Children Webmag - Editorial

If you are a regular reader, you may think you have seen this title before. You would be right. It was the heading for the Editorial last month. And you may see it again.

In this issue we report on the recent CCCF day conference which looked at the need for a National Commission to consider the role and status of children and young people in society today. The meeting seemed to come down on the side of a Church-based Commission, owned jointly by all the denominations (as against an Anglican Archbishop’s Commission, such as that which had led to Faith in the City). Indeed, Faith in Children was suggested as a possible title.

The advantage of a Church-based Commission is that the shared value and belief base might enable the fashioning of a more powerful sharper vision, but in the end, if it is to be shared by and influence the community as a whole, it will need to be acceptable to, and endorsed by, people of other faiths and people with a whole range of agnostic or atheist ideas. It will need to answer the sorts of fundamental issues raised by professionals concerned with children, such as those in Charles Pragnell’s powerful article in this issue. It will be the quality of the ideas, their applicability to humanity as a whole, their logic and persuasiveness and the motivation to act which they offer that will render them acceptable to society as a whole.

We will come back to this theme again, but for a start, how about asking ourselves what our assumptions are about children and young people? Are our ideas based on Victorian values, as Bob Reitemeier suggests, or have we moved on to establish a conceptual base suited to the twenty-first century? Or, in abandoning traditional values, as Dennis Wrigley argues, have we thrown out the clear morality and family base which humankind needs to live effectively? Do we view little children over-sentimentally? Do we consider young people too often as a threat? Do our images have any basis in fact? Are they created by the media? How can we come to understand the reality of children and young people today?

Unless we do a lot of digging first, and create sound foundations, the Commission could produce shaky ideas. And of course, the first place to start will be in talking to the children and young people. After all, if a National Commission has an impact, it may well take twenty years for its ideas to be absorbed, and then they will be the parents who are applying the thinking in the way they bring up their children.

We need to think big, but we need to think in the long term, so let’s get the foundations right.