Health Wellness & Nutrition: BACK TO SCHOOL
From ‘Crack Baby’ to A-Student
By Marian Wright
Edelman
NNPA Columnist
he odds were stacked
against Britiny Lee
before she was born.
Her mother was addict-
ed to drugs, like Britiny’s
grandfather and many oth-
ers in their poverty-stricken
Cleveland neighborhood.
Britiny’s mother used drugs
throughout her pregnancy
and went to prison for a year
just after Britiny’s birth. As
a poor, Black “crack baby”
with an addicted, incarcer-
ated mother and an absent
father, Britiny started life in
danger.
Being born into an unsta-
ble poor family or to a sin-
gle, teen, incarcerated, or
absent parent are all known
risk factors in America’s
Cradle to Prison Pipeline®
crisis. The disadvantages
millions of poor children
and children of color face
T
Marian Wright Edelman
autoimmune disease lupus,
which got worse as Britiny
got older. When she was 8
years old, her grandmother
suffered a seizure when they
were home alone and Brit-
iny had to call 911 and ride
in the ambulance with her
grandmother to the hospital.
From then on she was ter-
rified of losing her grand-
mother. Britiny’s mother Fe-
licia, who had come in and
out of her life throughout
one of the many caregivers
raising children in “kinship
care” or “GrandFamilies,”
headed by grandparents or
other relatives who step in
when parents are unable to
do so. Sometimes a child
is removed from parents’
care by the state and placed
with relatives in foster care;
in other cases, children like
Britiny are placed informal-
ly with relatives outside fos-
ter care. More than 6 million
children are being raised
in households headed by
grandparents and other rela-
from birth along the contin-
uum to and through adult-
hood and can include: no
or inadequate prenatal and
health care; no or little qual-
ity early childhood educa-
tion and enrichment; child
abuse and neglect; failing
schools; grade retention,
suspension, and expulsion;
questionable special educa-
tion placements; dropping
out of school; unaddressed
mental health problems; vi-
olent drug infested neigh-
borhoods; and dispropor-
tionate involvement in the
child welfare and juvenile
justice systems.
Entering the child welfare
system would have been
still another risk factor for
baby Britiny but she was
lucky.
Her grandmother, who
already had custody of Brit-
iny’s older brother and sis-
ter, stepped in. She brought
Britiny home, too.
Britiny says, “My grand-
mother stepped up to the
plate to raise us because she
didn’t want us to go into the
foster care system.” Brit-
iny’s grandmother didn’t
have a lot of money, but
she was a stable source of
love and support throughout
childhood and Britiny flour-
ished in her care.
Despite doctors’ concerns
when she was born as a
drug-addicted child, Brit-
iny was resilient and be-
came a straight-A student
who loved school from the
beginning. Britiny’s grand-
mother was her rock even
while struggling with the
her childhood, was strug-
gling towards sobriety. Nine
months after Felicia became
sober, when Britiny was 10
years old, her grandmother
died.
Felicia remembers the
moving moment: “[My
mother] held my hand and
she told me, ‘Licia, I want to
go home.’ And I thought that
she meant go home, like put
her in the car and take her
home. No. She was saying
she was tired and she was
ready to go home to Glo-
ry . . . She looked at me in
my eyes, and she said, ‘And
God told me that you were
ready, that you were ready
to be a mom, that you’re
going to be a good mom,
that you’re not going to use
drugs anymore, and that I
could go.’”
Britiny’s mother was fi-
nally ready to step in, regain
custody, and learn how to
be the parent her daughter
needed and deserved. To-
day, Britiny is a high school
senior about to graduate
from Cleveland’s John Hay
School of Science and Med-
icine and dreams of becom-
ing a cardiac surgeon. She
recently received a Beat the
Odds® scholarship from
Children’s Defense Fund-
Ohio.
She says of her beloved
grandmother, “She’s look-
ing down on me. I’m sure
she’s proud, and right now I
just want to make her even
more proud. I want to show
her that she didn’t fight for
me for nothing.”
Britiny’s grandmother was
and oftentimes community,
connections. There is also
strong evidence that chil-
dren placed in kinship care
experience greater stability,
have fewer behavioral prob-
lems, and are just as safe – if
not safer – than children in
non-relative care.
In Britiny’s case, all of
these positive outcomes
came to pass, and after her
grandmother “stepped up to
the plate,” a child who could
easily have become a statis-
tic is beating the odds and is
a star with a bright future.
Book Review: ‘Child, Please’ Offers Insight
Author reflects humorously on her own upbringing and how
‘old-school parenting’ served her in the long run
Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons
Helped Me Check Myself before I Wrecked Myself
By Ylonda Gault Caviness
Tarcher / Penguin Random House
Hardcover, $25.95
320 pages
ISBN: 978-0-399-16996-0
Book Review by Kam Williams
Despite doctors’ concerns when
she was born as a drug-addicted
child, Britiny was resilient and
became a straight-A student who
loved school from the beginning
tives. Of those 6 million, 2.5
million children are living
in households without their
parents present. These rela-
tive caregivers like Britiny’s
grandmother are willing to
care for the children, but
often need financial or other
help to appropriately meet
their children’s needs.
A number of states have
used subsidized guard-
ianship programs to sup-
port kinship families and
GrandFamilies.
Kinship
care has been found to help
children maintain family,
“In this wise and funny memoir, Ylonda Gault Cavi-
ness describes her journey to the realization that all the
parenting advice she was obsessively devouring, as a
new parent, and sharing with the world as a parenting
expert... didn’t mean scratch compared with her mama’s
old-school wisdom as a strong black woman...”
-- Excerpted from the book jacket
oya Graham was at home watching TV coverage
of the recent Baltimore riots when she spotted
her only son, Michael, in an unruly crowd of kids
taunting and throwing objects at the police. Without giv-
ing it a second thought, the shocked, single-mother of six
sprang into action and rushed right down to the scene to
retrieve her misbehaving 16 year-old.
Cell phone cameras caught Toya lecturing and slapping
Michael silly as she dragged him away.
T
The video soon went viral and the debate began about
whether or not the corporal punishment was appropriate.
She was dubbed “Mother of the Year” by some and abu-
sive by others.
The incident reminded me of a bygone era when not
only your own momma, but any adult in the neighbor-
hood, might straighten you out if you were messin’ up.
However, that strict style of upbringing has long since
fallen by the wayside in favor of a politically-correct age
of permissiveness.
Nevertheless, perhaps the pendulum might be ready
to swing back in the other direction, as evidenced by
Toya Graham’s teachable moment about accountability
and by the publication of Child, Please: How Mama’s
Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself before I
Wrecked Myself. Ironically, this delightful memoir was
written by Ylonda Gault Caviness, a sister who, for years,
had appeared as an expert on everything from The Today
Show to National Public Radio, where she would extol
the virtues of the relatively-lax, modern parenting styles,
much to the chagrin of her more traditional mother.
Ylonda has belatedly come to embrace more of her
mom’s supposedly-antiquated approach after becoming
exasperated by the challenge of rearing her own three
daughters.
“Any fool could see, Mama had the whole motherhood
thing down to a science,” she concedes. “Now, in my for-
ties, I finally get it.”
August 5, 2015 The Portland and Seattle Skanner Page 7