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I know, I know! If kids worry you, perhaps you shouldn’t have them. Before I had them, however, I didn’t quite appreciate the degree to which they would consume my attention.
I have two children, a girl and a boy. I think my wife started worrying about them before they were born, but she’s a woman. As a man, I simply assumed that they were and would be perfect, until the day when my mother suggested that my son might be “backward”because he took six months longer to learn to talk than his sister had. Of course, that was nonsense, as I soon realized: he was just having such fun eating and singing and laughing that he didn’t feel the urge to use his mouth for talking!
Now my babies are both in their mid-20’s, and they provide me with endless pleasure – but worries, too. I’m concerned about their jobs, their money (or maybe it’s my money that I worry about), their friends, their loves, their adventures and their safety. But that’s normal, isn’t it? Surely that’s what good parents do.
What really worries me, though, is not my own children but the many millions of others who are less fortunate than mine. If you have lived in a family of teachers, or worked in a teaching environment, as I have, you always want to see every child growing up safely and fulfilling its potential, whoever and wherever they may be. In China and several other East Asian countries, children are accorded a special status within families, such that they grow up in a cocoon of love and care. Some would argue that this can be bad for a child, stifling its spirit of enterprise and limiting its willingness to move away from the childhood home. But these youngsters do at least have choices.
In Niger, chronic malnutrition and infant mortality mean that children have a slimmer chance of survival than in any other country in the world. In South Africa, I have seen children who have been physically and mentally handicapped from the day they were born, because their parents work in vineyards where they are paid in wine rather than cash, and so produce offspring with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. And countries on every continent carry the shame of permitting child labor to flourish.
But it’s not just the developing countries where children are at risk. In the UK, for example, there is evidence that children are suffering from aches and pains, and even rickets, as a consequence of spending too long indoors playing video games, thereby depriving themselves of access to sunlight and Vitamin D. The problem can be especially severe in people of African or Asian origin, with darker skins. And in Southeast Asia up to 90 percent of school leavers are suffering from eye damage because their loving parents have kept them studying for long hours without the benefit of natural light, thereby inducing shortsightedness.
Other much-discussed sideeffects of our so-called civilized world are the examples set by some of the most prominent pop stars and catwalk models. The former tend to glamorize the use of recreational drugs, while the latter encourage girls to starve themselves down to size zero. Last week, in my own home town, a 16-year-old girl died from anorexia. Many like her die every year, seduced by the fashion for being thin, rather than accepting that it’s quite normal and healthy for women to carry a layer of body fat. So it was comforting for me to find myself in a London Indian restaurant with my son yesterday, where the paintings on the walls were of female dancers dressed in sarees, with bulky waists showing, just as they might be back home in India.
But what can one do? Understandably, kids want to be like the big stars, leaving us powerless to keep them on the path of good sense. Do we really believe that, or are we simply making excuses for our own inadequacies as parents? Are we in the developed countries perhaps spending too much time making money and paying too little attention to our children during their formative years? I suspect the answer is “yes.”
European society seems to me to have succumbed to two pernicious problems: the pursuit of wealth and possessions, and the expectation that someone else will take responsibility for the things we can’t be bothered to do ourselves. Often we hold our government accountable for looking after our children – their health, their education, their housing, even their food – all on the basis that we pay such high taxes that we are entitled to expect such things of society. How wrong that is, though. How obscene, indeed!
There is much that we in the affluent West could learn from watching our poorer cousins in Africa and elsewhere. Above all, when you’re starving and thirsty, you quickly develop a strong sense of life’s real priorities. What higher priority can there be than the welfare of our own children?
I have two children, a girl and a boy. I think my wife started worrying about them before they were born, but she’s a woman. As a man, I simply assumed that they were and would be perfect, until the day when my mother suggested that my son might be “backward”because he took six months longer to learn to talk than his sister had. Of course, that was nonsense, as I soon realized: he was just having such fun eating and singing and laughing that he didn’t feel the urge to use his mouth for talking!
Now my babies are both in their mid-20’s, and they provide me with endless pleasure – but worries, too. I’m concerned about their jobs, their money (or maybe it’s my money that I worry about), their friends, their loves, their adventures and their safety. But that’s normal, isn’t it? Surely that’s what good parents do.
What really worries me, though, is not my own children but the many millions of others who are less fortunate than mine. If you have lived in a family of teachers, or worked in a teaching environment, as I have, you always want to see every child growing up safely and fulfilling its potential, whoever and wherever they may be. In China and several other East Asian countries, children are accorded a special status within families, such that they grow up in a cocoon of love and care. Some would argue that this can be bad for a child, stifling its spirit of enterprise and limiting its willingness to move away from the childhood home. But these youngsters do at least have choices.
In Niger, chronic malnutrition and infant mortality mean that children have a slimmer chance of survival than in any other country in the world. In South Africa, I have seen children who have been physically and mentally handicapped from the day they were born, because their parents work in vineyards where they are paid in wine rather than cash, and so produce offspring with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. And countries on every continent carry the shame of permitting child labor to flourish.
But it’s not just the developing countries where children are at risk. In the UK, for example, there is evidence that children are suffering from aches and pains, and even rickets, as a consequence of spending too long indoors playing video games, thereby depriving themselves of access to sunlight and Vitamin D. The problem can be especially severe in people of African or Asian origin, with darker skins. And in Southeast Asia up to 90 percent of school leavers are suffering from eye damage because their loving parents have kept them studying for long hours without the benefit of natural light, thereby inducing shortsightedness.
Other much-discussed sideeffects of our so-called civilized world are the examples set by some of the most prominent pop stars and catwalk models. The former tend to glamorize the use of recreational drugs, while the latter encourage girls to starve themselves down to size zero. Last week, in my own home town, a 16-year-old girl died from anorexia. Many like her die every year, seduced by the fashion for being thin, rather than accepting that it’s quite normal and healthy for women to carry a layer of body fat. So it was comforting for me to find myself in a London Indian restaurant with my son yesterday, where the paintings on the walls were of female dancers dressed in sarees, with bulky waists showing, just as they might be back home in India.
But what can one do? Understandably, kids want to be like the big stars, leaving us powerless to keep them on the path of good sense. Do we really believe that, or are we simply making excuses for our own inadequacies as parents? Are we in the developed countries perhaps spending too much time making money and paying too little attention to our children during their formative years? I suspect the answer is “yes.”
European society seems to me to have succumbed to two pernicious problems: the pursuit of wealth and possessions, and the expectation that someone else will take responsibility for the things we can’t be bothered to do ourselves. Often we hold our government accountable for looking after our children – their health, their education, their housing, even their food – all on the basis that we pay such high taxes that we are entitled to expect such things of society. How wrong that is, though. How obscene, indeed!
There is much that we in the affluent West could learn from watching our poorer cousins in Africa and elsewhere. Above all, when you’re starving and thirsty, you quickly develop a strong sense of life’s real priorities. What higher priority can there be than the welfare of our own children?