All My Children

The more opportunity a child has to enjoy the richness and freewheeling fantasy of play in all its forms, the more solidly will his development proceed. Later encounters with learning, games, and sports will strengthen and enhance his knowledge and mastery of the world. But for games and sports, or even for learning to be fully meaningful, his prior experience with play must already have provided a firm foundation. This is why culturally deprived children who had little chance to play and were little played with by parents have such a hard time in school—without the experience of succeeding in play, they do not trust themselves to succeed in school. For this reason, it is not sufficient for parents to wait to share in play activities when they reach a more formalized stage. The older child’s activities may offer more intrinsic interest to a parent, but by that time it may be too late. Both kinds of experience—play and games—are necessary for growing up well. Children lose out on a great deal if TV viewing or even activities such as academic learning prevent them from having rich experiences with both play and games. The ability to enjoy games builds on the play experience. Continue Reading »

These factors, although given in summary form, are also found elsewhere, for example, the Philippines. Bearing in mind the comments of Vanistendael that the phenomenon of street children is not due to any single factor, but to a combination of elements and influences, let us look at some of the other factors in our South African situation which contribute to the phenomenon of street children. The list is not exhaustive in any way: Continue Reading »

Transition homes in the community

This is an area where it is extremely difficult to succeed. Because of the stigma attached to the street children, people in the community generally fear to accommodate them in their own homes. There is a tremendous need to educate the community in this regard; already the project held its first seminar in the township to make people aware of the street children’s plight and of its difficulties in finding transition homes, before the children can return to their own families. The project has also approached the churches for transition homes, but failed to obtain a positive response! As a result, it applied to the local township council and was given a piece of land to erect a transition home but funds are needed to build such a home to accommodate the children. Continue Reading »

• Parentless children: Again, following a divorce, children may find themselves in a catch-22 situation where they feel unwanted by both their new stepfather and their new stepmother. This seems to affect the boys especially who tend to be far more rebellious than girls. For a time, boys may move between the two new ’sets of parents‘ without ever settling down, until the day comes when they feel unwanted by both ’sets’ and decide to make it on their own on the street by leaving their families.

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Getting organized in a town

As contact is being made with the children by the street animator, three to four committed people willing to get something off the ground need to get together. Their first step is to identify the possible resources within the community and to communicate with these people and organisations with a view to calling a first meeting of concerned citizens. It should be made clear that the meeting is exploratory and that people do not commit themselves in any way by attending. Such resources could include the following:

• Child Welfare in the town and township;
• Two priests/ministers of religion (preferably belonging to a ministers’ fraternal) one in the town and the other in the township;
• A lower and higher primary school principal/teacher in the township;

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Getting started in a town

To state the obvious, one needs to identify the whereabouts of street children in a town and to try and establish how many there are. The usual places to find them during the day are the supermarkets where they will volunteer to push trolleys, the taxi ranks where they will wash taxis, parking areas where they will offer to wash cars, etc. It is important to remember the five `categories’ because, for instance, although part-time working children are street children, their situation differs from runaways or abandoned children. Part- time working children who attend school and sleep at home in the evenings are not a ‘problem’ as such, although care needs to be taken that they do not become full-time working children or runaways. Continue Reading »

Girls are as subject as boys to all kinds of frustrations, very much including sibling rivalry and anger at their parents, and so it would serve them equally well to be able to discharge their anger through symbolic play, as with toy guns. Furthermore it would prevent their feeling frustrated because an important type of symbolic play available to boys is not available to them. By playing with guns they too would get things out of their system. They would realize that boys are not advantaged in comparison to girls in this respect. Continue Reading »

Few other types of play can quite compare with doll play for eliciting deep parental involvement. Still, there are many other aspects of children’s play which can affect a parent deeply, through recollections and other feelings it activates, particularly when a child’s play reminds the parent of having played with the same toy, or having played in similar fashion. Also, the older the child gets, the more easily do play activities echo not only the parent’s own childhood experiences, but also his present hobbies or recreations. For example, the teenager who can play a serious game of chess has an experience very similar to his parent’s in doing so. Continue Reading »

Despite everything that has been said, it is obvious that parents cannot always have direct empathy with their child’s play experience. But certainly it can help parents to become aware of the different needs, anticipations, and desires a child brings to his play, as long as the parent realizes and accepts the fact that divergences between parent and child do exist. And the greater the parent’s emotional involvement in play, the more beneficial it is to the child, and to the relation with each other. Continue Reading »

But even the magic of reading will not sufficiently affect many children if their parents do not place high value on “book learning.” The great emotional investment of parents in reading makes it uniquely attractive to their child, since then reading forms another link tying the parents closely to the child. I am sure that Jewish literacy was helped by the fact that it was customary on the day the child entered one of the yeshivas (Talmudic schools) for the father to carry his son, Continue Reading »