Can y'all please just let kids be kids? “Have a new baby”, they said!
“Your son is old enough to help you raise the baby”, they said!
“Hell no! My son didn’t have a baby. I did. That’s unfair to him for me to pass that level of responsibility off on him due to a decision that I made,” was my reply.
For years, people have always been so quick to condemn “babies having babies,” but very seldom have I heard people check parents for having babies and making their siblings help care for them… and those are the babies who didn’t even go out and have babies.
Society has accepted this BS for generations and now it’s been watered down, manipulated, and deduced to simply being called “teaching them responsibility.” What part of taking care of babies is necessary to teach a “child” responsibility? Don’t worry, I’ll wait! I think that it is time out for parents to pass off what’s really “their responsibility” and making their children involuntary slaves to situations that they had no part in creating.
I am the middle of three children. I have a sister who is five years older than me as well as a brother who is four years younger. Growing up, I was never really close to my older sister and for years, I often thought that it was simply because of our age difference, but as I got older and started breaking my life down, I realized that our distance was really much deeper. I began to understand that we weren’t as close as siblings because she played more of a parental role in my life.
As it was in most homes around us, my sister babysat us as our parents worked. She was often left in charge to make sure that we were behaving, were fed, and doing everything else that we were supposed to do. At the same time, she was also in charge to “tell on us” if we misbehaved. With her just being a responsible and obedient older child in charge, she did exactly what she was instructed to do. She made sure that we were well taken care of and she told on us when we misbehaved. Surely, it made her a great child in our parent’s eyes, but it was damage being done that they had no clue was happening.
My sister having the responsibility to “tell on me” caused me to dislike my sister at a young age because I felt early on that I could not trust her to not tell my business to our parents, so by default, I don’t have the “my sister is my best friend” testimony. If anything, I often felt like she was more of my enemy. Having those feelings caused me to begin sneaking and hiding things from my sister just as I would from my parents. When I started coming into adolescence, I started reaching out to outsiders instead of going to my own sister who was right there in the house with me. I just wasn’t comfortable going to her because it was such a parental-like relationship. By no means am I sharing this experience to bash my parents or make it seem like my life was messed up. I am simply an adult who experienced this as a child and now I am here to share the silent cries of innocent children in these situations who are unable to speak during this process.
I totally understand the idea and reality that many parents are doing all that they can to provide for the lives that they brought forth and I also understand that once the children are here, it is then too late to waste time with what could’ve or should’ve been done to prevent the situation. I also understand that situations like mine are often the result of parents simply, “Doing what they gotta do.” Even with understanding all of that, I still have questions to try to help us come up with solutions to help minimize the number of innocent children who are caught in these crossfires of life.
A few of the questions that I have are: At what point do we hold parents accountable for having more children than they can afford? Where do we draw the line of knowing the difference between your older children simply assisting you because they’d love to versus having full fledge responsibility in their younger siblings' lives due to your current circumstance? What precautionary methods can we implement to ultimately be more responsible for ourselves and the situations that we create? At what point do parents make the necessary sacrifices to come up with a solution that does not involve their older children to be substitute parents?
All in all, all I’d like to ask of you, is to please stop making these babies lay in beds that they didn’t make. They are all children and they all deserve to simply - be children.
