Showing Up Beats Talking Down

The billboard hit me in the face as I landed at Dulles airport. It had a huge photograph of an African American teenage boy. In bold, black letters, it announced: “If you want to end underage drinking, insert message here,” with a large black arrow pointing in the kid’s ear. Then, as I drove to Philadelphia some days later, another public service billboard caught my eye. In wild graffiti script, the word “virgin” was scrawled in purple with these words underneath: “Tell your kids it’s not a dirty word.”

In a radio address President Clinton attempted the oral equivalent of these billboards in addressing gang violence. He urged that kids be taught the difference between right and wrong. What they needed, he said, was to be educated as to the great cost we all pay in loss of life due to gang violence.

Teenage pregnancy, underage drinking, drug abuse, gang violence and a host of other maladies plague our kids. Did we really think that our young people engage in such activities because they have not been given sufficient information? That they drink alcohol at 15 because they didn’t know they could have had a V-8?

At a town hall meeting at the White House, baby boomers are encouraged by the president to discuss drugs with their children. ABC television warns in a public service announcement that “silence is acceptance.” These are both worthy ideas--who could be against talking to your kid?--and yet the emphasis in this age of the “information superhighway” is all on the message; all we have to do is insert it in young people’s ears. But who doesn’t know that teenagers are far more knowledgeable in the areas of sex and drugs today than any previous generation? What should be abundantly clear is that young people don’t lack messages but messengers.

If the Carnegie report of a couple years ago is to be believed, children under 14 are at risk of falling prey to a host of ills (truancy, school dropout, drugs, pregnancy, gang involvement) not because they are uninformed. The reason cuts across all socioeconomic boundaries: Children stray, the report asserts, because adults aren’t there. No amount of messages or telling them to “just say no” seems to do much good. The message delivered appears to be far less important than the presence of the one who delivers it.

It is becoming more and more obvious that “showing up” is a great deal more than 50% of success. Showing up in the lives of children is everything. It has become an accepted tenet that kids will rarely listen to their parents but seldom fail to imitate them. Communicating the message has never been a good substitute for “showing up” and embodying the message.

We would do well to ask ourselves why a 13-year-old finds himself drunk by the early afternoon or a 15-year-old discovers she’s pregnant. Are they the misinformed or just the unaccompanied? Children find themselves adrift not because the informational signposts are illegible, but because there is no one around to guide and accompany them.

The president urges us to tell teenagers about the huge price we pay in gang violence. There is not a child who lives in the public housing projects where I work who hasn’t seen a dead body lying on the ground with yellow police tape draped around it. There is not a child in my community who hasn’t at one time or another dove for cover to avoid gunfire. Surely, they are the ones to inform the president about the price we pay out here.

If our young find themselves addicted, pregnant or violent, it is not because we’ve failed to tell them what they need to know. Our failure comes in our absence, in abdicating our responsibility to show up in their lives at precisely the moment they care less about them.

It has become a truism among those of us who work with at-risk, gang-involved youth that one thing must be present if a kid who’s been in trouble is ever to redirect his life. Ask teachers, social workers, priests or probation officers to call to mind their “success stories”--kids who have managed to get on with their lives and leave unacceptable behavior behind. Now ask those caregivers to identify the one thing each young person had in common that undeniably contributed to his success. They will reply that each kid had at least one loving, caring adult who paid attention. More would be wonderful, but there has to be at least one.

Showing up, paying attention and embodying the message for our children is more difficult than finding the right words and information to communicate. My hope in the upcoming presidential summit in Philadelphia is in its emphasis on mentoring and committing to our young with our very presence and not just with some finely honed message or sets of words. What is ultimately compelling for our children in helping them conjure images of a future for themselves is our willingness to walk with them as they do it.