Bevan – Northcote.
“I got an email from my son’s school, which is Westlake High School, and they sent me his exam results and he’s excelled in all of the subjects.
So he’s been put up a class and I was really proud of him, because he’s put in a lot of hard work and he’s a young man trying to do the best of a bad situation.
I’m a solo dad and just to see this boy, my son, excel at school is something that made me very proud when I got that email. It was a bit of a bad situation, a family situation. I ended up getting custody of my two boys 12 years ago. So the oldest boy is 19 now and the youngest boy is 13, and it’s a hard road being a solo parent, but it’s really rewarding. One of the hardest I found was nobody to share their achievements with.
So yesterday, when my son got his email about his exam results I was really happy about that, but then being a solo parent there’s nobody to share that excitement with, and if I go to one of their rugby games and the young fella scores a try, you know, there’s no-one to sort of do a high-5 with. You know? So that’s one of the hard things about being a solo parent; you’re doing it on your own pretty much. Yeah, for children to excel you’ve got to give them some form of stability and a good platform to sort of spring from.
So, as a solo parent, or actually any parent, it’s their duty to make sure that their children have the right platform, and that involves a lot of teaching them time management, how to be independent, teaching them how to do chores properly, so that when they grow up they don’t have to rely on anybody, that they can do those thing themselves. When the children were very young trying to put them to bed was quite hard, because they’d always get up in the middle of the night and they’ll come and jump in bed with you, and next minute they’re all over the place and you have to find somewhere else to sleep, but then they’ll find you somehow. I don’t know, there’s some trying circumstances, but it’s your love for your children that helps you to get through those things.
I came from a pretty rough background. All my older brothers and sisters were involved in gangs, and I was brought up by a solo mother myself, and so I sort of understood what goes into being a solo mum, but unfortunately for my mother because she had more children than I did, she had a bit of a tough time; had a mental breakdown.
A lot of my older brothers and sisters were involved in gangs and things like that. So, you know, I guess watching her children and not being able to stop them from a lot of their bad choices sort of resulted in myself becoming a person I never wanted to become, because I guess we all live our lives according to the knowledge we have and if that’s what you see growing up then that’s what you end up becoming.
So, I ended up becoming the person I didn’t want to be, joined a gang at a young age. It was the only thing that was there, basically. Ended up in jail and then one day I caused a bit of a tragedy and I wanted to make amends for that, and so I sought help and turned my life around, pulled my socks up, and managed to get custody of my children because of it. I’m just working now to sort of make a better life for my children, and one of the things we’re trying to do now is launch a social venture in Northcote amongst the children there. It’s a low socio-economic area and so I’m helping with a couple of other parents to mentor some of our young children there, to teach them how to start and run their own business.
They’ve got a product now and they’re on Facebook called the Choctops, and they make their own unique Māori chocolates for the mass produced so we can get them into the tourism industry, but just seeing the kids journey, seeing them grow just recently…
They were involved in a bit of a film shoot with Suzy Cato who was a New Zealand children’s television entertainer, and just seeing them grow and understand what they need to do to become successful entrepreneurs is something that’s very rewarding as well. It’s funny you should mention this, because I’ve got a bit of an idea just in my area. I live in a low socio-economic area and I don’t want to be pointing the finger at anybody, but there’s a lot of kids that I feel almost falling through the cracks and there needs to be a bit of a wider community effort.
I believe that it takes a village to raise a child, and so one of the things I’ve just done this morning is I’ve been speaking with other parents about approaching the local Countdown to try and get support to run a sandwich club within Northcote. We’ve got a venue and some volunteers to help the children to make their own lunches so that, you know, they have something to go to school and eat. My boy tells me when he goes to school there’s other kids there that don’t have any lunch, and a lot of them have holes in their shoes and things like that.
So just in our area, we want to sort of get a little bit of a social venture happening to show the rest of the community that there are people that care about them, and I think that’s where humanity breaks down; a lot of people are, dare I say it, quite individualistic. They’re more worried about how they’re going to get ahead themselves, and, as I was saying earlier, I believe it takes a village to raise a child, and it needs more of a collective effort towards doing more social ventures where the profits of that go back towards supporting communities and people in need.”
