“Ghetto” Parenting

It means what you think it means. The Chicago Sun Times columnist, Mary Mitchell, coined this new phrase and, not surprisingly, kicked up a hornets nest. Here’s her definition:

Ghetto parenting is cursing around, and at, a child.

Ghetto parenting is brawling with your man or your woman in front of your child.

Ghetto parenting is letting your child roam the streets until somebody else’s mother has to tell the child to go home.

Ghetto parenting is putting your child off on friends and relatives because you want to hang out in the street.

Ghetto parenting is getting so hooked on substances that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has to remove your children and place them with strangers.

I must say, that one can take away the “sound bite” of what Ghetto parenting is and think simply that this woman was being sensational for coining this new term. However, as I read her piece about the back story of a murderer, I was taken in by her underlying need to change a system that failed a young boy and his family.

Of course, that system happens to be a reality of living in a ghetto, though it seems as if ghetto parenting is without borders, meaning that even people who do not live in ghettos can be guilty of it.

At first I snickered at the term. I thought of how insulting it is, but also how true it can be. Sadly, the behavior is there, regardless what the words used to describe it are. And that’s the heartbreaking truth to the story.

If Mary Mitchell’s dust-up results in not only a dialog but some solutions to the plague of neglectful parenting that is rampant in our society, then I back her 100%.

photo credit: fabbio