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[U][B][CENTER]No cozy answers[/COLOR][/CENTER][/B][/U]
Nov. 19, 2005. 11:08 AM
ANDREA GORDON
FAMILY ISSUES REPORTER
VINCE TALOTTA / TORONTO STAR FILE
Experts are divided about whether children should
interact with the homeless, but all agree that they
need to understand why there are people
who live on Toronto』s streets
The children are watching. They see the man on the corner with holes in his shoes and hunger in his eyes, even if you tug their hands and pull them quickly past. You might think they don't notice, but they do.
The children are listening. They hear the silence when the street kid shivering under the sleeping bag asks for change and the adults don't reply.
The children are wondering: Why is that person out here in the cold? Where is their home and their family? Can't we stop and help them?
Encountering the homeless is part of urban living. Explaining it to kids can be a challenge. When you pass by the regulars who sleep in the park, or you emerge from the subway to a row of panhandlers, it might be tempting to grab the children and look the other way. But as any parent knows, in an awkward situation you can always count on the smallest people for the toughest questions and the loudest observations. And they have a way of making you reconsider your own reactions and attitudes.
How parents respond is important, say community workers and educators, because that's where the young ones take their cues. For many, seeing a homeless person on the street can be the first time they've come face-to-face with someone in need, and when poverty and hunger are suddenly made real. Some will insist on giving money, others may be upset. But it presents an opportunity to instil an attitude of care and concern.
It doesn't have to be complicated, says Margaret Stephenson, a Toronto housing and community worker with the homeless. "You just have to tell your kids, `This is another human being and I do not judge them,' that you don't know the life they've had to bring them to this place."
Stephenson knows what it's like to be in trouble and feel judged by others who don't understand. Eight years ago, as a single parent struggling to make ends meet, she fell behind in the rent. One cold December evening, she and her children, then ages 13, 6 and 4, found themselves out on the street with their suitcases. They ended up in a shelter for eight months ― a roach-infested motel ― until Stephenson could save enough to get them an apartment, go back to school and find a job.
Like the vast majority of homeless, who live in shelters, motels, cars or bunk in temporarily with friends or family, they never had to live on the street. But still, Stephenson's children remember what it was like to be the "shelter kids" going to a school where no one else talked to them. Stephenson recalls being the mother that other parents avoided.
Now when they go downtown, her kids stop and talk to the homeless people they see. They empty their pockets of money. And she doesn't try to stop them.
Stephenson believes kids need to be educated about homelessness, not shielded from it, and that it should start with parents.
"This can happen to anyone," she says. "I don't think some people in society want to deal with this situation, but it is not going to go away just because you want to ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. We need to keep advocating and talking about it."
But Mary Gordon, renowned Toronto educator, warns that kids need to know it's not their responsibility to solve it. It's the job of the adults.
"It's not up to us to raise activists, but it's up to us to raise compassionate people," she says. "To me, this is finding the humanity in the other person."
Gordon is founder of Roots of Empathy, an internationally recognized classroom program that brings babies and students together to foster empathy in children. She has spent a career studying the way children develop emotional intelligence and compassion and has also worked with families living in poverty.
Gordon says a parent who ignores a homeless person or looks on them with scorn passes along the message "my mommy thinks this person is yucky." But a parent who directly acknowledges someone on the street and speaks to their child about them with concern sends the message that every person has rights and dignity.
Parents' words and actions are indelible, she adds. Young children soak up the values that surround them and have internalized them by the time they reach the age of 6.
They can also remind adults of what's important. Just ask Colleen Taylor.
Four years ago, she and her daughter Hannah, then age 5, were driving through an alley in downtown Winnipeg when they passed a disheveled man rooting through a garbage bin, his mouth full.
"Mommy! What is that man doing?" Hannah piped up.
"It took all of 20 seconds," Colleen recalls in an interview from her Winnipeg home. She remembers feeling caught completely off-guard. "And then I, her mom, who had said to all her kids that we need to always help others ... drove right by."
For months afterward, Hannah persisted with questions and her parents answered her as honestly as they could. Hannah noticed other street people, insisting on giving them change and small items, and was so preoccupied for the next year that Colleen consulted the family's pediatrician. Then one bedtime after the usual queries, she told Hannah, "If you do something to help homeless people, maybe that will make your heart feel better."
Four years later, at age 9, Hannah has gone from running a Grade 1 bake sale for her cause to becoming an advocate known across the country. She is founder of the Ladybug Foundation (http://www.ladybugfoundation.ca), a grassroots organization that has raised more than $200,000 for food and shelter for the homeless. She has inspired audiences ranging from elementary school students to the blue-chip Empire Club of Canada.
But what will resonate with parents most about Hannah's story isn't her rare accomplishment. It's the childhood traits she shares with so many kids and that deserve our attention ― curiosity, a powerful instinct for right and wrong, and the ability to see people without judging them. Hannah has inspired action from kids and adults alike, mostly because she sees the human face of homelessness. Her message is simple: we need to be kind and decent. And as she explains over the phone, "If everybody did a little thing, then that would make it into a big thing that helps."
The story she tells about Carey is a telling example of the way kids are. Hannah met him on the street near her Toronto hotel during a visit to the city. She dropped some change into his cup and they started chatting. And then in the way that children do, she asked "What's your name?" He told her, then paused and added, "No one ever asks me that."
Hannah has advice for parents when talking to their children about homelessness: "Tell them the truth," she says. "Tell it gently and slowly and let them ask questions."
Gordon adds a caveat: Don't give them more information than they ask for or what you think they can handle. "The sensitivity of individual children and their degree of empathy is something we have to be really careful of....You don't want to disable kids by getting them too distraught."
To Rick Tobias, executive director of the Yonge Street Mission in Toronto, the best thing parents can do is model compassion. That can be the difference between raising a generation that cares or kids who look the other way. "I think there's a direct tie between acts of compassion and the world we leave our kids," he says. He says those actions, whether it's a smile, a greeting, or dropping a few coins into a can, are important because you never know where they will lead. Sometimes it's that human connection that paves the way to bigger deeds down the road.
"We don't need a world full of professional caregivers, or every child to grow up to be a social worker," he says. "We need a world of average people doing a little bit more."
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