REARING AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHILDREN 

Beal, Anne C., M.D., and Linda Villarosa, Allison Abner, The Black Parenting Book: Caring for Our Children in the First Five Years. Broadway Books, New York, 1999.

In addressing parents of adolescents, Karen Martin & Jean Walbridge point out that the foundation of your children's lives is laid in the first twelve years--and the most basic stuff happens in the first five. Even though when they hit adolescence your children may convince you from time to time that all your effort during the early years was for naught, eventually you see the payoff. Black Parenting goes a long way toward assisting parents in our African-American communities to lay down sound foundations for their children in those precious first years before they reach the troubled waters of adolescence. Consider the authors' list and discussion, in the Introduction, of "15 Ways to Be a Better Parent":

1. Be a good example. Your children will be influenced by how you spend your time, how you express your emotions, etc.

2. Respect your child as a person. Here the authors address the time-honored (and formerly life-preserving) tradition in the African-American community of authoritarian, "because I said so" style of parenting and ask whether, as the times have changed, parenting styles have changed as well.

3. Keep a sense of humor.

4. Take time for yourself.

5. Plan for the future.

6. Have reasonable expectations for your child.

7. Help your child think for herself. And here again, the authors point out that "Because I said so" establishes parental authority, but doesn't give the child much of a way to learn for herself.

8. Remember what's important.

9. Lean on your friends and family.

10. Forgive your parenting mistakes.

11. Spend individual time with your child. [I can hear parents of adolescents groaning...."Oh sure, how do you spend time with a kid who doesn't want to be seen with you, thinks you're stupid, etc.?"--but remember, this book is for parents of little kids. It was a good idea to spend time with them then, and your time wasn't wasted, even if it looks like that, now that they're teens.]

12. Talk to your child. [Another groan from the parents-of- teens section of the audience.]

13. Read and sing to your child. [Remember the days?]

14. Help your child foster relationships with others.

15. Find the child in yourself. [Instead of the other way around, we would add.]

There's lots more good stuff in here-- highly recommended. [Remarks in brackets are by the website reviewer, not by the authors of the book.]

Click here to order Black Parenting. 

Marita Golden's Saving Our Sons, Doubleday, 1996.

Subtitled,"Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World," Saving Our Sons is a record of one black mother and novelist's struggle to keep her son from the #1 leading cause of death among young black American males: being killed by another young black male. "Maybe, I thought, if I write long and hard and strongly and bravely enough, I can save and protect my son and somehow bless the others. This moment, when intraracial violence and death undermine any possibility for progress and complicate easy definitions of THE PROBLEM and THE SOLUTION, is a new kind of Middle Passage. What will we look like, how will we sound, once we are spewed forth from the terrible hold of THIS ship?," Ms.Golden writes (p. 9). The author interviews those who have killed and the relatives of those who have been killed. But the most moving parts of her book are her stories about her own life with her son Michael. Beautifully written, haunting, thoughtful. This non-African-American mother loved it. Highly recommended.