When Love Is Not Enough

Introduction THAT WAS THEN… Throughout most of my life, I have been blessed with a two parent household, brothers and sisters and a life that I really enjoyed and appreciated. People may not believe it …but it was fun sometimes being poor. We got a chance to appreciate each other. We were forced to do without and be content without it. When we did have enough money, momma and pop made sure we did things together like going to the drive-in theaters, Carvel and/or Guernsey Crest Ice Cream and going to Brooklyn to spend time with my mom’s sister, Aunt Josie Mae. It wasn’t about the money. It was about spending time as a family and making sure that we supported each other and was there for each other. Having a two parent household took a lot of the burden off of one person and gave the assurance that if you were not loved by one, you were loved by the other. During those growing times, we would observe our parents on how they reacted to things and did things on a daily basis. We would watch TV and from watching television, there would always be this upstanding superhero that we all wanted to imitate and be like. I always wanted to be “Superman” because I wanted to be faster than a speeding bullet and I wanted to fly and swoop down and catch the bad guys. Thanks to my brother, I am still alive. I tried to play “Superman” and flew off of the top bunk of the bed with a towel tied around my neck and aiming toward the window. I went through the sheet of glass and thankfully my brother caught me…towel first. I ended up getting stitches and a good beating that I’d never forgotten. I learned not to play “Superman” anymore, but I did learn the value of family and that we learn from observation, imitation and modeling. We learned that we had to be careful because environment also played a role in how people respond behaviorally in specific situations and scenarios. Family as the foundation kept most of us stable in a world that was becoming unstable. As a doctor and professor, I come to find that my parents did exactly what theorists have been telling us to do for years. Let’s get to the basic ideas first. It was the role of family and the home environment that was to prepare us as children and to focus on the appropriate behavioral skills in a family and social setting. As we were growing into our adolescent (teen) years, we started learning from other people. Our parents were still that basic and firm foundation for us, but we now learned to observe outside of our family realm, into unchartered territory called an environment, imitating and modeling those we now wanted to become, still keeping our values and morals intact. As far as operant conditioning, there was no such a thing as paying children to complete required chores and school work which was what momma used to call “your job as a child”. There were only rewards for getting “A’s” on your report card, rites of passages (birthdays, teeth coming out, etc.), or excelling in a sport or competition in an achievement made outside of the normal everyday activity. “THAT WAS THEN”… Today, it seems that parents are learning from their children, instead of children learning from their parents. It seems as though that the roles have reversed. The behavior that children and adolescents possess today is not just something that has come out of the blue. This has been an ongoing plight to gain our children’s respect. The thought of being their “friend” instead of their parents have given children and adolescents mixed signals, which is confusing them more each day. Parents have also allowed the fear of their children’s aggression to succumb to their negative behavior learned. So instead of standing up to their children and being the head of the households, the parents “give in” to their behaviors and demands. As a doctor in the field of Human Services, specializing in the field of Counseling Studies, I have studied (and still studying) the behaviors of children, adolescents and adults to come up with some sort of explanation why things have taken a turn for the worse when it comes to our families and the future of our children. I know that many parents may not want to hear this, but I can promise you that what I am about to tell you will be an eye opener and one piece of advice that I have found to be crucial in my family’s life and has made a change in how we live and grow and connect even closer as a family. In a research that I have done with adolescents and families, it has come to my attention that if we don’t come back to the basics of “family” and “spirituality”, the streets will take over our children and adolescents, and parents will be left holding the bag of shame and guilt because of familial practices that we chose to neglect and overlook. Young adult urban males across the United States are often absent from the conversations regarding that which addresses the integration of their expected values and norms of acceptance with that of one’s belief relative to their spirituality. In studies that I have completed within the past few years, African-American young adult males were found to show no organized system in place to mark their Christian beliefs and spirituality. Such an outcome suggests such views have created in some individuals an increase in their self-destructive behavior. With such results as these, there is now a growing awareness and concern about such loss in faith among African-American adult males and families across the United States. Sometimes we forget that the strength of any family lies upon the head of the household…the male. Women have become disgusted and frustrated, having to take up the slack for what has become the roles they now have to play as head of the household because of the roles that they have let men surrender as a way of giving up and throwing in the towel because the relationship “doesn’t work”. However, we cannot fold up, nor can we succumb to excuses and frustrations because things did not work between the mother and father. There is one factor that remains unchartered by males and females alike who are breaking up families and not facing the facts that they base their lives on sex, money and “what we can do for each other”…there is spirituality and what we can do to find it , get it back and bring our families back together. Most parents never make it mandatory or see it important to wake up on Sundays to go to worship service. Children (and especially) adolescents now have a choice as to if they want to get up on Sunday morning or stay in bed. The biggest obstacle facing the parents I deal with on a daily basis is that “ I don’t want to deal with the hassle of fighting with them to do something that they do not want to do.” So the parents ignore the facts that their children are not being “spiritually fed”, but being strengthened by “facebook”, “my space”, “twitter” and “technology”. It is funny to me that we can get our children up for school, and fight them tooth and nail and nearly threaten them to get up and go to school so that they can get an education. We, ourselves, as parents, literally break our backs trying to get up each day and go to work, because we know that if we don’t work, we don’t eat. We can’t buy and do for our families the way that we should. But guess what, parents, if your children are not being spiritually fed and you have given them that choice, you probably are not being spiritually fed. This weakens the family structure and causes the foundation of any and all relationships to deteriorate (crumble), including the lives of our children. Now for the wake-up call. How is it that we can get up in the morning, open our eyes, plant our feet on the floor, start our day, take care of our children and survive from moment to moment and not think of how this is possible? Who gave us our limbs and our life to have a family in the first place? How did we get this far in life to say that we have done this on our own? Surely, I hope that you are n