The power of NO

Well today and yesterday, friday, have been interesting. I’ve had my doorbell rung about 5 times, and had multiple kids walk up to my door and knock about 10 times. Each time I was a neighborhood child asking “can I come in and hang out?”
        “NO, you can’t I am sorry. When did I tell you that you can begin coming back to the house?”
        “Ummmmm.....”
        “Sunday. Do you remember why?”
        “Yeah, it’s just me though not everyone else.”
        “Well remember all of you need to start working together as a team, and help each other so that you can hang out here. You can’t come over today, but you can try again tomorrow afternoon if I am home.”
        “Okay... See ya mister Mike.
        “See ya, have a good day, try again tomorrow.”

On Thursday, I cooked dinner for some of my neighborhood kids. It was rice, and a chinese broccoli, guylan. They actually liked it and ate most of it. I was greatly impressed and was super excited about eating dinner with them. When we were almost done, things started to fall apart. Some more neighborhood kids came over to the house, and they started running around and hiding. This made me uncomfortable, and the kids know they shouldn’t act this way around the house. This kind of activity results in everyone going home for the day. They continued to play around a little bit, resulting in them not being allowed back until Sunday.

So friday and today have been interesting in dealing with the kids. I am glad that they still so want to come over and hang out. I am trying to instill an idea of discipline and self control to their lives. It is tough to turn them away when they look so lonely coming over by themselves. I know that if I just gave in, it would almost be like everyone else in their lives that are pushovers, and may never develop self control. It is almost like when I had my first dog and was learning about how to train dogs. I know that many of my friends fall prey to my dogs cute little face and allow her to jump up on them, or let her out of the cage when she whines. It takes everyone to play their part to help train my dog, I almost think its the same way for kids. I hope that I represent good parenting skills for the neighborhood, but I don’t believe that the community as a whole does. That makes it even tougher to help the children of the hood learn well.

How do you begin a holistic approach to helping the children in the neighborhood?
Community Development- which is way too much to describe, and hard to figure out.