A
New Year and a new magazine have combined to make me think about
children and child care in a rather broader context than usual.
In fact I have been wondering what future historians will make
of the way our 21st century societies have viewed, nurtured, educated,
and responded to the needs of children.
I suppose I’m pondering what Aries, the author in 1973 of
Centuries of Childhood, might have written in say 2,200 A.D. about
the way we do things now. |
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Another
approach to setting what is happening now in a broader context is
to ask how God might see the welfare of children today, in every part
of the world, rich and poor, with and without AIDS/HIV, fostered,
adopted, in boarding schools, children’s homes, children’s
villages, on the streets and in refugee camps.
The
task is, of course, beyond us, but if we do not consider such a long-term
perspective, or such a broad canvas, we may be committing fundamental
errors, influenced by parochial traditions and experience, and short-term
expedients. Worldwide, there are global processes developing that
are affecting the way everyone lives, even the way we think of our
own identities. These include means of communication, market economics,
the emphasis on “human rights”, ecological management,
urban conglomerations, and a belief in the virtue and effectiveness
of universal education.
A
question that arises immediately is whether children and young people,
and their children are, or will be better off than we were as children,
and what we mean by that. If, for example, we were to provide good
shelter, care and education for all children worldwide but in the
process, and at the same time jeopardize the future sustainability
of life on planet earth, would children be better off?
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If
the stress on individual rights were to be accompanied by a
weakening of the ties and bonds that exist in families and communities,
how would that affect children? Adults might be able to cope
and thrive in such a world, but what about children?
If
unsupervised news and information is available in every dwelling
24 hours a day via television, mobile phones, and internet access,
is that, on balance, likely to improve or undermine children’s
personal and social development?
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Compare
this with a report of the England and Wales Social Services Inspectorate,
Delivering Quality Children’s Services, published at the end
of 2002. There is no mention of any of this context, and the timescale
is short-term. There was some progress in meeting adoption targets,
educational outcomes and care-leaver schemes, but weaknesses in child
protection arrangements in a third of the councils inspected, and
unsatisfactory progress in physical and mental health.
On
balance, one wonders, have things improved compared to, say, five
years ago? And what about a comparison with services in the period
of the Children’s Departments from 1949-1969? The nearest I
got to a clue was this summary: “Councils continued to struggle
to provide an appropriate range of placements and services to meet
children’s needs…” But wasn’t this what councils
were doing in the days of the Poor Law? If so, what progress has been
made? Could it be that future historians will conclude that the lack
of such placements and services resulted in children languishing in
families and communities that had themselves ceased to function satisfactorily
as far as the children were concerned?
There
is much focus on “targets” in the United Kingdom under
the Blair administration. Whatever progress is achieved by this one
unintended consequence may well be that policies and information are
produced at the expense of basic services. And the summary of the
report hinted at this: “We found that councils generally needed
to give continued attention to providing basic services well…”
As the stream of initiatives continues and officials struggle to produce
responses to Government documents, new policies, mapping and plans,
it seems that those on the ground in residential and foster care,
in family support services, and in schools, are struggling to meet
the basic needs of children.
So
what to do? Conferences like “Rethinking Children’s Care”
to be held at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, London on 13th February
2003, and books like Reframing Children’s Services published
by NCVCCO in 2002 are vital. Sooner or later we will have to face
up to the fundamental questions posed above. And a starting point
will be a fresh statement about the basic needs of children, the sort
of thing that Mia Kellmer Pringle had in mind in her book The Needs
of Children, written in 1974, and prepared, would you believe, for
the Government department with responsibility for children! You might
think that we have got past such a basic stage, but such an assumption
is always risky.
I
have been working on a formulation of these needs for twenty or so
years, and have summarized them in articles and papers. My interim
conclusion is that worldwide there has been very little progress,
if any, on meeting them, whether in rich or poor countries, often
for reasons outside the control of governments. These reasons include
things like wars, poverty, disease, and the weakening of familial
and communal bonds.
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You
could say that this is not a very comforting way to start a new
year and a new journal, but if we really are concerned about quality
care for children and young people, future historians would be
surprised if we never asked about the basic elements of that care,
and whether we were attempting to provide what children needed.
Without this radical questioning we are all agents of incumbent
governments and prevailing trends seeking to deliver packages
of care that may or may not be wide of the mark. My hope is that
Children Webmag and Caring for Children will never stop asking
these questions, and setting them in both international and historical
contexts. |
