Earlier this week, Member of Parliament for Couva South, Barry Padarath, announced that the Couva Children’s Hospital is ready to accept young patients. Social media users were conflicted. There were those who welcomed this news, as children will now be able to receive specialised care. But there were also those who questioned why we need another children’s hospital when “we already have one”.
Let me be absolutely clear: we can never have enough for our nation’s children. We should never reach a point where we believe that the facilities, services, or opportunities we provide for them are enough.
We need to keep doing more, providing more, so that they will always have the best healthcare, the finest education, and the greatest opportunities for social and emotional development. The minute we start to believe that we have enough, we will be setting them up for failure. As a nation, we must never stagnate when it comes to providing for our children.
Over the past months, several issues involving our children have surfaced. There was the concern of school violence and the move to curb it by putting police officers in schools. Predictably, some people objected to this, claiming that students were being treated as criminals or that the policy targeted specific schools and certain geographic areas. But the reality is that sometimes strong, uncomfortable measures are necessary to protect children. The same applies to charging students who engage in acts of violence, as has been done in more recent times.
Perhaps our most neglected crisis is children’s mental health. We need to teach children, from kindergarten to secondary school, how to identify, express, and manage their emotions.
We have to normalise letting children express their emotions and their dissatisfactions, and allow them to speak up and speak out. We can no longer say “some good licks will straighten them out”. That approach belongs to a different era.
Today’s children are growing up in a world where they are exposed to everything from as young as two and three years old because they spend time on tablets and phones. Their anxieties, emotional outlook, and responses to the world around them are different, and thus, we need to change our attitudes toward them.
This brings me to my next point: parents need to learn how to be parents. If we want to raise our children to be well-adjusted adults, then parents have to do better.
Parenting tricks that worked 25-plus years ago are not going to cut it. We need to throw out outdated parenting models and introduce parenting styles that will encourage children to communicate their ideas and opinions; to explore their full potential, and not penalise them for calling out adults when they do something stupid.
We cannot expect children to blindly follow adults just because they are adults. With younger generations today, we cannot expect blind obedience from children, and we need to understand that respect must go both ways.
There are too many factors hindering adults from being good parents.
First, many adults did not have good parental role models when they were growing up, so they do not have good examples to follow.
Secondly, there are too many single-parent homes today. Sadly, children are growing up with absentee mothers and fathers.
According to writer Lorraine Lydia Kavedza, “Statistics place single-parent homes in T&T at 28 per cent. More than half of these are single-mother households.”
Thirdly, there are many cases where grandparents are raising children while their parents are busy working or, in some cases, “liming hard”.
There is also the other extreme of this: homes where both parents are present, but children are smothered, expected to be perfect, are not allowed to express their own opinions, are too sheltered, and grow up unable to socialise outside of their little networks.
Many parents, grandparents, teachers, and counsellors will agree that dealing with younger generations can be very challenging.
The days for thinking that children should be seen and not heard are gone. It might be useful to understand that children learn from example.
As novelist James Baldwin said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
They see and hear what adults do, and they model it. Children do not raise themselves. We shape them by the world we build around them. When we invest in their safety, education, health, and well-being, we are investing in our country’s future. When we fail to provide for them now, we will pay the price later in the form of broken adults.
As we celebrate World Children’s Day, we need to understand that it is our collective responsibility to create a society where our children feel seen, heard, protected, and valued.
The question should never be: do we need more for our children? It should always be: what more can we do for our children?
