged.

The research also uncovered trends relating to children who were in formal child care — away from their parents.

The disclosure will revive debate over the best way to raise children amid a surge in the number of under-fives enrolled in nurseries and with childminders in the past 20 years. Figures from the Department for Education show that 441,000 children under five are in day nurseries while another 272,000 are being looked after by childminders.

[…]In the Oxford study, researchers recruited 991 families with children aged three months. Mothers had an average age of 30.

Researchers assessed children at the age of four through questionnaires about their behaviour and emotions completed by teachers and parents. They also observed care provided by mothers and observed non-parental care for at least 90 minutes for those children placed in formal childcare settings.

The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

The researchers also tracked other forms of early years care and found benefits to different approaches.

They found that children who spent more time in pre-school playgroups – normally for a few hours a day, rather than a full-time nursery – had fewer problems.

More time with a nanny in parents’ own home predicted higher levels of “pro-social behaviour”, showing willingness to help others, it emerged.

The study said: “These findings suggest that interventions to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural development might best focus on supporting families and augmenting the quality of care in the home.”

A study like this will be useful when debating people with open minds, but hardcore feminists and socialists, who want women to work in order to fund bigger government, will not be moved. Because for them, it’s not about evidence. It’s about ideology. That’s why we have to be careful about letting people like that get elected.

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Commentary

Readers vote: who is to blame for this problematic marriage? The wife or the husband?

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Please read the excerpt from the article BEFORE you vote in the poll at the bottom of the post! Thanks.

Letitia the Damsel posted this article from the UK Daily Mail on my Facebook page. The article is written by a woman who rejects the traditional roles and responsibilities of women in marriage.

She writes:

My husband is the kindest, most considerate man in the world. During the seven years we’ve been married, Ben has done most of the cooking, cleaning and ironing without ever being asked.

He brings me an organic buffalo milk cappuccino every morning in bed and once spent hours making fresh syrup from rhubarb to add to my favourite champagne after I’d given birth. And yes, he works full-time.

But for all he does for me, anxious to make everything in my life better, he gets a raw deal in return.

I am shamefully neglectful of my wifely duties. In fact, I am the anti-wife.

The trouble is that I just can’t do the subservient partner thing. Ben is more likely to arrive at our home in Twickenham, South-West London, after a hard day’s work and find me having a manicure or checking Facebook than slaving over a hot stove.

This may make me sound selfish, but I’m just being honest. At 39, I’ve never ironed a single item of my husband’s clothing. I rarely cook for him either. Why would I bother when he’s so much better at it than I am?

Last Christmas, he produced a lavish three-course lunch and booked a 15th-century cottage for our whole family to eat it in. All I did was hold out my champagne glass for him to refill while saying: ‘Well done, darling.’

And if you think I reward his sterling domestic efforts with treats in the bedroom, I’m afraid I fail in that department, too. Intimacy is reserved only for his birthdays – and then just the ones with a zero.

I felt occasional pangs of guilt about our unusual dynamic during the first year of our marriage, but now I find it liberating. He even refers to me as the ‘household manager’ because I’m an expert in the art of delegation.

Recently, Ben’s job for an organic fruit and vegetable box delivery scheme meant he was away on business for three weeks.

Before he left, I found him packing the freezer with organic ready meals and ringing round for short-term nannies to take care of our children, Ronnie, six, and Stanley, two.

The truth is that I’m just too busy and involved in my career as a writer to be a traditional, caring wife.

I work from home and, like most self-employed people in a recession, I push myself to the limit. I set my alarm for 6am so I can squeeze in an hour of work before the school run and I often write until midnight.

My job often means being away from home during the evenings and weekends, which means the lion’s share of the childcare falls to Ben. Even when I am home, I keep one eye glued to my iPhone for fear of missing a work call.

Ben bemoans my inability to achieve a work/life balance. He sees the word ‘driven’ as a negative, while I think I’m aspirational and ambitious. Now, I know what you’re thinking – that I must earn more than Ben. But no, I don’t.

He’s the breadwinner and a domestic god. But my work is so all-consuming there’s little of me left to go round by the time I switch off my laptop. Don’t get me wrong – I love Ben very much and regard our marriage as happy. And he could never claim breach of contract because he always knew I was a workaholic. 

[…]When we began dating in 2003, I was helping to launch a woman’s magazine, which required me to be at work from 8am until 11pm.

It was Ben’s touching gesture of sending boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the office that made me realise what an excellent husband he’d make.

But when, in the early throes of our relationship, he mooted the idea I might one day be a ‘stay-at-home mum’, I bristled. ‘But my mum stayed at home for the first five years of my life,’ he said. 

‘That’s never going to happen,’ I replied sharply. The matter was never raised again.

[…]It’s my fault that he returns home to find no dinner and our children running amok.

But I work hard, too, and that changes everything. While I love my children deeply, wiping noses, bottoms and encrusted beans off the floor doesn’t inspire me in the way my work does.

I’m too busy to share the chores. After a day of writing, I feel happy and complete; after a day with the children, I am frazzled.

After the birth of our first son, I went back to my £60,000-a-year job as deputy editor of a national magazine and put Ronnie full-time into an eye-wateringly expensive nursery.

I felt guilty about it, and working 8am to 6pm every day and barely seeing my son just compounded that guilt. But I didn’t want to give up work.

You might think me self-obsessed, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for my happiness.

Just before the birth of our second son, I decided to leave my job and pursue a career as a writer after being offered a generous redundancy package.

But instead of relaxing into my new job, I allowed work to seep into all areas of my life.

That is why I ignored cripplingly painful contractions ten minutes apart and carried on writing to meet a deadline.

I was back at work just two weeks after giving birth to Stanley, breast-feeding while conducting tricky phone interviews.

Now that you read the excerpt, please vote in the poll:

I’ll vote and comment later tonight to say how I voted.

By the way, if you like the articles that Letitia finds, you can hear her on her Visible Conservative podcasts on Fridays. Here’s the most recent one and the opening monologue transcript is here on Letitia’s blog. If you’re like me, and you like hearing conservative women talk passionately about issues that matter, you’ll love this podcast. I never miss it.

UPDATE: I voted and my vote was to blame the man entirely. He chose this woman to marry and to mother his children. He knew she was unqualified to be a wife and mother and married her anyway. It’s ALL HIS FAULT. She is completely innocent because she was bad BEFORE the marriage and he knew it.

You cannot blame a bad woman for continuing to act badly after you marry her. If she is bad before, she’ll be bad after. If she has no moral standard for marriage before, then she’ll have no moral standard after. She doesn’t BELIEVE that she is doing anything wrong – either before or after marriage. You can’t blame her for acting according to her own feminist worldview. It’s the MAN who is to blame for choosing her.

The man shouldn’t even be opening his mouth to complain about her after he chose her. He chose her, and he has no right now to blame her or complain about it. You can’t expect traditional wife and mother behavior when you marry someone who explicitly repudiates those roles. Blame the man 100%. And what’s more he is EVIL to have inflicted this on his children.

You can’t go to the pet store and pass by all the cats, dogs and birds and buy an alligator then complain when you get the thing home and it bites your arms off. It’s a freaking alligator, and you knew that when you bought it. It’s your fault.