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Authors: Mary Catherine Bateson
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contribute to a positive future for our children and our grandchildren, how to continue to make our lives meaningful. This last is a new question for healthy people in their sixties to be asking, for through most of human history elders have been treasured and have had established roles that only they could fill, and much less time in which to fill them.
One of those who joined us six months later was Ruth Massinga, an African American woman who lives in Seattle, Washington, then approaching retirement as president and CEO of Casey Family Programs. This foundation, one of a cluster started by the Casey family, works to provide and improve foster care and to prevent the need for it. Ruth also chaired the board of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, an independent grant-making organization where she and Pat Schroeder had become friends, and cochaired the board of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.
Ruth has spent her career on different aspects of social welfare, concerned with children and with the elderly. Her career has included service as secretary of the Maryland Department of Human Resources and president of the American Public Welfare Association. She has a son, Irving, and two grandchildren, Ben and Madeline, who were six and four when we first met.
It was Ruth who got us discussing the importance of grandparents to the well-being of children, and the connections between longevity, health, and the availability of grandparents. Ruth grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her own parents had in fact lived with her maternal grandparents in the kind of community in which relatives and neighbors all took a role in child rearing—the kind of community in which “it takes a village to raise a child.” Ruth was the oldest, the first grandchild on either side, and described herself as spoiled and overprotected, spending summers in Lafayette, Louisiana, and returning to Baton Rouge for school during the winters.
“We lived in a very communal fashion. I can still see the faces of the neighbors who watched me and my friends on the way to the Catholic school, three or four blocks around the corner, and would report to my parents and my grandparents what I had or had not done appropriately. ‘Ruth,’ they’d say, ‘Ruth, I see you taking off your sweater. Your granny’s not going to like that, ’cause it’s too cold.’ That was the routine. Every house along the way was inhabited by somebody who was a part of the extended family in that fashion, which is very southern. It was tremendously impressive … and oppressive … from the point of view of the child. But you felt absolutely safe. You knew what the deviations were, and you knew what the consequences were.”
I commented that, by the time most people had television, that kind of awareness had decreased. People began to sit indoors, and front porches all over the country were abandoned—no more “Good morning, Mr. George,” no “Good afternoon, Miss Mamie” as you walked down the street. Neighborhoods became less safe, and again less safe when families began to get air-conditioning and close their windows in hot weather. I have sometimes fantasized that older people who have become shut-ins might be enrolled in a program to watch the streets through their windows.
“But even so,” Ruth said, “when I was in college and driving, my father said to me, ‘You should stop driving so fast.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know that the police tell me where you go and how fast you’re going?’ Okay, so that was ’fifty-nine, ’sixty, still a small town. Still small enough for most people to know what you were doing, and if they cared enough, it got reported back. It was, in that sense, a very closed society.
“I think that’s part of why I couldn’t wait to graduate college. I went to college where my parents had gone, and then I went straight to New York. Because I thought not only ‘big city,’ exciting, et cetera,
One of those who joined us six months later was Ruth Massinga, an African American woman who lives in Seattle, Washington, then approaching retirement as president and CEO of Casey Family Programs. This foundation, one of a cluster started by the Casey family, works to provide and improve foster care and to prevent the need for it. Ruth also chaired the board of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, an independent grant-making organization where she and Pat Schroeder had become friends, and cochaired the board of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.
Ruth has spent her career on different aspects of social welfare, concerned with children and with the elderly. Her career has included service as secretary of the Maryland Department of Human Resources and president of the American Public Welfare Association. She has a son, Irving, and two grandchildren, Ben and Madeline, who were six and four when we first met.
It was Ruth who got us discussing the importance of grandparents to the well-being of children, and the connections between longevity, health, and the availability of grandparents. Ruth grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her own parents had in fact lived with her maternal grandparents in the kind of community in which relatives and neighbors all took a role in child rearing—the kind of community in which “it takes a village to raise a child.” Ruth was the oldest, the first grandchild on either side, and described herself as spoiled and overprotected, spending summers in Lafayette, Louisiana, and returning to Baton Rouge for school during the winters.
“We lived in a very communal fashion. I can still see the faces of the neighbors who watched me and my friends on the way to the Catholic school, three or four blocks around the corner, and would report to my parents and my grandparents what I had or had not done appropriately. ‘Ruth,’ they’d say, ‘Ruth, I see you taking off your sweater. Your granny’s not going to like that, ’cause it’s too cold.’ That was the routine. Every house along the way was inhabited by somebody who was a part of the extended family in that fashion, which is very southern. It was tremendously impressive … and oppressive … from the point of view of the child. But you felt absolutely safe. You knew what the deviations were, and you knew what the consequences were.”
I commented that, by the time most people had television, that kind of awareness had decreased. People began to sit indoors, and front porches all over the country were abandoned—no more “Good morning, Mr. George,” no “Good afternoon, Miss Mamie” as you walked down the street. Neighborhoods became less safe, and again less safe when families began to get air-conditioning and close their windows in hot weather. I have sometimes fantasized that older people who have become shut-ins might be enrolled in a program to watch the streets through their windows.
“But even so,” Ruth said, “when I was in college and driving, my father said to me, ‘You should stop driving so fast.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know that the police tell me where you go and how fast you’re going?’ Okay, so that was ’fifty-nine, ’sixty, still a small town. Still small enough for most people to know what you were doing, and if they cared enough, it got reported back. It was, in that sense, a very closed society.
“I think that’s part of why I couldn’t wait to graduate college. I went to college where my parents had gone, and then I went straight to New York. Because I thought not only ‘big city,’ exciting, et cetera,
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