Poor Schools Or Being Poor Are Not Holding Your Kids Back: your poor parenting skills are — turn your family on by turning your TV off

Now that I have your attention, let me start by saying that urban schools are not without their challenges: in-effective school boards whose members are more politicians than educators, unqualified or barley qualified staff, teacher turnover lack of funding, etc. And yes, these things need to be fixed. However, despite these challenges, most public schools, even those in the inner-city, do a good job given the task at hand: educating children who come through their doors with a host of issues that should have been resolved at home: lack of quality medical care; hunger; depression; domestic violence; child abuse; alcohol or drug abuse by family member; family lack of priorities, especially for education; lack of productive male role model; etc. The way I see it, these schools are being asked to be mom, dad, counselor, pastor, doctor, dietitian, motivator, and teacher—all rolled into one. And folks, that simply just can’t be done. Government cannot fix all the ills of society. Parents, you need to get involved! One way to do this is to get family back focused on each other by turning off the television.

The average U.S. household has at least one TV set turned on for about seven hours a day. The American Academy of Pediatrics' recommends that a child watch no more than one to two supervised hours of TV a day. Yet the average school-aged child watches 27 hours of television per week (some preschoolers watch much more). And most of the time, they are unsupervised by a parent or responsible adult.

Here’s an interesting fact. Did you know that kids today spend twice as much time in front of a TV or computer as in the classroom? Children spend about five hours watching television, playing computer games or online each day—that’s 2,000 hours a year! Yet, they only spend 900 hours in class and 1,270 hours with their parents.

Do you allow your kids to watch this much TV or stay on the computer this long?

Did you also know that much of what your child is watching is intended for adults and that TV shows contain approximately 20 violent acts per hour?


Do you supervise your children while watching TV or using a computer? You should.


I also found the habits of parents in other countries interesting. Japanese kids watch about four hours of television every day, yet they continue to outscore American kids on all standardized test. Why? Japanese parents not only monitor but control what their kids watch. Japanese parents tie television watching to homework (i.e. watching more educational shows and the completion of homework before watching TV. Wow, there goes that parenting thing again—and it didn’t cost any money.

Chinese children are not even allowed to go out with friends or watch television on school nights—they to school six nights a week. They are expected to be responsible, work on their own, do their homework, and do well.

You see, it’s all about priorities. We must make parenting, education, and saving a priority in our families. Parenting is not just something you do because you had kids. You should have had the kids only after you knew you wanted to and were ready to be a parent. While public schools have their share of problems, I contend that too many of our children come to school ill prepared to learn and expect schools to fix these problems. Mark Michaelis in “The Seven Big Problems In High School,” summed it up this way:

"In the 1940s a survey listed the top seven discipline problems in public schools: talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothes, not putting paper in wastebaskets. A 1980s survey lists these top seven: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, assault. (Arson, gang warfare and venereal disease are also-rans.)"

After reading this, do you still feel public schools share much of the blame for your child's lack of academic success? If so, would you please tell me why?

Keep this in mind; over the course of a year, children spend more time watching TV than they spend in school or participating in any other activity except sleep. If one of these kids is yours; you need to reset your priorities. So, the next time your kid reaches for the remote or the laptop, give them a book instead. Better yet, read the book with them. After all, if your kid is not doing well in school, it’s your fault.

Do you send your children to school ready to learn?

Another “Black-on-Black Violence” Study: Why It’s Not Just Causing African-Americans More Harm Than Good (Part I)

Ok, by now I’m sure you’ve seen or heard the latest headliners about young black males and homicide: Criminal Justice professors James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt “… [found]… an increase of more than 39 percent from 2000 to 2007 in the number of black males ages 14 to 17 who were killed and a 34 percent increase in the number of blacks in that age group who committed homicide.”

While the numbers are alarming, the only problem I have with studies such as these is that they tend to portray or are used to casts ethnic groups as the sole source of the malady. White youth commit crime too: According to Newsmax, the federal Centers for Disease Control reports that "a white adolescent male is four times more likely than his African-American classmate to be a regular cocaine user. Whites are 66 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds, and yet they are 70 percent of drug users in that age group… [And], approximately 9 out of 10 serial killers are white males between the ages of 20 and 35. Yet we never hear these statistics repeated over and over again in the mainstream press, making these crimes synonymous with one particular race as is the case with blacks."

I conducted a search of the literature to help me get my arm around the subject and came across an intriguing abstract by James F. Anderson [1]. Anderson does an excellent job of defining the three classical views on the causes of crime IN URBAN AREAS (remember this because I’m going to come back to it). Some believe that because blacks were excluded (i.e. from good jobs, education, housing, and political access) and victimized (institutionalized racism, discrimination, and brutality) many blacks to chose crime as an alternative means to achieve social and economic prosperity. [Anderson] In other words, a community structure just wasn’t there. Others believe social forces are responsible: peer pressure if you will. [Anderson] Finally, there’s the view that black males learn and assimilate criminal attitudes from others. [Anderson] The proverbial; “birds of a feather flock together.”

As I read the abstract I came to one conclusion: we keep saying that “these” people are broke and we need to fix “them”; even if society, as a whole, created the problem. Remember earlier when I mentioned the abstract focused on urban areas? That IS the problem! We keep trying to define the problem as a black problem as if crime only exists or is committed in the black community by black folk. And that simply is not true. Again, there is no black crime, white crime, race crimes, etc. There is only crime and it affects us all—if not, why do you have that car alarm on that expensive car that you drive from that expense (and alarmed) house in the “burbs” to that high-profile job downtown?

The bottom line is crime is a problem—for everyone, every race, everywhere. We are all victims of crime in one way or another. We have all enabled crime to happen, even if only through indifference (i.e. to “those victims”, “those communities”, “those people”, to the human spirit). Seeing it any other way probably explains why our “solutions” to it are so fragmented, mismanaged, uncoordinated, and inept. Therefore, all Americans are suffering.

I also found one interesting commonality among all three theories that I feel offers a solution. I will cover both his proposal and mine in part 2 of this post.

1. Anderson, James F. “African-Americans, Violence, Disabilities, and Public Policy: A Call For A Workable Approach to Alleviating the Pains of Inner-City Life.” Western Journal of Black Studies Summer 1998.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2877/is_/ai_n28718913?tag=artBody;col1