Our Children, Our Future

If we want to help build a better world and a better life for our descendants, there is nothing more important than to provide a caring, nurturing, yet stimulating environment for our children from conception to adulthood. Possessions and affluence pale into insignificance by comparison with the need for a warm, peaceful, secure home with loving caregivers. Yet all too often, children are neglected or maltreated. In the words of Bruce Perry, millions of children in the USA are ‘literally incubated in terror.’ Many of these will grow up to be fearful, anxious and depressed. Others will become aggressive, violent and predatory. All of them will have their potential blighted. They will learn inappropriate ways of child rearing, and so pass on their dysfunctional patterns to their offspring.

Hope for the future lies in breaking this vicious cycle through conscious interventions. Research suggests that authoritarian policies that result in children being taken into care do not work. They do little to change the home situation, and child welfare workers become seen as police to be feared. Far more effective are approaches that provide integrated support and education to the caregiver, usually the mother. In this case, the welfare worker may become a trusted friend and advisor, who identifies problems the family faces and helps to find solutions. These may include issues such as accommodation, financial support, budgeting, an abusive relationship, physical and mental health, parenting training, and so on. The best of such programmes not only coordinate a range of local, state and national government services through a single local advisor, but also integrate them with local community groups and charities.

Sure Start is a successful programme established by the previous Labour government in the UK. It set up 3,500 centres in communities around the country, reaching out to hundreds of thousands of families and helping 2.7m children in need. In the words of columnist Polly Toynbee in The Guardian newspaper, these “life-enhancing places have become hubs for community activity: mothers creating a fount of local action.” Despite this success story, many of these centres and the services they provide are now at risk due to cutbacks in social services by the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, and a rising tide of need.

According to Toynbee, unemployment is leading to higher drug use, and more domestic violence, mental health crises and family breakdowns. The high profile media coverage given to the death of ‘Baby P’ resulted in a rise in children being referred to social services of over 25% last year with 17% more being put in care. “Add in the phenomenal, but largely unmentioned, cost of the rising number of profoundly mentally and physically disabled children … thanks to the heroic neonatal specialists in maternity units. Most of these extreme cases end up in care, costing hundreds of thousands in round-the-clock teams to look after them. Just a few can upend a children's services' budget.”

Faced with this financial crisis, the easiest things for agencies to cut are the long-term programmes which prevent more serious problems in the future. According to Toynbee, Sure Start centres “offer the earliest help to young children, identifying difficulties before it’s too late, a welcoming place to which families can turn. … (T)his is a heartbreaking destruction of a service that was starting to change children’s life chances.” What money remains is no longer ‘ringfenced’, so “early intervention to stop tomorrow’s crises is sucked away to cope with today’s emergencies … This is the way the social deficit grows, costing the next generation more … with a legacy of costly problems that could have been prevented with a little early spending …”

Wherever in the world we live, similar stories are probably being told. Let’s support local and national campaigns for effective child welfare programmes, thus bringing real Hope for Humanity in the long term.