Through my own personal development and skills, I have worked alongside children that are in the upper-elementary age bracket. When I was younger, I served as a tutor and mentor to youth. I have also worked in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program which helped me to connect with children of all different ages and many of them were youth who could potentially be at-risk if they did not have a mentor there to help them. Through the mayor’s anti-gang task force in Houston, it has been designed to help children off of the streets and become better prepared for the future in order to contribute to society and to also provide services that will help them become more successful.
According to the anti-gang task force in Houston, the program has been proactively working as a mentoring organization for children since 1994 and helps try to keep youth and young adults out of gangs (City of Houston, n.d.). Males and females who are in an adolescent phase of life often join gangs for a variety of reasons. They often come from various socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, and from all types of communities. They often gain a sense of belonging but are generally led into a life of crime. Generally, members in youth gangs want to be respected, have a sense of status or would like to be affiliated and recognized as a member of a group. It is with this belief, members often think they are like family to one another and once one person is a gang, recruits are often their other friends. Oftentimes, gang involvement is a result of other family members or other community members directly within the youth’s environment are also a reason why youth join gangs. Gangs also often provide easier access to weapons, sex, drugs, alcohol, money, and even protection (City of Houston, n.d.).
Mentoring students during this age would be a prime time when they need someone who encourages them. According to the Industry versus Inferiority stage, if a child is encouraged, they will then start to have more competence and believe in themselves and their own skills. This will then provide success. In the fifth stage of Identity versus Confusion, proper encouragement helps them to have better control and independence (Cherry, 2015). By mentoring in the anti-gang task force, it would be an opportunity to be a positive role model for children of this age where they are vulnerable and need to develop security and sense of identity through positive encouragement. Gangs offer a false sense of identity. It is their peers influencing them and it is encouragement to typically perform a crime or to do something that they would not have normally done if they had been influenced by the right person.
Based on the information from the Anti-Gang Office, many people who are involved with theses youth have discovered that these children have become involved in gangs because no one had ever paid any attention to them or really even bothered to be attentive by showing them care. By utilizing what can be learned through Erikson’s model, being positive, consistent, and staying positive can help impact these youth so that they do not get involved in delinquent behaviors. They need to learn limits and boundaries and also be encouraged for any behaviors that are positive. Through this involvement as a mentor, it might be difficult to save every child from being in a gang but it can help to make a significant impact one child at a time in hopes that we can eliminate gangs completely someday.
References
Cherry, K. (2015, December 17). Understanding Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development.
Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://psychology.about.com/od/psychosocialtheories/a/psychosocial.htm.
http://www.houstontx.gov/antigang/gangs101.html.
