Childhood is Sacred

Inpatient Child Pysch is a cross between Jerry Springer and a Jodi Piccoult novel.  It can be a very dark place filled with hopeless situations, broken families and gross abuse and neglect of children. I have learned about the gang wars of Winston-Salem, the myriad ways to get high off crack, marijuana, XTC, acid, glue, you name it. I listened as parents cuss their children out and their children cuss right back at them. I watched parents give up their children to the state and listened to the tears of children whose parents don’t pick up their insulin for their childhood diabetes or take them to doctor’s appointments or leave them on the pysch ward so they can go Disney world or the beach without having to worry about their bipolar kid or their child with Autism complicating their vacation.

But the most important I learned is that play is the thing. No really it is. I’m talking about finger painting, mud pies, water balloons, swimming in a pool, in the ocean, games of tag, checkers,  chutes and ladders, Candy Land, dancing, singing loudly, running through grass barefoot, coloring, drawing, riding your bike,  basketball, baseball, flag football, going fishing with your Grandpapa, making cookies with your Grandmama, running around with your dog in the back yard, wiffle ball, hiking through the woods becomes an adventure, going down the slide, climbing up the slide, swinging so high you are sure your toes touch the sky,  make s’mores  and weenies over a campfire, make believe of pirates and princesses and shipwrecks and hospital (if your parents are in medicine this is inevitable) or army men or playing school, playing with dolls, playing with cars,/trains/trucks, building the tallest tower of blocks, or making a space ship with legos, playing with play dough, dying Easter eggs or sitting down and listening to a story. Sticky hands, muddy feet, paint all down your clean t-shirt,  Easter egg dye from your head to your toe, mud in your hair, clothes soaking wet because you fell in the lake fishing, paw prints on your shorts from playing with the dog, a crown of daises that make you so sure that its made of diamonds and rubies, a sword that to some resembles an dirty stick you found behind a bush, the bad haircut you got after playing beauty shop, the stuff animal whose appendix you tried to take out who needs his stuffing put back in (that is for you Karen)…..

these things are sacred and they are worth fighting for….these are not just obnoxious or silly things…these are the things that teach kids how to laugh, how to talk, how to think and create, how to love and relate to others, to feel confident….these are the things that children who live on the streets (rather they be Bucharest or Winston-Salem) miss out on, these are the things that don’t happen in broken homes or homes where parents are more concerned of their own needs rather than those of their children that become twisted….

Childhood is sacred. Its where we learn everything and can lose more than everything.

so thats what I do in these family meetings and in group thearpy I fight for the right of childhood.