Early Childhood Stressors

This week's blog was hard for me to think about.  On one hand I felt incredibly blesses that I didn't have an overly stressful childhood.  I had 2 very involved, loving, supportive parents and my needs were well taken care of.  I feel that my husband and I are providing a very similar childhood for our children, and are lucky to have many of our extended family in the area to support us and our children as well.  My husband's upbringing was a different story, and one that is hard to talk about with him because he prefers not to think about it.  I had the chance to talk with him and his brother this weekend about what their biggerst stressor was growing up.  I went into the conversation thinking the stressor would be the poverty the family experienced during and after his parents divorce, but to him that wasn't the largest struggle.  He said they had food provided by the government and his mom was a wonderful cook that could put things together with very little resources.  He also had other family members around that would help provide clothing if needed and both boys got jobs very young to help provide for the family.  The biggest stressor for the children in the family seemed to be the chaos.  The divorce was very hard on his mom and she didn't deal with it well.  For a few years she was an absentee mother, as she was out most nights until very late and would come home drunk.  The boys were required at about age 10 to take care of the 4 siblings for sometimes days at a time.  Many times they look back and wonder how they didn't burn the house down when they were trying to make food or keep the house warm.  Keeping the house safe was another issue that got forgotten for much of their childhood.  Most often the flat roof was leaking and they had no door knobs to keep the animals out.  He remembers pushing the table in front of  the door to keep a hungry bear out.  I can understand why the responsibility to care for siblings along with the fear of being safe and having the resources to provide for the siblings had a large effect on my husband.  That being said, his school work suffered.  He didn't have anyone to help or keep him on task with homework, and many times he was up late worried about his mom and would fall asleep at school.  Luckily for their family the school was small enough that staff knew the family and would help out as much as they could; this meant letting the boys work as custodial help at 13, and allowing them to sleep in class when they needed to.  It makes me sad to think about that and then to compare what kind of father he is to my children is just amazing.  In comparing this situation to that in other countries I went to the unicef website (www.unicef.org) which talks about how the severe maltrition issue in Africa isn't because the mother doesn't care, she is busy in the fields and will take the time to feed the baby with her only if he cries.  It is important to provide these families as well as families all over the world with education about nurturing and supporting your child and the ways to do that with the resources available in your area.  I wish the county would've stepped in to help my husband's family.  It wasn't that she didn't care, but she couldn't even take care of herself, let alone her 4 children for a time.  In looking at early childhood stressors I think it is important to understand that even though the specific stressor might look different, the end result is similar: What happens - or doesn't happen - to children in the earliest years of their lives is of critical importance, both to their immediate well-being and to their future.  As I have said before, if the child isn't getting their basic needs met, they will not be ready to learn.

I chose to focus on child malnutrition because as a teacher I have seen the negative effects on families.  For the adults in the family it is very hard to provide educational support to children if they are concerned with getting basic needs met.  We have had cases where the child comes to school with such behavior issues, and once we figure out that they were hungry we added an extra snack in to the daily routine and the behaviors vanished.  When a child is hungry, he or she is not ready to learn in other areas, sometimes part of being a teacher is meeting basic needs.  In our district we have a weekend backpack program where children can pick up a backpack full of food for the weekend.  It was expanded from the free and reduced lunch program because they realized students were dreading the weekend because of the lack of resources.  It makes me sad when we think about how wasteful many of us are on a daily basis.

I was interested in looking into malnutrition in  Central America because I work with families that have moved from there.  Malnutrition is not usually thought of as a Latin American problem, but much of Central America there are cases of chronic child malnutrition as preveleant as it is in Africa or South Asia.   In Guatemala 50% of children under 5 are chronically malnourished and in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua 1 in 3 children under 5 years old are affected.  Good Nutrition is imperitive to survival, health and development of our future generations.  With well-nourished women there are fewer risks during pregnancy and childbirth, and well-nourished children perform better at school, become healthier adults and can offer a better start to their own children.  It is important that we not repeat the cycle.

Check out the full article at:worldbank..org,

Fighting Malnutrition in Central America