As Iowa farmers are harvesting bountiful crops, Peter Komendowski, president and executive director of Partnership for a Drug-Free Iowa (PDFI), was in Greene County encouraging people to think not of corn and soybeans as being Iowa’s most important crop, but as children holding the top spot.
Komendowski spoke to the county board of supervisors Monday morning and was the speaker at the Jefferson Rotary Club. On Tuesday he spoke with healthcare and service providers in the morning, attended Gov Terry Branstad’s town hall meeting at noon, and spoke with Greene County teachers in the afternoon.
He was hosted by sheriff Steve Haupert.
The mission of the Partnership is to look at what can be done via infrastructure to provide Iowa’s children the best opportunities to grow up free of substance abuse and high risk behavior. “One of our basic tenets is that we believe the number one crop in Iowa is children,” he said. After looking at the number of children who leave the state, Partnership is looking at ways to create the best opportunities for children to stay in Iowa, including education.
“On the other side of the coin, we look at problems like substance abuse, law enforcement and public safety, mental health issues, homelessness, hunger, all the things our children face that stimulate high risk behavior. It’s not just drug use. It could be obesity and over-eating, it could be bullying. When we put stress on our children and on our communities, that manifests itself in high risk behavior with children,” Komendowski said.
“We’re a very good state about caring for our kids,” he continued. “We have lower incidences of problems with alcohol and marijuana than a lot of other states, but lower incidences is not acceptable when we’re talking about our kids. We’d like to see no incidences.”
Komendowski spoke a lot about what he sees as a threat to children – excessive use of the internet and social media. Studies show that of 168 total hours in a week, the average child has 60 to 68 hours a week for activities like homework, sports, anc club or church attendance. According to studies, the average child age 8 to 18 in Iowa spends 50 to 55 hours a week on video games, the internet and social media. “We’re left with very little time to influence our kids in a family or community setting,” he said.
“What we’ve really lost is parental controls and connection between adults and children. That’s the most important in providing a safe environment for our kids,” Komendowski said.
Komendowski said that at focus groups he has held for young elementary students, the children ask him what they can do to get their parents to put down their cell phones and pay more attention to them, or to get their older siblings to leave the computer games and have fun some other way.
“We’ve built a very interesting world. It’s not always the same for children when we say, ‘Get off the internet and go play ball.’ Where’s the local ball field? Where are the leagues? Where are the kids in after school programs doing these things? That’s our job… We can build a lot of things to entertain adults – casinos, bike trails, things like that – but sometimes we forget about the little things we can do to make sure our kids are connected to resources and are getting the best opportunity,” he said.
Government agencies and schools should always remember that children need to be connected to adults and their communities.
He provided statistics about the attitudes of young people toward risky behaviors. In 2012, 5.4 percent of sixth graders thought it was okay for students in their school to drink beer, wine or hard liquor, to smoke cigarettes or marijuana, to start a physical fight, or to go to a party where people younger than 21 were drinking or using drugs. Forty-seven percent of 11th graders said those things were okay. He said those years are a time when adults have a lot of influence on young people and they shouldn’t give that up to social media and computer games.
“What historically makes Iowans better is when we see a problem, we fix it. If you start learning about what the new technologies are for getting the best crop yield, it makes sense. You put these additives in, do you soil this way….it makes sense. We’re talking about working the same way with children. We have to apply that same scientific thought. Our belief is that in every corner of leadership in Iowa, from the supervisors to the mayors to the educators, public safety, the priority should be what is going to give us the best long term outlook for our children. Children are an outcome,” he said.
Komendowski supports measures like the proposed social hosting ordinance to curb underage drinking. According to him, almost all adults who are treated for methamphetamine use started using drugs and alcohol excessively as youth. “Statistics show that if you can keep a child from trying alcohol, drugs or tobacco until the age of 18, there’s an 80 percent reduction is problems with addiction and abuse of drugs and substances as they become older. It’s because of the way their brains develop,” he said.
In 2010, the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages division reported in 2010 that 21.56 percent of all the beer consumed in Iowa was drunk by people under the age of 21, he said.
Responding to the issues facing kids isn’t easy, Komendowski said, and he used the metaphor of a hammer. “If you use a hammer to build a house, it’s a really good thing. Hit someone in the head with it, it’s not so good. Every one of these issues has at its core a fulcrum, that somebody has to do something right with those tools, not something wrong. Sometimes right is not simple, it’s not easy. But I guarantee you that if you were farming a field of corn and you went to the bank to borrow so much money to put an application on something because you knew that at the end of the season you’d get that much more yield to pay for you, you’d bite the bullet, sign for the loan, and pray that there’s no hail storm.
“We need to start looking at raising children the same way. We need to put the same intensity into raising kids that we put into raising corn. We need to bite the bullet. It’s not going to be an easy decision, but if we don’t make it, we’ll eventually pay for it… We need to use the best practices for the agriculture of raising kids.”
