Raising Children with the Help of Community

Single Family Households

Raising children has never been an easy task. In today's society raising them in a single family household is even harder, even though it seems to be the norm. I have been doing it for a good ten years. I have five children altogether. I say altogether because one of them is my baby sister's boy who is only eight days older than my oldest. My sister died from Lupus and so I been raising her boy since he was eleven.

It has been a long and strenuous road. We all had trials to go through and have survived the worst of it. It's hard to assure proper behavior when most of the times you are at work while the children are at home. That's where community has to play a part in raising your children.

Sibling rivalry is one of the biggest battles at home. I had three of the children that were ten and eleven and two that were five and six. There were four boys and a baby girl. So naturally the three older ones were in charge of watching of the younger ones. I would always tell the younger ones to keep an eye on the older ones too so that it would give them some responsibility. There were a few times when calls to my work were necessary to break up fights; that was to be expected though. Fortunately, we were able to plant roots in one neighborhood for the majority of the years. This is a good factor because knowing your neighbors is a vital part in keeping it safe to do those long hours to make ends meet when you're the only provider. I usually worked during the day and on weekends the neighbors would help keep and eye on the household.