Today I learned about Martin Luther King Jr’s mama, Alberta Williams King. The podcast talked about how there is a mom behind all of the amazing citizens of history who fought for social justice. Alberta King was a young teacher when she got married, and then promptly became a stay at home mom when the school board refused to allow married women to teach. She raised her three children with conviction and beauty. She was a Christian who fought for love and equality. Alberta King was assassinated just 6 years after her son, Martin Luther King Jr was murdered, while she was playing the organ for the choir in church.
Her story led me to think about kids today and how they will change the world when they’re older. It led me to think about what I want to teach my kids. It also trailed into the rabbit hole of thinking about why our children’s collective mental health has never been worse.
I currently work in a position at a large children’s hospital in Canada. My job is to ensure that everyone has a space to go when they need a bed — I watch the big picture. I see everything that comes through emergency. I know about so many people’s stories because I need to know where the most appropriate bed is for your beautiful children who need mental and/or physical support. I see all the trends. It is my job to notice trends.
Going into the third year of the pandemic, I think we can all agree that children’s mental health needs to be everyone’s priority. Statistically we have never seen so many children who need support. Anecdotally, I can say that it is alarming that the numbers seem to be growing exponentially every day. One thing that kids rarely come in to emergency citing as the main concern for their mental health demise, is that they need to wear a mask (just saying). In my humble opinion, we need to go upstream.
The global pandemic has impacted mothers in ways that we could have never imagined. Without a second thought, in April of 2020, moms around the world were suddenly responsible for being full time working parents, as well as full time teachers, full time mental health clinicians, full time playmates …. full time full time full time. We went from paying more than half of our monthly income to childcare so that we could participate in the workforce and contribute to the family income (or let’s face it, pay our grocery bills), to being responsible for everything. We lost the social interaction of talking to other parents and learning from other, experienced moms, to having to zoom with maybe one or two friends on the weekend. Moms who were already staying at home to raise children full time heard insurmountable criticism about how they are not “working” from home. The mom world then turned further on themselves and criticized each other for what they were and were not doing during every waking minute.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We could talk for hours about the inequalities of women in the workforce. The pressure on mothers before the pandemic was mounting like wildfire, and for so many parents, this has been the straw that broke their very tired, sleep-deprived backs.
And what happens when a mom and dad are not okay? You guessed it, the kids are not okay!
I want to be clear here, I am NOT blaming parents for the increase in mental health admissions of children over the last year. Quite the opposite. I am here to advocate and speak up that there are very clear reasons why moms are not okay and kids are not okay, and dads are not okay. We can not continue to have the same expectations of mothers to be everyone to everybody, and expect kids to have outcome for growth as they did prior to the pandemic. They won’t. We can’t. We need to shift our priorities as a society and take care of the people who are screaming for help in ways that we have never seen before. We need to invest our time and money in mental health programs for families and enhance coping skills, provide living wages to women who are also parents and have a community mindset for the children who need extra love and attention. We need safe places for kids to go when their parents need to figure shit out. We need compassion for families who have maybe never had to live with this level of stress before and have never been taught how to manage stress in a healthy way. Get the point? If even 1/10th of the money that was donated the trucker’s convoy who occupied our nation’s capital for 3 weeks was donated to programs to support families, can you imagine the ripple effect of that impact on our children? Imagine how many meals we could have served to children so they can go to school with a full stomach. We could have hired 100 mental health clinicians to support or kids in public schools across the country.
Our lives are about so much more than what we are living today. The impacts of parent and child relationships will trend in our healthcare system for generations past ours. Alberta King could have never raised a leader if she didn’t have the care and support of a community that loved her when she needed them, even when society told her that she was inferior to others.
And that’s all I have for tonight.
With so much love,
Sam
