The parenting predicament

Here's a strange thing: whenever there's a tragedy involving children, we immediately decide that either Child, Youth and Family Services or the general public is somehow to blame. Here's what's so strange: it's never about the people who actually hurt the children.

The Auckland double homicide inquiry into the death of twin baby boys is another of those sickening tragedies for which everyone mysteriously now claims an answer or a solution. But both were glaringly absent when the babies' fatal head injuries were inflicted, and during the short weeks in which they were alive. That's usually the case, though the family is invariably involved with agencies and health professionals who notice nothing amiss. Yet we insist that Child, Youth and Family is the guardian angel of all human misery that should save the child, no matter what.

Child, Youth and Family in turn suggests we're collectively to blame, as manager Lorraine Williams did this week. "We each of us need to take personal responsibility for acting to prevent these tragedies," she said. And I don't think that's especially helpful. Just what are we supposed to do about other families' dysfunction, poverty, drug-taking, alcoholism, mental illness, child neglect? Are we really welcome to poke our noses in, make judgments about their family life and act on those judgments?

Are we supposed to reason with P-addled parents and drunks? Would the law – and other people – really back us up? I once saw a woman challenge an abusive mother in a supermarket, after she was nasty to her small child and hit it for no reason. Believe me she wasn't thanked, and the mother didn't see the error of her ways. We all watch such incidents in unhappy silence because we don't want to make matters worse for the child – and we don't want a punch in the nose ourselves. The woman in this case replied – and here I edit for your tender ears – "It's my child, and I'll do as I like!" She's right. Who can stop her?

Everyone has a right to have a baby; even people who aren't prepared to have sex to get one can be artificially inseminated at the taxpayers' expense; but there's no such thing as an obligation to be a good or caring parent. We probably wouldn't agree on what that might involve anyway, and it's not the state's role to run peoples' private lives.

The twins are dead, it's reasonable to assume, because somebody killed them. Their family could well know the truth of what happened, and the rest of us may do in time. What seems terribly sad is that while the babies were on life support, their family gathered at the hospital. A bit more helpful gathering at the right time would no doubt have made all the difference to whether they lived or died.

We have a complex attitude toward Child, Youth and Family. Not so long ago it was called Child Welfare and part of the justice system. Children, not parents, were threatened with "welfare" if they misbehaved. They were taken away and put into children's homes – where we now know things often happened that were just as nasty as what might have happened at home. The view lingers that "welfare" should swoop on children and take them away from families that don't look or act right, despite the lessons of the past. We think Child, Youth and Family should be a police force – though when it was, it wasn't a benevolent one.

My grandmother fostered two children before I was born. Their mother was a live-in housekeeper and their father her employer. The children didn't live with their parents because of the scandal of their being illegitimate and their parents living in a de facto relationship, but my family always spoke fondly of the mother's love for the children.

The local welfare officer, however, decided to intervene on the grounds of morality. My grandmother had to take the sobbing children on a bus ride to another town, where they were given to someone else to look after. The mother had no say in the matter, and no one knew if she ever saw them again. "Welfare" was not highly regarded at our place.

I mention this old story because the kind of absolute power we think we want Child, Youth and Family to have when things go wrong is the kind of power that can be abused, and has been in the past. The real answer is surely for families to be supported in the ways they need, promptly, when they ask for help.

Rosemary McLeod
22 June 2006

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3708533a1861,00.html

 
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