“Kids from lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to be disorganized, with parents often severely stressed by economic and family instability” (MH Van IJzendoorn).
Here, “disorganized” refers to an insecure attachment to the parents. This disorganized attachment contributes to the maladaptive behavior exhibited later on in life. Studies have shown, and it is generally understood, that children gain a sense of identity and security from their parents and those closely connected to them. Inner-city households are 86% single parent households, with a parent making less than $33,000 a year. A vast majority of single parent households are women who work in the service and healthcare industry.
The number of challenges in maintaining the cost of living while raising a child, in an area plagued with poverty, crime, and rampant drug use, is innumerable. Often, these single mothers are dealing with their own trauma stemming from early childhood experiences. And because of this, the pressure to successfully raise a child under these circumstances is intensified.
Bessel Van der Kolk, M.D. wrote, “While all parents need all the help that they can get to raise secure children, traumatized parents, in particular, need help to be attuned to their children’s needs.”
These mothers become desensitized to their children. Researchers call this “maternal disengagement and mis-attunement.” But these are mere words, and just as the famed author Willa Cather said, ”Give the people a new word, and they will think that they have found a new fact.” I believe that genuine truth is not in the textbooks of hypothesis and theory. Genuine truth is in lived experiences and the conditions which create them. So, allow me to offer myself up for a bit of truth.
When I was six years old, in 1979, my mother was striving to achieve her goal of becoming a certified nurse. Most of her time was spent studying for tests, and the rest of the time was devoted to part-time jobs. These times were particularly hard in the inner-cities, and the single parent mother had to bear the brunt of it.
The dire financial state of the country forced my mother to make an executive decision. She decided that public transportation was too costly and could not fit into her tight budget. So, whenever she had to go somewhere in the city, she would walk. And since she didn’t have money for a babysitter, I would walk too. It was never a distance that required more than two hours of walking. But, then again, I was six years old. My mother was always in a hurry to get to where she was going, she had a singular focus. I am much like her today, once I direct my mind towards a thing, I have no peripheral concerns. My mother would always walk faster than my little legs could carry me. For her, it was urgency to get to where she needed to be. For me, it was a desperate, almost frantic, struggle to not be left behind. When we would go on those long walks, I always felt like I was chasing her.
She wore this red leather jacket with fur around the collar. No matter how much my legs hurt, no matter how far she walked ahead of me, I would never take my eyes off the back of her red leather jacket. Sometimes I would stop and dramatically collapse to the ground in tears. The physical and emotional pain was too much. My mother would turn back to me, scold me, and insist that I hurry along. Now, to be fair, that wasn’t always her response; sometimes, she would comfort me and agree to hold my hand. My mother was loving and all of those things. But when there was urgency — which during those times was often — she was detached. Most of the time, I was not encouraged or made to feel secure. I felt as if I was being threatened in those moments. If you don’t hurry up and come on, I am going to leave you behind! Just to be clear, my mother never said that to me, but that was how my six-year old mind interpreted it.
By the time I reached my teens, I had developed a fear of abandonment. It manifested itself through an obsession with my mother coming home from work on time. She worked from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. She had to catch a train to and from work, and would come home around 8:30 P.M. If my mother did not come home around that time, I would become extremely anxious. I would start by calling people within the family to see if she stopped by their house. After making a bunch of calls, I would began to panic. I would start calling hospitals to see if she was admitted to the emergency room. Now, by this time, I am completely distraught. I am begging God to please not take her away from me. I am drenched in tears and everything. Eventually, I would get dressed and go down to the bus stop and wait for her. It seemed like the only thing that I could do to calm down. A couple of times I actually got on the bus and rode it down to the train station.
When I finally reached the age of 17, I had an unstable sense of self and I was exhibiting self-damaging impulsivity. Unbeknownst to me, in the early 1980s, a Harvard researcher named Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth was beginning a study which would mirror my own story. Her study was in regards to attachment research; the attachment between mother and child. She began to video tape face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants at 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months old. She taped them again when they were 5 years old, and again, when they were 7 or 8 years old. When the children turned 18, she made note of their emotional development. Their mothers were detached and were under the same strains as my mother. As a result, the children developed an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity, inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. In addition to these adverse behaviors, Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth discovered that these 18 year olds suffered from dissociation (Lyons-Ruth, ”The Two-Person Construction of Defenses”). Dissociation, for me, describes how I was emotionally disconnected from, or loosely connected to, others and everyday experiences.
By this time in my life, I had at least 5 symptoms on the DSM check-list. I had little or no self-esteem, so I turned to inner-city street life for a sense of identity, and to get what I had not been given: safety, direction, meaning. But inner-city street life seduces you into engaging in illegal activity, and so I did. I committed crimes, used drugs, and had promiscuous sex until I was eventually charged in a robbery-homicide and sentenced to life in prison.
My story is not a revelation. It is a rampant occurrence in the inner-cities, all across America. It is so prevalent that one might say, the inner-cities of America cultivate and supply the penal system with the brick and mortar of its continued expansion, privatization, and industry. But the penal system is not the only benefactor of the tragic story of detached mothers and disorganized youths. The political arena uses the newest, surging urban-wave of crime to drive policies and pass trojan horse laws with special provisions, lobbied by special interest groups. And of yet, to secure political nominations for he who can scream loud enough, “We need to be tough on crime!”
The rhetoric and the laws proposed are nothing more than a failed placebo treatment. Whereas in medicine, a patient improves after receiving an inactive treatment which they believe will work, the inactive rhetoric and subsequent laws (in this case) do nothing to change this ailment of crime in the inner-cities; but, then again, they were never supposed to! The politicians need crime and disorganized youth. And so they need the inner-cities to continue to be pressure cookers of socioeconomic disparity, trauma, and dysfunction.
It is amazing how people would continue to take the placebo treatment with eager consumption, despite the fact that they know it does not work. Their eyes and ears witness its failure everyday on the news; yet, when election time storms around, and the rhetoric, and proposed “tougher laws,” are vociferated, they (the people) take the pill. Why? Why, when they know for a fact that it does not work?
I realized that the politicians and penal industry are not the only benefactors of disorganized youth and the conditions surrounding them. Everyday Americans benefit from this tragic story as well.
Everyone needs a monster under the bed, or in the closet, or in the woods, or down the street. Everyone needs something, somewhere, and/or someone to point at to say: “I’m better than that/them.” ” I am not like that.” “I don’t live there.” ” I don’t do that.” The easiest way to elevate your self is to point downward. But, this “pointing down” can lead to far more worse things.
In this case, society can point down to what is going on in the inner-cities as a way to ignore it. “That’s them, not me. I’m concerned with me and mines.” But this “pointing down,” tends to lead people to dehumanize others and their plight. And once you have removed the humanity from a people and their conditions, it becomes justifiable to do the unjustifiable. And then, when you add fear into the mix, after having dehumanized the situation and its people, you now have a Molotov-cocktail of social unrest. If you are smart and clever enough, you can use that to leverage political power; but, if you are humane and empathetic enough, you will roll up your sleeves, and tirelessly strive to change the conditions as much as you can and with as much strength as you can muster.
