The in­ci­dents of chil­dren dy­ing or be­ing se­ri­ous­ly in­jured at home, or be­ing al­lowed to stray from the care of par­ents and oth­er se­niors, are be­com­ing mat­ters of course, un­til an­oth­er one hap­pens. What is more wor­ry­ing, lit­tle learn­ing is ap­plied from pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ences of small and help­less chil­dren dy­ing while un­der the care of ma­ture and re­spon­si­ble adults.

In re­cent times, a child, al­most a tod­dler, is al­lowed to wan­der away from home in­to a riv­er while un­der the su­per­vi­sion of an adult; a ba­by dies from com­pli­ca­tions af­ter falling in­to a pot of boil­ing peas; and an­oth­er child took her life. In be­tween, sev­er­al avoid­able deaths and se­ri­ous dam­age to chil­dren have oc­curred.

In­evitably, some­one screams about the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty not do­ing its job. It is not, how­ev­er, that that in­sti­tu­tion is per­fect in at­tend­ing to its broad re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pre­vent and or mit­i­gate against pos­si­ble in­stances of child abuse. Un­der the present re­quire­ments to ful­fil its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, it is le­git­i­mate for spokes­peo­ple for the au­thor­i­ty to ask how they were sup­posed to save a child from the cir­cum­stances said to sur­round this in­fant meet­ing such a hor­rid death.

In­abil­i­ty to ful­fil its man­date in re­la­tion to mon­i­tor­ing par­ent­hood prac­tices re­lat­ing to su­per­vi­sion in the broad­est sense, how­ev­er, is an­oth­er is­sue. That re­quires a qual­i­ty and dy­nam­ic in­sti­tu­tion­al struc­ture and es­tab­lish­ment with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to give sup­port and there­after to close-mon­i­tor whether par­ents are giv­ing the req­ui­site care.

Clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, Dr Var­ma Deyals­ingh, is queued-in to iden­ti­fy the dis­tract­ing at­ten­tion paid by par­ents/guardians to cell­phones when hav­ing care-tak­ing cus­tody of their chil­dren; too at­tract­ed are they to the “sweet” con­ver­sa­tion tak­ing place on the phone.

Then there is the per­va­sive prob­lem of “chil­dren hav­ing chil­dren”, com­plete­ly ill-quipped in mind and phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances to care for their ba­bies. In a pre­vi­ous time, many a grand­par­ent/s filled the void and took great care of those un­able to care for them­selves.

The ex­tend­ed fam­i­ly home is not as preva­lent and sup­port­ive as it once was, and frankly, in many in­stances to­day, grand­par­ents are not far re­moved from the par­ents in terms of their un­der­stand­ing of child care. So, it is of­ten a moth­er left by a flee­ing/flown fa­ther, to fend in cir­cum­stances be­yond her abil­i­ty, even to grasp.

Dr Deyals­ingh makes al­so crit­i­cal­ly ob­serves that in the lead-in to giv­ing birth, our in­sti­tu­tions need to ex­tend in­for­ma­tion and ed­u­ca­tion to par­ents. They need to have preg­nant women and would-be fa­thers un­der­stand the at­ten­tion which has to be giv­en to tak­ing on the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of par­ent­hood.

We recog­nise that a mea­sure of pre­na­tal care at the hos­pi­tals and clin­ics is giv­en, per­haps not in suf­fi­cient quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty re­quired; but most per­ti­nent is the ques­tion as to whether the would-be par­ents are dis­posed to hear­ing and do­ing what is right for ba­bies and chil­dren.

At the lev­el of the law, strict at­ten­tion is re­quired to hold par­ents and guardians re­spon­si­ble for child in­juries and deaths.

Con­tribut­ing to the deaths of chil­dren through a mea­sure of ne­glect is now re­sult­ing too fre­quent­ly. One part of the prob­lem is the scant re­gard be­ing giv­en to the val­ue of life; large groups of peo­ple have be­come numb to its loss.