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Summer break is here and millions of children across the country have gone from having highly structured days that were scheduled down to the minute to nearly free schedules in just days.
Students across the country are finally able to walk the halls of their schools with visible smiles after living through two years of the global COVID-19 pandemic. All 50 U.S. states in the nation have dropped their mask mandates for schools since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the okay to go maskless indoors on Feb 25.
We’re now one week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the situation has become dire. A million Ukrainians have fled the nation and have sought refuge in neighboring countries. The situation is likely to worsen before it gets better as peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials continue.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption to nearly every aspect of our lives. From work, to education, and social life, the lives of millions of Americans and their families were upended in the spring of 2020 and have not found any sense of normalcy since then.
Schools around the nation are facing a second round of closures due to the Omicron variant sweeping across the country. This recent variant of the COVID-19 virus has caused the number of daily COVID cases to balloon into the hundreds of thousands. Over half a million children were diagnosed with COVID in the first week of January alone and unlike past variants, Omicron has hospitalized many children who were once seen as being immune to the virus.
As the majority of students returned to the classroom this school year, the unfortunate reality of mass violence has also made a comeback. School shootings have taken an upward trend these past few months after a hiatus due to the school closures across the country at the onset of the pandemic.
If you weren’t already aware, November is Men’s Health Awareness Month, a period dedicated to drawing attention to health issues affecting men such as prostate and testicular cancers, suicide prevention, and mental health. In order to raise awareness around these important topics, many men will sport a mustache or participate in No Shave November as a way to create a conversation about men’s health.
That’s our belief here at maro parents. If a system doesn’t aim to improve the lives of the most vulnerable that it serves, then it’s a flawed system. There are many inequities that people of color come across throughout their daily lives. They show up in the financial lending system, the job market, and even in our healthcare systems. Unfortunately, children aren’t impervious to this reality.
Instilling a sense of cultural pride in kids is one of the main characteristics of being a parent. It helps boost confidence in children, helps them confront racism whenever they encounter it, and gives them a sense of belonging in the world. Unfortunately that cultural pride is seen as threatening when it comes from the cultures of people who are being subjected to oppression.