For the past few months our family has been volunteering at a local family shelter. Over the next two years, Philip will be journaling about his experiences and interactions there to meet one of the requirements for his honors program at Hermes High School. Today we spent about ninety minutes at the shelter decorating cookies with kids between the ages of four and nine. Like Philip, I volunteered at a family shelter when I was in high school. It gave me a view of life I would not otherwise have seen. Some thirty years later, I am viewing life at a family shelter with an older set of eyes.
What strikes me the most about the family shelter is how much fun the kids seem to have and how happy the kids seem to be. There is a large common playground and a large common kitchen and dining hall. A cork board displays a calendar of activities for the kids, including both weekly and one-time events. At the three events we have helped with so far, the kids seem not only happy but committed to one another’s happiness. One seven-year-old girl Tracy takes particular interest in the younger children. While I sat outside repairing bikes one day, a pair of boys wanted to sit close to me and watch. Tracy helped the boys overcome their hesitations and explained everything I was doing. She also made sure the boys didn’t touch anything that might hurt them. When we managed the Easter Egg Hunt, all the older children took it upon themselves to make sure each of the younger children filled their baskets. There was not the slightest evidence of bullying.
The adults at the family shelter are a different story. Whether they are there as a result of bad fortune, bad choices or some combination thereof, living at a family shelter rather than in a more common living situation is frustrating and embarrassing. I have never seen an adult overtly take out that frustration on a child. In fact, the parents at the shelter seem to be going the extra mile with their kids. But I can see the weight of their situation on each adult’s face. The men seem to take it the hardest.
Recently, my wife Amelia read Farewell to Manzanar, the memoir of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston who spent a window of her childhood living at one of the internment camps established for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Despite the unfair treatment, economic challenges and restrictions on freedom, the years at the internment camp proved to be this woman’s happiest childhood memories. There was something special about the closeness and the effort to band together. It was a sense of community she wanted to find a way to recreate for her own children but never fully succeeded in her own mind.
Kids enjoy going to the playground, making quick and possibly short-lived friendships and simply playing, especially in large groups. They love being on sports teams together. Even the ones with less athletic prowess love being part of sports teams. Events with lots of kids like birthday parties, beach trips, camping trips and barbeques are thrilling for kids.
As adulthood approaches and takes hold, the desire for autonomy becomes progressively stronger. Philip now spends hours inside his bedroom with the door closed. While young adults are comfortable sharing apartments in cramped quarters, older adults do not merely want their own home, they want a house: ideally a house with lots of square-footage and lots of acreage.
As I look at Tracy and the other kids living at the family shelter, I expect they are forming great memories. But I also think they are burying various forms of stress to process later in life. No matter how much parents want to protect their kids from adult troubles, some always manages to penetrate. But at manageable levels, the buried stress does not need to emerge in the form of unhealthy behavior. And when offset by the joys and benefits of community, Tracy and her peers are probably much better off spending a few months at the family shelter than most would expect. I’m looking forward to future interactions at the family shelter and also to reading Philip’s thoughts as he journals these experiences.
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