Posted on 10/25/2009 9:16:42 PM PDT by Steelfish
With More Troubled Families, More Runaways
Monica Almeida/The New York Times Clinton Anchors, 18, in Medford, Ore., has been on his own, living in the streets and camping in the woods since he was 12.
By IAN URBINA Published: October 25, 2009
MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Nikki Hall, 16, in her parents' foreclosed home in Medford, Ore., where she has been squatting in order to finish the year at her school.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.
The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.
“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 — and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.
“We always first try to send them home,” said Clinton, who himself ran away from home at 12. “But a lot of times they won’t go, because things are really bad there. We basically become their new family.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13."
"Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens."
Uh, she's not a "fugitive," she's a missing person. This article is strange.
This might be a delayed-action result in the innocent untold human cost and suffering from the mortgage crisis. The actions of Maxine Waters, Queen Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd.
Somewhere in this recession, there will be a pulitzer prize won for a fake, but accurate, tale of the poor in America. The only thing that weighs against the Pulitzer prize is the fact that Bush is no longer president.
There is more to this story than is being told.
I’m from the Pacific Northwest and now the region well. You’re correct about the schools but miss several things. These children all have parents who are late baby-boomers or generation Xers, probably the most selfish, self-centered and disfunctional people imaginable.
I’m rearing my sister’s son because a life of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll was more important to her and the boy’s father than their son’s well being. The boy was left on my parent’s doorstep at age 4. When the two lost their jobs and the toll of drugs resulted in disabilities, the taxpayer picked up supporting them.
My nephew is doing fine now, it was a close call for a while but seven years of therapy sure helped with his feelings of having been abandonned. Not all kids are lucky. Children who run away already feel abandonned, not just physically but emotionally.
Times are tough now and adults are feeling beseiged. Imagine how kids view all this - they haven’t caused their parent’s problems but often are the targets of frustration or just neglected. Parents all want their children to be supportive, like in the movies, but real kids just don’t get it. They don’t understand why their parents are screaming mad at each other all the time, or why dad is drunk and mom is sleeping so much. Or the parents are out busting their rear ends on multiple jobs and expect the older kid(s) to watch and care for the younger ones, a task perceived as horrible by most teenagers if not handled tactfully by parents.
No, I don’t blame kids for this situation.
I suspect a lot of the increasing number is accounted for by children of meth addicts. You’d leave too, as soon as you were old enough to even imagine you could fend for yourself out in the world. Kids who’ve never been fed regularly at home, and often can’t rouse their parent or parent who’s sleeping off a meth binge, have little reason to stay at home. They’ve often been pretty much fending for themselves at home, but having to dodge increasingly paranoid and violent parents, as the parents slide deeper and deeper into meth addiction. Some have probably been raped at home, by people their parents brought home. At some point, there’s not much left to be scared of. Yeah, you might go hungry and cold; yeah, you might get raped; but that’s happening at home anyway.
Bump to reply later, maybe.
So many parents “warehouse” their kids from infancy thru’ daycare etc all thru’ school mostly because governments have made it very hard for the traditional one-earner family, not to mention many women would rather have some sort of job even if it takes 90% of their earnings to pay for the nurseries etc.
The Israelis tried communal child raising in the early kibbutz and found it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
We had a succession of kids who’d stop by when they saw the “helping hand” sticker in the window, plus friends of our kids who were envious that ours came home to a real mom and so on not to mention some we met (8, 9 10yrs old) who were alone in city parks who said they were told to “go play” and stay out of their house until some arbitrary time. Pretty pathetic really.
So if bonds become so weak that some feel no alternative to flight it’s not surprising, but I really feel for them, childhood (incl adolescence) is supposed to be a warm, secure, nuturing and learning time in preparation for the hard world out there.
Exactly.
Your situation is exactly what I was thinking of when I read article.
These children aren’t on the street due to lack of government money.
Billions of dollars are out there waiting to be grabbed. The parents
are failing their children for reasons such as you outlined.
Usually their own poor choices. For some reason, the mexican illegals
are able to work the freebie system much better than people born here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.