Children Webmag - Alison Marlow's Editorial

Protecting Children

Protecting the young must be built into our genes. It is something we share with many other species – animals, birds and insects – and the importance of caring for the next generation must have been around millions of years before mankind was on the scene.

Sometimes we fail utterly to protect children. The terrible loss of life among children is one of the most appalling aspects of the recent Tsunami, and our hearts go out to all the people who lost friends and family and, in particular, children in the chaos caused by the inundation. There are villages now where the younger generation has been virtually wiped out. There are schools where not only the buildings and equipment have gone, but a lot of the teachers and pupils as well.

There are people who are grieving and people who feel guilty at having survived. Parents who have lost children will no doubt be going over and over events in their minds, trying to think of ways in which they could have saved them, reliving the agony, and hoping against the evidence of their eyes that it has all been a bad dream.

Clearly, early warnings could have been given to many areas if messages had got through, and no doubt for the future, warning systems will be set up. But for the individual parents, there is probably nothing that they could have done against this particular killer, even when they were vainly trying to hold on to children who were swept out of their grasp. They will simply have to live with the awful memory as they patch up their lives and carry on.

There are other dangers today where parents do have the chance to protect their children. Warnings have been given that children should not use mobile phones for more than limited periods and those aged seven and under should not use them at all. The hidden impact on children’s developing brains is not yet known, but the warnings have been given.

As Lord Winston showed in a recent television programme, children benefit from activity, playing and running around. Those that sit like couch potatoes for hours on end in front of the telly or computer screen are storing up problems for themselves as adults. Experts may not yet agree on the ideal diet, but we know a lot more now about what children – and adults – need to eat and do to keep fit. The warnings have been given.

We are carrying an article this month about the dangers of the Internet. The web, chat rooms, emails and all the rest are great inventions with massive scope for positive use, but they also contain traps into which children may fall. Parents may not yet be alert to the dangers, and there is still a need for campaigning to make sure everyone is aware of the risks.

It is a hundred years since Dr Barnardo died. He died of overwork, saying that there was still so much to do. As Roger Singleton, the current Senior Director of Barnardo’s, pointed out on breakfast television, children still have massive needs. In many ways the world has changed tremendously since Dr Barnardo’s day. The dangers of excessive television, the threats posed by the Internet and by mobile phones were all unknown to him. But the root causes of many dangers were the same. Children were sexually exploited and they still are. Children’s growth was impaired by city life and industrial processes, and it still is. Some children’s diets were poor, and that is true today.

We cannot guard against every threat to our children, as the tsunami showed, but there are many areas of life where parents – and the rest of us – can be alert to the risks posed by modern life, and eliminate or reduce their impact by acting sensibly. As for those threats posed by human behaviour, there is no sign that evolution has changed fundamental human conduct in historical times, and we need to be ever-vigilant.