The impetus for the title of this book by Alex Kotlowitz is a quote from the mother of Lafeyette and Pharoah, two young boys who are growing up in a Chicago public housing project in the 1980s. The mother said, “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children” (Kotlowitz, p. 12). Lafeyette is twelve, and he has had to learn a lot about the world just by taking care of Pharoah as well as three younger siblings. He tells the author, “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver.” In the vast majority of children, that sentence would begin with the word “When.” The fact that he uses the word “If” means that he really does not know if he will make it into adulthood. There has been a lot of anger in the media lately …show more content…
If you walk into a classroom full of kindergarteners and ask them what they want to be, you won’t hear words like “gangbanger” or “drug dealer.” You will hear big aspirations like “doctor.” “Astronaut.” “Artist.” The dreams of children are powerful, but in places like the project where Lafeyette and Pharoah are growing up, those dreams die early on. Their families are caught in the clutches of generational poverty without any clear path out. They lack exposure to many of the strategies that people in other parts of the world have to manage their own lives. Because they are constantly moving from one crisis to the next, these children truly never have the chance to enjoy being small and young. They don’t have the kind of protection in place that they deserve to have, and that distorts their progression toward adulthood. They get used to living in constant fear and stress, and they think that life will always be that way. Unfortunately, too many of these lives end before the children even have the chance to move out of the apartment where they have been crammed along with all of their siblings, a parent (not two in so many cases) and perhaps even a grandparent and other family members. Instead, they die too young from the ongoing epidemic of violence. These are children who never have a real chance to succeed. This is …show more content…
As the oldest child in the family, he is often expected to be a proxy sort of adult and take on responsibilities that are well above what he should have to do. In the first summer that the book details, 57 children were mowed down as gang wars raged in the apartment complex. That means that there were 57 small coffins that had to be buried because the gang wars couldn’t stop taking collateral damage. This is why LaJoe, Lafeyette and Pharoah’s mother, pays almost 10% of her welfare check each month to buy burial insurance for all five of her children. She is so certain that something awful is going to happen to them that she is willing to risk her family’s financial future in order to make certain that she has enough money on hand to pay for a funeral when the time comes. Through the course of the book, Lafeyette personally sees seven people get murdered. Some of them are his friends. This is why he has concluded, by the end of the narrative, that he does not have friends – only acquaintances. Developing friendships in this sort of context is almost a waste of time, because you don’t know who the gang wars are going to claim next. Forming those sorts of emotional attachments is, for this young man, an investment that is not worth its while because you simply don’t know how long your friends will be around – even alive. You don’t want to have to go through the pain of losing another friend to another
Lafeyette is a teenager whose experiences in the Horner homes teaches him how the way of life works. Lafeyette is one of LaJoe's children who starts out as a promising child but changes throughout the novel trying new ideas that he was not familiar with. Lafeyette is a thin person. He is a "stick" to some people. Lafeyette experiences conflicts which affects his life. His 'mentor' Craig Davis. Craig's death affected him so much that Lafeyette's attitude became so different than what LaJoe was so used to. Lafeyette would hang around with his friend Rickey who was affiliated with the up and coming Four Corners: a young group of trouble-makers looking to start a new gang. Lafeyette didn't like hanging around with Rickey's friends. During the final chapters of the novel, Lafeyette is accused of stealing car parts from a pick up truck. He would be charged and sentenced for one year of probation. Lafeyette becomes what LaJoe dreaded: Lafeyette turning out to be his older brother Terence.
There are many problems in the neighborhood and even with LaJoe's positive attitude, she cant take her family out of the (HHH) projects. In an environment like the one shown in the book, by Alex Kotlowitz " There Are No Children here," ,how a youth develops is much affected by the physical environment and the actions that go on around them. By the time most of the children of the city have gone through adolescence, they have witnessed and experienced many tragedies heartache that even an adult would find disturbing. They have sold drugs, joined gangs, have probably seen their best friends being shot, or even murdered by th...
Lafeyette and Pharoah are faced with many hardships in their day to day activities. Their apartment, the once beautiful complex, now has broken appliances, poor plumbing, horrible security and from the basement come smells that one housing manager described as “foul odors” that “no equipment presently in use by staff could be used to withstand the odor beyond a minute” (p. 240). The boys wake up every morning in this horrible public housing that would most likely be condemned if it was located in any decent neighborhood. Lafeyette and Pharoah get ready for school, usually putting on clothes which have been washed the night before in the bath tub, and then leave for school. Pharoah, who loves school, is always in a hurry to get there, leaving the apartment before anyone else. School is the one place for Pharoah to stand out and get away from the neighborhood for a while. He even attended a summer school program that was supported by the University of Illinois. Lafeyette, on the other hand, isn’t into school very much; which explains why he has such a large number of tardies. Both boys are always careful as they walk through the streets to school to be alert for gunfire, they don’t want to die young like so many friends of theirs.
The West side of Chicago, Harlem, Watts, Roxbury, and Detroit. What do all of these areas have in common? These areas, along with many others have become mine fields for the explosive issues of race, values, and community responsibility, led by the plight of the urban underclass. Issues such as violent crime, social separation, welfare dependence, drug wars, and unemployment all play a major role in the plight of American inner-city life. Alex Kotlowitz's book: There Are No Children Here, confronts America's devastated urban life; a most painful issue in America. Kotlowitz traces the lives of two black boys; 10 year old LaFayette, and 7 year old Pharoah, as they struggle to beat the odds growing up in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. Their family includes a welfare dependent mother, an alcholic-drug using father, an older sister, an older brother, and younger triplets. Kotlowoitz describes the horrors of an ill-maintained housing project completely taken over by gangs, where murders and shootings are an everyday thing. Kotlowitz does a fine job at portraying ghetto life; those who are outside the American dream. He succeeds at putting a face on th people trapped inside the housing projects with virtually no hope of escape. One can truly feel a sense of great loss for the family, and a great deal of hope for the two young boys. You can truly feel yourself hoping that things will work out for them, and you can really feel like you know these young men on a personal basis. Kotlowotz spent a great deal of time with the boys so he could portray the world from the eyes of a child growing up in the ghetto, and he does an amazing job.
Alex Kotlowitz was a freelance journalist. In 1985 a friend came to him and asked him to write a text for a photo essay he was doing on (children living in poverty) for a Chicago magazine. That is when he met the Rivers brothers, Lafeyette, age ten, and Pharoah age seven. He spent only a few hours with them interviewing for the photo essay. Lafeyette had an impact on Kotlowitz. When asked what he wanted to be, Lafeyette responded with "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver." Meaning, at ten years old, he wasn't sure if he'd make it to adulthood. In 1988 Kotlowitz suggested to the boys' mother, LaJoe, the idea of writing a book about Pharoah, Lafeyette and the other children in the neighborhood. LaJoe liked the idea. However, she then said, "But you know, there are no children here. They've seen too much to be children."
All of these kids just wanted to survive and live another day, but now they have to live with the fact that they used to be used as killing machines. Not only does the environment itself cause trauma, but the decisions they have to make just to survive another day can haunt them. Like mentioned before, Aron Ralston was hiking in Utah, when he fell into a very narrow canyon and a massive boulder landed on his arm. His last hope to survive was to cut his own arm off. And despite having a prosthetic arm, he still has to live without that arm and is reminded of the fateful day.
More and more children in the United States are experiencing a growing sense of insecurity about the world inside and outside the boundaries of their families. It does not take much violence and terror to set a tone of threat. Even in the worst war zones—places like Sarajevo—shooting and killing is intermittent. Memory of the emotions of trauma does not decay; it remains fresh (Garbarino 64-65).
Growing up for me some would say it was rather difficult and in some ways I would agree. There have been a lot of rough times that I have been through. This has and will affect my life for the rest of my life. The leading up to adoption, adoption and after adoption are the reasons my life were difficult.
Did you know that the average education costs about $10,000 a year, it triples that cost to hold them in prison for a year. The book, “If I Grow Up”, by Todd Strasser is about a boy growing up poor and doing what you have to, to stay alive. Although others may say that DeShawn’s life was over before it started because there were very few choices that he could benefit from such as staying in school but being broke. DeShawn had a choice on how he lived his life but he chose to live the "Hood Dream". First of all nobody made DeShawn quit school he could of stayed if he wanted too. Second, although DeShawn was extremely low on money he could have gotten a job like Raydale did. DeShawn wasn't all alone Marcus would have been willing to help DeShawn
In There are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, the way of life in Chicago's Henry Horner projects has a profound effect on all the residents who live there. The children become desensitized by the constant violence that they are forced to witness every day. Children are forced to walk home from school through the urban war zone of these housing projects. It is not unusual for the children to run home from school to avoid becoming casualties of the ongoing battle between rival gangs. The violence has affected Lafeyette and Pharaoh as much as anyone in the projects.
The United States is divided into three different classes when classifying a group by their income. The classes are the High class, the middle class, and the low class. People who live in the high and middle classes have every day struggles similar to people living in the lower class have; but one thing that fluctuates is the types of struggles people in poorer class have to face proceeding on an everyday basis. For example, not knowing if they will have food on the table for their children, heat for their house in the winter, or have a roof over their head by the end of the month. Unfortunately to every difficulty there is always a gray area over looked. When dealing with poverty, children are often the ones left in that gray area with no
In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough attempts to unravel what he identifies to be, “some of the most pervasive mysteries of life: Who succeeds and who fails? Why do some children thrive while others lose their way? And what can any of us do to steer an individual child – or a whole generation of children – away from failure and toward success?” (Tough, 2012). Children are born into environments of varying circumstances, good and bad, influencing their development. Through direct encounters with researchers, educators and children of different environments, Paul Tough approaches his questions by ex...
...are inadequately being taken care of. Consequently, there is the possibility that America’s poor children will grow up in a socially disorganized neighborhood, and ultimately they will be exposed to violence. As they grow up, they will attach meaning to the surroundings and people around them, and depending on the resource in their life they will eventually become molded.
These kids were joining gangs just to be able to be like the blonde hair kid with pale skin.Throughout the book i could connect to their situation about being the new kid in a new country where everything was different. These kids were taught new holidays that seem strange for example Halloween. I had never had a Halloween until I arrived here. I never thought it was a real thing people in America did. In the book it explains how getting treats from strangers was not safe for the kids. Many parents had a fear that they wouldn't be safe to eat and many people didn't have enough money to buy candy and give it away to strangers coming up and knocking on their door. Parents in the book were afraid of their kids being outside because of what they had been through in their country. The parents wanted to have the kids isolated in the small apartment for their safety. I can kind of relate to this, my parents are really protective. They didn't want anything bad to happen to me. Although they didn't keep me in the house all the time, they stilled looked out for me when I was
Over the last decade, Sub-Saharan Africa population has been categorized as the most poverty stricken areas worldwide. In such countries, the poor children’s mental and physical development is impacted the most due to the existence of the absolute poverty. According to Cannon, who formerly served as the Director of Development and Transformation at Willow Creek Community Church, the majority of the poor populations in South Africa are children. “In South Africa alone, between 45-55 percent of the entire population…between 57-75 percent of children are living in poverty” (Cannon 208). Unfortunately, the absolute poverty had shown its ugly face in the various life aspects such as health, starvation...