You don’t need to be a parent to build meaningful relationships with kids
On any given weeknight in the early 1990s, Athena Palmer’s house was full of people. A mining accident had upended Palmer’s family, grievously injuring her dad and spurring her mother to attend dental school. This required moving the whole family away from their small Appalachian hometown to Lexington, Kentucky.
But it was her mother’s decades-younger classmates who really made an impression. Palmer was young and homesick, and her older sister was a struggling teen. Encouraged by Palmer’s mother, the dental students started coming over to score a free meal and study. They kept showing up for the food and the camaraderie, and later to support Palmer herself. The effects of this period of extended community would reverberate for the next 30 years.