This is cross-posted from Grow Boys Red Deer at http://www.reddeergrowboys.ca/. I have been involved with the Grow Boys project for three years now, and it has been one of the most rewarding initiatives I have taken on. For more information on the Grow Boys concept, please get in touch and we can talk.
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.
Herbert Vilakazi's opening address to the National Association of Child Care Workers 1991 Biennial Conference (http://tinyurl.com/yfxzdwn) in South Africa provides one such perspective with his brilliant insight to how we need to think and act if we are to support today's children as our gifts to the future.
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.
Mother would come out and say,
"You're tearing up the grass!"
"We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.
"We're raising boys." -author unknown
We
are raising boys. All of us. No matter who we are in the community,
whether we are a parent or not; we all have a responsibility to support
the happy, healthy growth and development of boys. Of course we need to
do this for girls as well, but Grow Boys is a collective that focuses
specifically on what can be done to nurture the particular needs of
boys; and there are many. As the dad in the poem suggests, we need to
take a critical and reflective perspective toward what our boys need
from us, and how we're going to provide for them.
Herbert Vilakazi's opening address to the National Association of Child Care Workers 1991 Biennial Conference (http://tinyurl.com/yfxzdwn) in South Africa provides one such perspective with his brilliant insight to how we need to think and act if we are to support today's children as our gifts to the future.
"The problems of children and of youth, giving rise to child and youth care programs, can only begin to be solved in that society of humankind’s dream; a more collective-oriented society than at present, when the father of the child shall be every man as old as the child’s father; when the mother of the child shall be every woman as old as the child’s mother; a society of responsibility of the entire community; a society without poverty; without the inequalities of society members, based upon race, class, or sex; a society without the use of violence against other members of society; a society without any exploitation and oppression of any group by any other group; a society of equals; a thoroughly democratic society; last, but not least a society that shall have, once more, incorporated productive labor into the educational process."
