Summary Of If I Grow Up By Alex Kotlowitz

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

about the picture of a six-year-old boy from Syria who was trying to flee to Europe. There are hordes of refugees coming from Syria because of the war that the Syrian government has been waging against its own citizens – and now the additional turmoil and torture that ISIS is bringing to the Syrian nation. While there has been so much shock about that picture and the plight of the refugees, there are thousands and thousands of children growing up in the inner cities of the United States who have the same story as Lafeyette and Pharoah – and are just as likely to end up as dead children as that one young boy from Syria.
This book resonated with me because many of the problems of our nation could be solved if we gave all children the equal opportunity to achieve their dreams.

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

what makes this book resonate so deeply with me, because I believe that all children should have a chance to make their own choices. These kids don’t have that chance.
Character Assessment
Lafeyette is the character that resonated with me the most profoundly.

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

bullet, and so he doesn’t form that close emotional connection with anyone anymore.
The book provides a fairly stark contrast between the numbing pace of the gang wars in Lafeyette’s apartment complex and the white suburbs. In the suburbs, a woman is killed and there is all sorts of outrage as a result. The fact that someone would be gunned down inspires rallies and other protests out in the suburbs. However, where Lafeyette lives, someone is either beaten, shot or stabbed every three days. That’s a much higher rate of violence than what they have out in the suburbs, but there is nowhere near the level of protest in the inner city about this heightened level of violence. The implication is that what happens in the inner city simply does not matter because the people who live there are too poor to matter. Even though the murder rate is so much higher, the outrage rate is significantly lower. Living in an area that people basically ignore, Lafeyette grows up with the idea that he does not matter to the same degree that people in the suburbs do. The implication is that he might as well not do anything worthwhile with his life, because he is not going to be worth anything to his community anyway – and he might not even live long enough to make meaningful contributions.
Watching Lafeyette progress through his childhood is a truly sad experience. Seeing him have to become an adult so much sooner than he should have is a sad commentary on our society. Coming away from this story, it is important for me to reach out and volunteer in my community so that other children do not have to experience the same sort of horrors that Lafeyette and his family do – and that children have a way out to a life of dignity.

Works Cited
Kotlowitz, Alex. There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other
America. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. Print.