My childhood

Good Morning lovelies!

I hope this week went well for everyone and your weekends are starting off well.

This week is all about our enviornments and their impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health- biosocial and psychosocial. As we have discussed all this week, a child's development is greatly dependent on his/her enviornment and experiences. To paraphrase Harvard researchers, the brain is built from bottom to top and a child's personal experiences help shape their schema's and build nueral connections and pathways.

With that being said, stressors and factors that impacted my childhood were chaos and poverty. I was born and raised on Chicago's South side to single-mother. I'm the oldest of four but more like a second mother than anything to my siblings. My father decided that I was too much to handle and decided a family was something he was not interested in. My other three siblings have a different father from myself- him also leaving after my mother's marriage ended to him.

My mother was always the primary breadwinner while my step-father used his masculinity to control and dominate my family until the marriage ended. My mother had stepped out on faith and decided to start her on transportation service when I was five because she wanted to alleviate the fear of other mother's sending their children out to school in crime-ridden Chicago. My step-father never supported her and always fought her about going against the grain, dreaming big aspirations, and-most importantly- not staying in a woman's place by being as strong-willed, determined, and fearless as she was.

I have only seen my mother move mountains and part oceans throughout my childhood. Most children's childhood smells involve fresh baked cookies and dirt from playing outside; mine involves the smell of diesel fuel from gas trips to Indiana and McDonald's Happy meals because my mother was too tired to cook after working fifteen hours a day.

We struggled for awhile due to her new company being a startup business in a low-income neighborhood. Lights, gas, heat, and water were turned off so much that we made games for them when they were and learned how to survive without them. There were times were food was scarce and non-existent; my siblings and I wondering how in the hell our mother made a full course meal that tasted DELICIOUS out of ramen noodles, frozen "chicken slivers", dried fruit, and miscellaneous cans of beans from the back of our dusty pantry.

I was forced to grow up by age eight; when my brother was four and I began babysitting more and more often. Most of the kids from the neighborhood played outside after school or went to the park on weekends with family and friends.  I came home after school and fed "the kids" while helping them with their homework and on weekends, I would watch my brother for hours alone while my mother went to work on our family businesses  with my step father disappearing regularly.

By ten, I knew how to cook full meals, clean and disinfect the entire house, fix minor damage to the house , change a diaper in two minutes flat, and pay overdue or late bills over the phone using my "Emily" voice. I was a miniture adult that had been shortchanged a childhood.

My mother and stepfather also argued daily at some point. They argued so much that I began to normalize it and didn't recognize when it would escalate to violence because it was so common. Common, in fact, that I thought it was a common form of expression of love in my own personal relationships.

I didn't realize I had negative effects of my childhood until recently when I lost my son and engaged in psychotherapy. I figured my childhood had only made me thick-skinned and gave me a perspective of not letting anything stand as an obstacle between me and my goals. However, once I engaged in therapy, I realized my childhood- despite the wonderful moments that I had sprinkled in during those years- had a negative impact on how I view a healthy relationship between partners, I have developed a sense of apathy towards others, and I do not know how to properly express my emotions as times.

As a child, I was exposed to a world that forced to me assimilate- an adult world where there was no filter of what was reality. My mom was very transparent with me from day one. I knew everything from finances to their struggling marriage. From this, I was unable to form and develop basic childhood experiences that would foster development of my adult ones.

This would explain why I am a twenty-five year old that enjoys playing with bubbles and chalk in her spare time.

However, I don't regret anything in my childhood because I know it was literally the best my mother could have given me at the time and she did it mostly on her own.

Another part of the world that I would love to know more about would be the childhood of children in China and how they manage to be happy and survive in a damaging political and social climate while experiencing high levels of air pollution.  When I taught in China, I was taken aback how anyone would live in a country where the air can literally kill them if exposed to it for extended moments of time. Wearing a face mask everyday to work was abnormal to me yet it was treated like a fashion accessory from the natives. Government crackdown on pollution from manufacturing was non-existent and regulations that would keep people from getting I'll from drinking and eating contaminated water and food were simply suggestions.

Also, certain minority populations in China were harrassed daily- Muslim- and often threatened with death. Women are still seen as second-class to some degree while a state test determines your future; high rates of suicide and anxiety amongst children out of fear of failure.

Therapy is something that is not talked about, let alone suggested and tea is a cure for all-including social situations.

I would love to see my students five to ten years from now to see how and who they become based on their childhood experiences and if there would be anything they would have liked to have been done differently.

Overall, childhood is a miraculous period of life for everyone but it varies from person to person. Keeping that in mind would allow educators to remain cognisant that each child they encounter as experienced a different narrative than their own and to be sensitive of that in how they are treated.