With the Fire on High

With the Fire on High

Child Welfare Context

The first idea that comes to mind in regard to how the child welfare system is experienced by recipients of services in the book is a stereotype. After coming back from Spain and picking Emma up from daycare, Emoni meets a senior white woman on a bus who positively comments on her baby. The senior woman asks if the child is Emoni’s sister, but when Emoni tells her that the child is actually her daughter, the attitude of the senior woman changes immediately. Emoni is not surprised because she has met such reactions from other people before. She states, ‘I’ve met this kind of woman before. The kind with real strict ideas about what makes certain people respectable’ (Acevedo, 2019).

She adds that the senior white woman, like the ones she has met before, gets sour-faced as soon as they learn that Babygirl is Emoni’s daughter. The senior woman displays stereotypes regarding young mothers, but the stereotype applies differently depending on whether the baby’s mother is White or Black. This is because she automatically assumes that Babygirl is Emoni’s sister and reacts negatively after learning that she is not. Additionally, Emoni admits that she makes a lot of assumptions regarding women, such as the senior white woman. Nevertheless, her reflection depicts an experience where she was held to different standards and made to feel odder than younger White mothers.

Prejudicial attitudes and identity issues are also well highlighted in Acevedo’s book. Emoni, who is a mixed-race of American descent and Puerto Rican, explains that she has experienced prejudice so many times from the Hispanic and Black groups for not being able to properly belong to a specific community. For instance, when Emoni meets Malachi for the first time, Malachi tells her that he did not think she was Black-black, as seen on page 57. Emoni rolls her eyes and asks why Malachi did not think she was Black-black. Malachi states, “…your last name is Santiago, you’re light-skinned, and your hair’s wild curly. I assumed you were Spanish”. This means that Malachi assumed that a person should be specifically from one group of people and that it is confusing when one is from a mixed race.

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The most important people in Emoni’s life are her daughter, Babygirl Emma, and her grandmother. She, therefore, believes that it would be better to start working after high school graduation to put her child through school rather than joining college to follow her dreams. However, the school provides her with an opportunity that favors her situation. As such, the school offers Culinary Arts and a trip to Spain, but her worry about the potential effects on her loved ones, time, and money grounds her (Acevedo, 2019). However, her grandmother, the advisory teacher, Ms. Fuentes, and her best friend encouraged her to enroll at the last minute. As much as the school gives her a good opportunity to follow her passion and be able to support her loved ones, Emoni realizes that the class of Culinary arts threatens her freedom to do what she wants. She learns that she has to follow technicalities and rules even if she is good at cooking. This is why she gets into conflict with her teacher, Chef Ayden.

Another safety net that helped Emoni is her family and teacher, which entails a supportive grandmother as well as her teacher, who worked very hard to keep Emoni at school during her pregnancy and after. Even her best friend Angelica was supportive of her, encouraging her to join the Culinary Arts School and attacking people who scorned Emoni at school. I think that if Emoni’s grandmother had been separated from Emoni while she was pregnant, she would not have experienced the conflict of deciding many things as a teenager on whether to look for work, go to college, or study and work at the same time. She would have had an easier time deciding if she would continue with the school to be able to support her daughter better and not worry about how her grandmother was doing.

Clinical Assessment Skills

Erikson’s psychosocial theory posits that children undergo eight psychosocial phases in life. The first three phases include trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, and initiative vs. guilt. According to Erikson, these phases are important stages in the life of a child. It is comprehended that if a child passes through these phases of development successfully, they gain positive dispositions of initiative, autonomy, and trust (Onchwari, Onchwari & Keengwe 2008). For instance, a child who develops trust during their infancy phases, as highlighted by Erikson’s theory, is likely to find it easier to create trusting relationships, whereas those who did not get the opportunity of trust in the infancy stage are likely to be insecure and feel detached. Thus, when the latter case child is placed in a new environment, they are likely to have a difficult time adjusting (Onchwari, Onchwari, & Keengwe, 2008).

Family relations and structure shape a child’s building of relationships. According to ‘With the Fire on High,’ Emoni is brought up by her grandmother after her mother’s death when she was very young. Therefore, Emoni does not experience a mother’s affection and love. This is why she questions her life on page 49 by admitting that she often thinks to herself if her mother would be proud of her if she were alive. She also wonders if she would have ended up being pregnant with Emma and if her father would have left her for Philadelphia. She is also doubtful of her father, who left her at a young age with her grandmother. As a result of the disconnection from her parent, her father, Emoni, tries to search for comfort and pleasure away from home. She tries to look for feelings of trust and love from her mother’s sister, Aunt Sarah, who is from her mother’s family, as she explains on page 49. Even though she tries to fill this void by getting close to her aunt, who is connected to her mother, she is still resentful of her father. Emoni believes that her father does not respect the family unit because he left as if he was living without a family. When her father tries to reach her even on the phone, Emoni is reluctant to call him, and she even tells her grandmother that she will call her father to make sure that he does not need anything.

She distrusts the opposite-sex figure mainly because of her complex mistrustful relationship with her father, as Erikson’s theory argues. Her distrust for men is also reflected in her complex relationship with her daughter’s father, Tyrone, a good father and a bad boyfriend. Emoni states that sometimes she thinks the best thing Tyrone could do for his daughter is to leave the daughter’s mother alone. In other words, she finds Tyrone toxic to both her and their daughter. According to Erikson’s theory, Emoni might have compared Tyrone to her father, who was also inconsistent in her life, just like Tyrone, who still wants to have other girlfriends.

With her father’s abandonment and her mother’s death, Emoni does not think she is worthy of love. This is mainly because she did not receive parental love, not even from the living parent. Although she loves her grandmother and her best friend, Angelica, she still finds it hard to let anyone else occupy the safe space she has created for her and her daughter, Emma. This situation is exacerbated by Tyrone’s on-and-off relationship with her. Therefore, she does not like the idea of having a boyfriend until later, after she has progressively navigated through boundaries and suffering to get asked by a boy in a cooking class to court her.

Practice Skills

According to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, children learn actively through hands-on experiences (Cherry, 2020). His theory also posits that peers, caregivers, parents, and culture are responsible for the development of higher-order functions. In Vygotsky’s perspective, learning is an intrinsically social process (Cherry, 2020). Through interaction with other people, learning becomes more and more integrated into a person’s understanding of the world.

A good example is when Emoni was conflicted about joining the Culinary Arts School when her high school offered that opportunity. Knowing that she was passionate about cooking and that she had a child to look after and a grandmother who depended fully on disability help, she was unsure whether to follow her passion. However, she is encouraged by her friend Angelica, her grandmother, and her advisory teacher. For instance, Angelica tells her, “You’re stronger than anyone I know…” (Acevedo, 2019). She adds that the Culinary Arts opportunity allows her not only to learn to cook food from Spain but also to cook food in Spain (Acevedo, 2019).

When Emoni joins the cooking classes, she learns through interaction with Chef Ayden that she is not free to do as she pleases. Rather, she has to follow the rules, do quizzes, and receive instructions from the chef. Emoni is not used to following rules, especially because she believes she is already good at cooking and does not need further instructions. She probably thought that joining the Culinary Arts School was for professional purposes alone. She then socially learns from her class that there is more to cooking than what she previously knew.

Additionally, she also gets professional help when Ms. Fuentes talks her out about not getting to college because she believes that her family would benefit if she joined college in the long run. However, Emoni is not pleased with Ms. Fuente’s advice because she does not relate to her situation. In the book, Emoni states that Ms. Fuentes is young and does not have a kid or a grandmother who has spent her 35 years raising a son and her son’s child and not her great-granddaughter. Plus, Ms. Fuentes has a desirable job. With her analysis of Ms. Fuentes, Emoni thinks it is best to do other things to raise money for her daughter’s college tuition instead. This means that Emoni wanted someone she could relate with to make an informed decision.

The best person she could relate to was her best friend, Angelica, who helped her more than her professional helpers. For instance, when kids at school started talking about Emoni when her baby bump started showing, Angelica declared that she was gay. Angelica’s coming out of the closing and Emoni’s pregnancy brought the two friends closer than before. Angelica could defend her whenever boys made fun of Emoni, and this peer interaction is what made Emoni listen more to Angelica’s advice, including joining the Culinary Arts School.

Self-Awareness

I think that my countertransference is being overly critical of Angelica, who I thought probably came out of the closet because she wanted to help her friend. Perhaps it was her opportunity to expose her flaws together with someone else rather than do it alone. This has made me learn that it is actually the acting of Angelica and other Emoni’s helpers that drove her to make the right decisions about her tough circumstances.

I was also on the side of Ms. Fuentes when she encouraged Emoni to apply for college for the long-term benefit of her family. However, Emoni does not take her advice because she is convinced that Ms. Fuentes does not understand her situation and that she can never relate because her life is perfect. This bias has made me conscious of the fact that, more often, clients would talk to someone they can relate to and someone who, from experience, can understand their situation. Therefore, using mentors who have had similar experiences with the clients might help with the client’s situation and decision-making. Moreover, it would be important to use other case examples with similar situations so that they know they are not alone.

Practice Treasure

In conclusion, we can learn that the assistance of the community can be helpful in situations such as Emoni’s because it is the community that empowered her to achieve her goals. Perhaps she would have been helped sooner if her grandmother had been put in foster care and taken care of. The society also needs to be more empathetic to teenage mothers, who do their best to improve their circumstances. Being a teenage mother is already hard enough, and teens in such situations do not really have to experience more pressure from outsiders. If anything, outsiders need to go out of their way and help them by encouraging them or even referring them to relevant assistance, just like Ms. Fuentes did. Even though she probably could not relate to Emoni’s situation from her own life experience, she still wanted the best for her student and kept encouraging her not to stop studying because of Emma.

I will also remember from the book that safety nets, such as foster care and clinical systems that attend to special groups in society, such as senior citizens, are important. These safety nets need to work with the clients and understand their culture, family structures, and background and how these could affect their decision-making in situations such as Emoni’s. Notably, as Erikson’s psychosocial stage theory states, a child’s infancy stage impacts how they relate with others in terms of initiative, autonomy, and trust.

References

Acevedo, E. (2019). With the Fire on High. Hardie Grant Publishing.

Cherry, K. (2020). Child Development Theories and Examples. https://www.verywellmind.com/child-development-theories-2795068#toc-vygotskys-sociocultural-theory

Onchwari, G., Onchwari, J. A., & Keengwe, J. (2008). Teaching the immigrant child: Application of child development theories. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36(3), 267-273.

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With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

With the Fire on High

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