THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607140033
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: 64 lines
I can still feel the gravel grinding into my chin at the bottom of the steepest hill in my neighborhood.
Even though I was only 8, and blood was dripping onto my bashed-up bike, I knew what to do: Go to the first door I could find. There'd be a mother waiting to help.
And there was.
In those days, the local Neighborhood Watch came in the form of a mother behind every door, and the children who knew that.
But as the years passed, people were less likely to know one another, more hesitant to help.
Not just in my hometown, but here, too. In March 1967, some Virginia Beach mothers decided to recreate the mom system with something called the Tidewater Council of Block Mothers.
The idea was to form a network of moms to watch out for everybody's kids. Not just an informal watch, but an official one with ``helping hand'' signs in windows and a ``telephone tree'' that linked mothers together.
If children fell down, if they got lost, if they got stranded, if they were approached by strangers, all they had to do was look for the sign in the window, and knock on the door.
From those first few mothers in the Arrowhead neighborhood grew a system of thousands across South Hampton Roads, according to 1969 newspaper reports. PTAs would sponsor block mothers in a school's neighborhood by paying $25 a year for pamphlets, signs and background checks.
But something happened between then and now. More mothers went to work. Families moved around more. School districts began busing kids to schools beyond their neighborhoods.
And then, the final blow to the block mothers: the growing issue of liability.
What happens, people would ask, if something happens to a child in a block mother's home? Who's responsible? The block mother? The PTA? What happens, people would ask, if you sign up a block mother who doesn't have good intentions?
Even though the process of becoming a block mother had gotten more complicated, what with police checks for everyone 18 and older in the home, references and a list of other requirements, the liability question wouldn't go away.
PTAs and mothers gradually dropped off the roster until there were only four schools in Virginia Beach sponsoring about 50 block mothers. The council's current president, Kathryn Brooks, now thinks it's time for the block mothers to call it a day.
It's ironic that at a time when children most need to be looked after, a group like the block mothers has to die because of fears of responsibility. That an increasingly litigious country has forced people to fear helping a child.
``Times have changed, and people don't want to be liable any more,'' Brooks said.
Some would argue there's not as great a need for block mothers today. That a lot of parents don't let their children hang out in a neighborhood, anyway. That the child molesters about whom mothers worried in the '60s and '70s are more likely to be relatives and friends than strangers lurking behind bushes. That it shouldn't just be mothers looking out for children, but fathers, too.
Maybe the idea of a block mother has passed its time.
But more is lost in the disappearance of block mothers - both the official and unofficial ones - than helping hand signs in the corners of windows.
What's lost is that place in a child's mind that knows there's a mother behind every door with a hug and a Band-Aid. by CNB