Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/zhughes1/)
What is happening right before our children’s eyes is the very R-rated stuff they’re not allowed to see at the movie theaters. This is the predicament that too many of us black parents are encountering right now with our young kids and teenagers. We find ourselves having to be gravely honest with them.
My son turned 13 last weekend. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking he is now eligible to be charged as an adult in the event he commits a stupid act that is deemed a felony offense, instead of celebrating a rite of passage. This is wrong.
“Without the help of good people and youth programs I would have a different life. I would have been one of those statistics my mother tried to warn me about.”
My daughter is deathly afraid of police. When I was pulled over for rolling through a stop sign when she was about 6, she leaped into the cargo area of the car to hide from the officer before I could even stop the car.
I’m on a mission to make sure my two kids have a competitive advantage — and fun. They won’t be too overscheduled, but they will definitely not be idle on the couch.
Through comedic hijinks and some explicit visuals of drugs, guns and a scantily clad woman, “Dope” opens the eyes of viewers to the challenging lives many of our urban youths experience while trying desperately not to get trapped in a waterfall of stereotypes and statistics.
Our little family rarely gets a chance for down time at home so when my son woke up on a summerlike Sunday morning with nothing on his agenda, he told me he wanted to go to the library. You’re thinking, “Wow,” right; the boy wants to spend his weekend at the library. His new fetish is manga comics. Hey — no harm there; he just finished "The Odyssey"; he's up to date for the most part on the classics. So he wants to go to the library, but he doesn’t ask me to take him; he wants to ride his bike a whopping 1.5 miles away.