Tunette Powell, interim director of UCLA’s Parent Empowerment Project, said it’s been hard to be a parent during the pandemic because kids are out of school and taking classes at home. Now during this period of racial unrest, the burden on parents is even greater as kids try to understand what’s going on.
Powell has three boys between the ages of 5 and 10, so the past few months have been “especially challenging” for her to balance their school and camp schedules with her own work. At the same time, she’s also talking to her kids about policing in America. She believes it’s important for her and other parents to have conversations with their Black sons and daughters about these difficult topics, especially now.
“What we're seeing is very difficult conversations that we have to have,” she said. “For me, it's always the balance of how do you protect your child's innocence while also preparing them for the world that you know is waiting for them?”
As children of all ages watch the news and see reports about the killings of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd, among others, they’re asking their parents many questions about the ethics of policing.
“My 5-year-old has asked a lot of questions recently: Are police bad or are they good? Why did they kill George Floyd? And just trying to figure out the essence or the balance of protecting and preserving the innocence while also wanting to be very honest with your kids about where we are today in the world,” she said.
Powell adjusts the information she tells her children about police brutality based on their ages.
“I have an obligation to be honest with them about the world that we do have, but also giving them freedom to dream of something new, and to talk about how we can be a part of building something new in this country,” she said. “For my 5-year-old, I say that not all police are bad, but we are seeing some examples of police who were bad. For my 10-year-old, I talked about how all police individually are not bad, but the system of policing has always been bad. He's ready for that conversation.”
When Powell’s oldest two sons were suspended from preschool when they were 3 and 4 years old, she decided to preserve their innocence instead of telling them what happened.
“I chose their innocence because Black kids are not afforded the opportunity to be kids, you know what I mean? And it's not because of their parents, but because of the society that sees them as older than they are, that sees them as a danger at a very, very young age, as young as 3 years old,” she said. “From one Black mother to a lot of other Black mothers, if you get to choose between preserving innocence and being very real, I choose innocence for our Black babies. I choose joy.”
Powell said conversations are important, but a Black child’s home should still be a place of “restoration and healing that we don’t get from the outside world.”
Recently, Powell took her boys to a Black Lives Matter protest in L.A.
“I came home to hear how my kids were talking about the protest. My 9-year-old was saying, ‘I was most impressed that there were people who are not Black that were chanting Black Lives Matter.’ It was my 5-year-old two weeks later walking through the house saying, ‘Don't shoot. Black Lives Matter. Don’t shoot.’ Being at that protest is going to have a ripple effect and going to have an impact that is far greater than any kind of conversation we could have had. So I think that was a moment when I felt like I was doing it right, and it's something that I'm going to make sure we do more of because kids learn more from what we do than what we say, and that's what I'm learning everyday,” she said.
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