There are many families for whom Christmas will be a time of pain and sadness because a child will be missing from the celebrations and seasonal rituals every family develops over the years.
In Toronto alone, there are an estimated 10,000 street kids. Some run away from an abusive home; some left following arguments over the rules and parental expectations. Still others left home without any rational explanation, leaving other family members in great distress – damaging, perhaps permanently, the family’s integrity.
For parents trying to trace a runaway, the first shock is how little help is available. If the teenager is over 16, the various agencies which help the kids will not even tell parents if they have been in contact with the youth, let alone give any information which could reassure them that at least their son or daughter is alive.
The second shock comes when parents set out to find the teen. Walk down Yonge Street early in the morning and you will see groups of bundled-up children curled in store doorways, or in foul-smelling transit shelters, baseball caps or Styrofoam coffee cups left out in the hopes of spare change from passers-by. Walk down the street later in the day and the same groups are now awake and actively begging. Walk down late at night, they are still there, having been thrown out of the fast food restaurants once their money has been spent.
Most people hurry past these street kids, avoiding eye contact and the muttered requests for money. Some, no doubt, are disgusted by the strange hairstyles or colour, the earrings through noses and eyebrows, the grunge clothes. Some give a little money, maybe offering a silent prayer of thanks that their own children are safe, or viewing it as a form of insurance against their children being on the street. Some, perhaps, think of all these kids as coming from broken homes; they assume the parents have abandoned the teens. If they spare a moment to think of these parents, they dismiss them as obviously not raising the children properly.
There are probably as many reasons to account for these kids being there as there are thousands of them on the streets of downtown Toronto. There are kids who come from poverty stricken families, as well as from middle-class, or wealthy families. There are kids from welfare backgrounds, from families where the mother has worked within the home from the time they were babies. There are kids from families with rigid rules, and from those with rules somewhere in the middle. There are kids, whose school records show constant problems over the years, and kids who have been straight A students until the day they dropped out. There are kids who run away after years of neglect, abuse or family conflict; and kids who never gave their parents cause for concern, until one day they announced they were leaving.
There are parents who never give that runaway a second thought. And there are parent who wake in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep because they are afraid for the child’s safety and wellbeing. There are parents who seek their children and never find them, so never know even whether they are still alive. And there are parents who do find their child, only to have their son or daughter reject them over and over again.
All across Canada, there are families preparing for the special time together which each Christmas brings. For many of these families, there will be an empty chair at the dinner table, an empty stocking quietly left in the box instead of hung from the mantel, one less person sharing the pew at the Christmas service. Many parents will sit down to dinner, pretending a seasonal joy they do not feel, but determined not to spoil this special time for the rest of the family.
As you go about your Christmas preparation, spare a moment of prayer for the parents, the brothers and sisters, and the street kids themselves. Some of these parents will be asking themselves what happened and wondering if they did, indeed, do something to break up their family. Spare a moment, and a prayer, for these families and for the sons and daughters who prefer life on the cold streets of a large city.
