ABSTRACT
This is one young mother’s description of walking from the corner grocery store to her home as she begins to offer her thoughts about raising young children while living in an inner-city community. This is the same community she lived in as a child, but the neighborhood has changed. There are fewer two-parent families, fewer adults are employed, fewer businesses are left in the community, and there has been a profound increase in the amount and seriousness of violence. She says she has become used to the violence, but the steps she has taken to ensure her family’s safety and her desperation to move out of the neighborhood suggest otherwise. She does not fear that these young men will harm her or her children; they are friends of her children’s father. However, she does want to keep her children away from these men. She does not want her son to end up in jail like his father. She does not want her children to grow up thinking it is “normal” to have shooting outside your house every night. She is not sure she will be able to protect them or keep them from becoming involved in criminal behavior. Others haven’t. How can she be any better a parent in this community than others are?
