Today is Universal Children’s Day. The date was created in 1954 by the UN, but it seems to me that it remains fairly unknown to the public at large. Now, why do we need a day to celebrate the children of the world and to promote their welfare, you may ask? Well, as it turns out, children remain one of the most oppressed groups among humans: scores of children around the world are neglected, abused, and fail to receive schooling, proper nutrition, love and attention. Whenever things get rough, say during wars and in violent environments, children are typically the most vulnerable and thus the most likely to suffer. More generally, parents and caregivers experiencing hardship will have extreme difficulties in being adequate caregivers (it’s hard enough when things are fine!).
Why is it so? There is a rather simple biological explanation for why human youngsters are vulnerable: the human species is unique in terms of the number of years (relative to the expected lifespan for the species) that a youngster is deeply dependent on others, parents in particular (but not exclusively), for survival. The fancy word for this phenomenon is altriciality, and humans share this characteristic with many bird species, but not with our closest living cousins, the great apes. As with many birds, rearing a human child is such a tough job that humans have become a largely monogamous species, again unlike our ‘promiscuous’ cousins the chimpanzees; motherly care alone is not sufficient, so the involvement of the father in childrearing becomes vital (if nothing else, to provide for food even if he is not a ‘hands-on’ kind of dad).
In fact, even the involvement of two adults is usually not sufficient to raise a child successfully, and typically a number of allo-parents must be enlisted (we are social breeders). One of the paradoxes of the human species is that it truly is exceedingly hard on parents and caregivers to provide for a child’s needs, and yet the child truly does need every bit of this attention and investment to thrive and become a viable, hopefully happy adult.
When I first became a mother 8 years ago, I got involved in all kinds of internet forums for new mothers, and in particular in debates on how best to manage the sleep patterns of an infant. The two main camps were: those who defend interventional approaches, in particular ‘cry-it-out’ methods, to teach the infant to sleep through the night and thus to allow the parents to have the good nights they crave for; and those who emphasize the infant’s need to be cradled and attended to whenever it cries. I was myself very much in the second camp, and still believe that a newborn must be attended to every time it cries (at the very least until, say, 6 months of age). But it was easy for me to say, as my first child basically slept through the night since she was 10 days old!
When my second one came, we discovered what it was like to have a ‘normal’ baby who is not so eager to adopt the sleeping pattern of adults. We dealt with sleepless nights until she was 9 months old, by which time we couldn’t take it anymore (I know, lots of people deal with much longer periods of sleepless nights!) and embarked in a modified version of the cry-it-out method (her father stayed with her in the room during the whole night but did not pick her up from the crib). It took only two nights for her to get the idea (again, rather unusual), but it took us much longer to have normal nights again: our own sleeping patterns were all messed up.
This experience taught me how incredibly hard it is to balance the parents’ needs and the child’s needs, while both sets of needs are absolutely legitimate and real. Years later, I read Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature, who argues beautifully and on the basis of a wide range of data for exactly this view. And if it was hard for me and my husband, who have otherwise nearly ideal material conditions, I cannot even begin to imagine what it is like for people in less favorable conditions, in particular single parents. Even past the first year of sleepless nights, human children continue to require an enormous amount of involvement and investment from their caregivers in order to thrive: material investment such as food, money to pay for child care and medical assistance etc., but also massive amounts of emotional involvement – comfort when they wake up in the night with a nightmare, dedication to make it through the countless childhood illnesses, and simply willingness to talk to them and to genuinely care about the little ins and outs of their exciting lives.
The thing is, childhood is the most critical phase of human life: what a human will be like as an adult is fundamentally determined by what her childhood is like. Child malnutrition affects a person’s health negatively for the rest of her life, even if later in life she receives proper nutrition; language learning is notoriously deeply related to the ‘window of opportunity’ of a human’s first 10 years (especially for speech, but also for writing, albeit less dramatically); and as we’ve known at least since Freud (one of the few things he was right about!), a person’s emotional constitution is largely determined by her relationship to her caregivers (parents in particular) during childhood. So it takes an awful lot to give a child fairly minimal conditions to thrive, thus the high likelihood of her needs not being met and things going wrong.
What can/should be done? One of the most urgent points remains limited access to formal schooling, which affects in particular a very large number of girls around the world (such as the amazing Malala Yousafzai in Afghanistan). Programs of incentive to education, such as the Brazilian program of financial incentive to keep poor children in schools, can be very effective. Programs of early intervention for mothers at risk of neglecting their infants, where trained nurses regularly visit the families and teach caregivers basic elements of what a baby requires to thrive, have proved to be effective in breaking patterns of poverty running across generations of the same families. More and more countries are passing laws prohibiting any form of physical violence on children, including the proverbial spanking, as it has become abundantly clear that resorting to corporal punishment (even in ‘mild’ forms) is an ineffective and psychologically damaging method of upbringing. Other forms of child abuse (including, controversially, genital alteration both for female and male infants and children) are also receiving increased attention at least in some countries.
The bottom line is the recognition that human children are vulnerable because they require such a vast investment of resources to become viable adults, if compared to other animal species. But a happy, healthy childhood, with nurturing caregivers, is not a luxury: it is a biological necessity. So yes, we truly need such a thing as the Universal Children’s Day.
Recent Comments