. Children Webmag .

In this Issue

This month our Editorial is on the Minister for Children, and articles include a report of a meeting addressed by Paul Boateng saying things will get better in the future, an article by Karen Vitler asking if things are better in Sweden and a piece by Terry Hoon saying things were not better in the past.

Bernie Commissiong looks at the interplay between people’s self images and their relationships with others.

National Sure Start Month

June was National Sure Start Month, promoting services for young children. There were literature and events, opportunities for parents to learn about all the services available. The first week was National Day Nurseries Week, followed by Pre-School Playgroup Week, National Childcare Week, National Childminding Week and Kids’ Club week.

You can find out more on www.nationalsurestartmonth.com .

Young Carers

The Children’s Society and the YMCA have conducted a survey which has indicated that there are almost 1,000 children aged between 5 and 7 who each provide more than fifty hours of unpaid care a week, and over 13,000 aged under 18. They may be helping a sick or disabled brother, sister, parent or other relative. Jenny Frank said it was “staggering” that the children spend more time caring than at school.


Smacking I

About 80 children a year die from physical abuse in England, and none in Sweden. Why? Some people blame the British culture of violence towards children, which continues from generation to generation. Robert Whelan, Director of the pressure group Family and Youth Concern, blames the failure on child protection services. While we are publishing an article on the strengths of Swedish social work in this issue, it is hard to imagine that the difference can explain away 80 deaths.

David Hinchliffe MP, the Chair of the Health Select Committee, focuses on the positive angle. “The issue is not just about smacking. The issue is about affording children greater respect.” We agree; as always David is talking sound sense, and it is a pity that the Government feels unable to give a lead to the country on this issue.

One cannot criticise serious child abuse or other forms of violent behaviour such as football hooliganism while condoning lesser forms as being insignificant. They may be different in degree, but they are the same in kind. Otherwise, it would be all right for anyone to give “a loving tap” to anyone else, but if we are big enough to speak up for ourselves, we call it assault.

Smacking II

So the smacking debate has got going again. There is a Ph.D. for someone who writes a thesis about these debates, identifying whether they ever persuade people to change their minds, and if so, what the critical factor is. Usually the TV debate consists of a professional pointing out that for adults to smack children is bad as there is no other relationship where violence would now be tolerated, and a member of the public responding by saying that it never did them any harm. End of debate.

We seem to have moved on a bit, though. The two Committees of Parliamentarians have come out against smacking, the key argument being that permitting it a bit allows serious abusers to justify their cruelty. The Government, though, remains resolute in declining to act as nanny and tell parents what they can and cannot do. Yet they expect action to be taken against abusers. How do we make sense of this?

Are analogies helpful? We all know that we are liable to prosecution if we do 31 mph in a 30 zone, but most of us go a bit faster than that in 30 zones every day. People feel a bit aggrieved if they get caught when driving a modest amount over the limit, but everyone knows that speeding well over the limit can kill and should be prosecuted.

Again, we know as a matter of law, principle or commandment that we should not steal, and we would expect serious theft to be prosecuted, yet there are many examples where large sections of the population do not feel it immoral to breach the law a little.

The point in these cases is that the basic principle is clear and people know where they stand with regard to the law, but there is also an understanding that there may be flexibility in application. It is time for the smackers to give ground and see the principle established that children should not be smacked.

The next step will be for the anti-smackers to help parents learn how to bring up their children properly without needing to clobber them.

Smacking III

Following the recommendations from the Joint Committee on Human Rights and
the Health Select Committee, BBC News online have got a poll....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3015226.stm

Please vote! At present about 85% are voting not to ban smacking, despite all the arguments to the contrary.

Men in Child Care

A Mori poll has shown that people think that should be more men in childcare, but they are put off by low pay and suspicion about their motives.

Maintaining Quality

We were visiting the lovely little island of Colonsay in South West Scotland, and happened to call at the same time as the Inspectors. The island has a population of 130, and of these, ten children are of primary school age and four attend the nursery class at the island’s one school. (Older children board weekly on the mainland.)

In all, there were four inspectors to provide the right range of expertise. Two stayed for two days and two for three. The staff of the school can obviously feel reassured that they received a quality service with so much attention. The length of the inspectors’ stay may have had something to do with the frequency of the ferries to the island, or again the quality of the food at the island’s one hotel. Unworthy thought. We look forward to seeing the report on the website at the end of July. (Click here)

Couch Potatoes

There is real concern in Scotland that children are turning into couch potatoes. Instead of lively life-styles, they read or stay immobile in front of the telly or playing computer games. According to Mary Allison, Scotland’s fitness tsar, a third of children aged between 2 and 3 are not doing enough to keep fit. There are stories that they refuse to walk to the park and want to be driven. Nearly 9% of 3 to 4 year-olds are overweight. They are the Teletubby generation.

The outcome is that Scotland has the label as the sick man of Europe, with high levels of obesity, cancer, coronary heart disease and strokes. The one good piece of news is that the number of 15-year-old boys who smoke has halved over the past five years.

Thanks to Scotland on Sunday, 8th June 2003, page 5, for the story.

APPG

Elsewhere in this edition, Alison Linsey reports on Paul Boateng’s address to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Children. The next meeting, at 5.30 p.m. on 14th July, should also be interesting, as the new Minister for Children, Margaret Hodge, will be speaking about her new role and responsibilities and how the Green Paper on Children at Risk proposals will be taken forward. Any organisations with an interest in the subject who would like to be represented at the meeting should contact Alison Linsey. The meetings are a useful meeting point with politicians, they offer a chance to network and you get the latest news and ideas.

Small Schools

Do you remember the Danish Small Schools? They used to run a couple of schools in England, at Red House in North Norfolk and Winestead Hall near Hull. They provided for children with behavioural problems and did some good work. But they were unusual.

The Danish Small Schools movement had political, philosophical and life-style overtones, as well as being educational. There have been accusations that the movement was a cult, and that the head, Mogens Amdi Petersen, laundered money and made millions out of the movement. His main UK charity, Humana, was closed down by the Charity Commission.

It’s sad that an organisation with good ideas and a degree of success in helping children should crash down in flames in this way.

For more details, see The Guardian Supplement on 9th June 2003, pages 6 - 7.

Congratulations

….. to Deryk Mead, the Chief Executive of National Children’s Homes, on being awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. (For readers outside the United Kingdom, that means that he is now a Commander of the British Empire. It does not matter that there is virtually no British Empire left to command. The gong is a high grade one, and it reflects positively on both Deryk and the NCH.)

Coffee and Traffic Lights

They say that travel broadens the mind, which presumably means that we should become more tolerant. We disagree. We think that the more you see of foreigners, the more you realise how very different they are.

Have you noticed the way people drink coffee? The Turks have tiny cups, half full of black sludge. The French, on the other hand, drink huge bowls (what Spike Milligan called “steaming bidets”) full of a sort of light beige liquid for breakfast, in which they dunk their croissants. In between, there is every kind of strength, including the American stuff that tastes as if it was strained through old socks and British coffee substitutes that are said to have been made from ground-up acorns. And - even if we are polite to our hosts - deep down, we all think that our own coffee is best.

Or again, you would think that pedestrian traffic lights should work the same way in every country, but they don’t. In Denmark, pedestrians stand to attention in an otherwise empty street and wait for ages for the little man to go green before they will cross the road. You get frowns if you cross because there is no traffic. In New York, if you cross the road when the man goes green, you get run over by stuff accelerating round the corner. In Italy, you get run over, whatever the colour.

And, of course, there are the places without the little red and green men. We were once standing at the roadside in a small town in America, simply admiring the view, when a car rolled to a halt to let us cross over. Now, there’s courtesy.

So perhaps travel introduces one to the pleasanter aspects of other nations, as well as their foibles. There was a famous cartoon in the humorous magazine, Punch, in the late nineteenth century, in which one man was saying to another, “Who’s him, Bill?” Bill answers, “A stranger”. “Then heave half a brick at him.”

Things have changed since then. With all the travel round the world today as holiday-makers, economic migrants, business people, experts giving advice, political refugees and everything else, perhaps we have had to become more tolerant of each other. We need to be. And we still have a long way to go to overcome discrimination against strangers. But we don’t need to stop being fascinated by each others’ foibles.

Mental Health Services for Children

At the recent conference of the Association of Directors of Social Services in Belfast, Jo Williams, the Chief Executive of Mencap, complained about the inadequacy of mental health services for children, saying that they were creaking under an avalanche of referrals. She described the way that children might be put on adult wards as the only way of coping with their chaotic behaviour.

This is not a new problem. Professionals have always been reluctant to diagnose children as mentally ill, since labelling can be self-fulfilling, pushing a child down the path of psychiatric treatment, when disturbed behaviour may have a wide range of causes. Equally, people who are recognised as being mentally ill as adults may have shown signs of problems when they were children which one can see with hindsight were early symptoms.

It is hard to identify mental health problems in children clearly, and yet their disturbed behaviour requires an appropriate response, whether through mental health or other specialist services.

It has often been the case in the past that the agency which first got involved in a child’s case determined the way his or her problems were understood. Educational investigations might have led to residential special education, for instance, while social work assessment might have resulted in a children’s home placement, and a general practitioner referral to a psychiatrist ended in an adolescent mental health unit.

Maybe with the appointment of a Minister for Children English services will be able to develop a truly integrated approach. Certainly children need access to the full range of professional assessments and services to meet their needs. Oh, but I nearly forgot. Mental health services for children will still be under the Department of Health. And if the kid is an offender, the Home Office will be responsible…….

(For more about Jo Williams’s speech, see Community Care, 19th June 2003, page 12.) - click here

The Weakness of ACPCs

At the same conference, Lord Laming had another go at Area Child Protection Committees for their failure to co-operate adequately. He wants an organisation with teeth, with consistent membership and with incisiveness, prepared to act in children’s interests.

From our experience we have no doubt that the problem needs attention, but it is rather like applying french dressing. To mix up the ingredients, you have to shake it about, and even then, the vinegar and oil separate out if given a chance.

The point about ACPCs is that they represent the meeting points of a number of professions and services, each with their own priorities, ways of working, lines of accountability, professional values, skills and even language. To achieve real collaboration is something of a miracle.

It is not even as if the people who meet in ACPCs are a peer group, in the way that it is possible to put together a liaison group between members of different armed forces at equivalent levels. ACPCs include both top professionals such as paediatricians and people with specialist child protection interests much lower in their respective hierarchies.

The police work in a highly structured organisation according to the book. The social work representatives are probably part of a hierarchical organisation, but with more flexibility. The health service professions all retain their own professional accountabilities while being part of their local health services. The general practitioners represent no-one but themselves.

There is no point in trying to make them all part of one accountable organisation. The value of ACPCs is precisely that they are made up of representatives of disparate organisations who need to work together. We will just have to keep on shaking them up.

From the Case Files

“She has also taken several over dozes”.

Presumably a bit more than a Sunday morning lie-in?

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