Parenting a Special Needs Child (or any child, for that matter)

By Charisse N. Montgomery

As a new parent and a parent of a child with special needs, the past seven months have been a whirlwind of activity and emotions. My son, who was born with a congenital myopathy (muscle disease), requires quite a lot of care, and since his birth, I have received requests for advice about managing life with a child who has special needs. While I am pretty new to this and am by no means an expert, I have learned a lot from my own experiences and from those of my parents (who also parented a child with special needs) and my sister (who has a physical disability).

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Baby Blues (Part III): Expecting and the Unexpected

By Charisse N. Montgomery

At 33 weeks pregnant, my husband and I went to the ultrasound clinic for a routine follow-up ultrasound. Because I have fibroids, as about 60% of Black women do, the doctors kept a close eye on their growth throughout my pregnancy. This appointment, however, revealed more than fibroids. Having been through thorough ultrasounds for the past four months, I noticed a difference when the ultrasound tech continued to take photos of my baby’s spine and brain. Her silence and her concentration on these areas were a red flag that something might not be okay. Not really wanting to know the answer, I asked, “Should his spine be curved like that?”

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Black Baby Genius: Cultivating the minds of our next generation

anissatBy Richard Montgomery

I recently attended a Black male empowerment conference, and one of the speakers was a 13-year-old African American sophomore majoring in Computer Science at Morehouse College. While a thirteen year-old genius is impressive, his mother’s reasoning behind how he became a child genius who could perform complex algebra equations by age five was more interesting. Put simply, she kept him engaged in whatever he seemed interested in. Stephen has an older sister, and the two of them played school for hours on end mostly because Stephen liked it.

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A Letter to My Daughter on Graduation Day

By Richard Montgomery

I have pictured the day when you graduate from high school since you were a young girl, hoping that when that day came I would have prepared you to make your way successfully in the world.

I have always taken fatherhood seriously, knowing my role was to guide you, make you think, and let you decide.  When you were three years old and your favorite question was “why is that daddy?,”  I always spoke carefully because I knew that you were not randomly asking questions about nothing; instead you were asking me to help you make sense of the world.  As you got older, I watched you begin to see the world in ways that no longer showed the naiveté of a child but that of a young woman growing up in a world that is sometimes cruel, unfair, and unforgiving.

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Backsliding: From middle class to poverty in one generation

LegleyBy Charisse N. Montgomery

The goal of most parents is to raise children who are educationally, socially and economically better off than they were, but this outcome seems to escape many black middle-class families.  As many as 45% of black children from middle-class black families will eventually fall into poverty in their adult lives, while only 16% of white children from middle-class families do the same. These were the stats before the current economic decline. Putting aside the current economic difficulties that plague most Americans, what makes black middle-class children more likely to fall into poverty as adults?

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