Today's children are growing up without the freedom to roam and play unsupervised, the Pfizer/ Irish Timeshealth forum is told
THE EFFECTS of a loss of personal freedom for a generation of children needs to be assessed, according to child development expert Irene Gunning.
Speaking on the topic Children in Ireland: Seen and not Heard, Ms Gunning, chief executive officer of the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA), said today's children grow up without the freedom to roam and play unsupervised, as was the norm for previous generations.
"The freedom of childhood has been lost. While many great strides have been made in areas such as health and nutrition especially, the freedom of childhood is gone," said Ms Gunning in her address to the Pfizer health forum in association with The Irish Times.
“We all have memories of meandering and playing and not coming home until the tea was ready, but now those days are over,” she said.
Ms Gunning questioned why that freedom had been removed and what effects this loss might have on the individual psyche and overall development of a new generation.
She said society needed to look at the reasons why children now live such protected lives and what effects this might have, especially on children under six, which is now accepted as an age bracket crucial to development.
The introduction last year of the free year of preschool education for every child in Ireland was one of the most positive child policies put in place since Dr Noel Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme in the 1950s, Ms Gunning said.
“This is a really positive policy and one that is badly needed as the educational phase from birth to age six is crucial,” she said. “We need to follow it up by putting in place everything a child might need through the provision of services.”
Early education could help give children a voice and was therefore a vehicle for protection, encouraging open communication and informing children of their rights, Ms Gunning told the debate, which took place in Cork last week and was chaired by Irish Timescolumnist Fintan O'Toole.
Ombudsman for Children Emily Logan spoke about the importance of family as a child’s greatest resource.
Paradoxically, children are most at risk of sexual abuse within their own homes, Ms Logan said, referring to the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report of 2002.
Ms Logan highlighted the nation’s huge discomfort in addressing this issue and called for more open debate.
She said much of the current policy surrounding child protection was reactionary, resulting from political responses driven by the public mood on certain issues.
And while the public was quick to react to the scandals of church and institutional abuse, reaction to sexual abuse in a home environment was far less forthcoming, Ms Logan said.
“We are very good and going out onto the streets and making our voices heard when a stranger has been found to be abusing children. But as a society we still have a huge discomfort around the findings of the SAVI report, which clearly states that the environment children are most at risk in is, sadly, their own home,” she said.
Ms Logan said the child abuse scandals of the past 10 years had opened up the topic of sexual abuse for debate and she called for further discussion on the dangers present in a child’s home environment.
“Multimedia, the internet, facebook – there are so many new opportunities for new entrants into the market of child abuse. As a society we still have a huge discomfort around that . We need to tackle these beliefs if we are going to tackle child abuse,” she said.
A patriarchal view of children continues to exist, a throwback to the 1960s, where children were seen and not heard and the State assumed it knew better – certainly than children or families, according to Ms Logan.
In her own education, she said she and her colleagues were actively encouraged to exclude the family in the care of a child in health or social services.
“There was this cultural attitude that families were meant to feel grateful for the services they got from the State. People perceived that they should be grateful for the help they got from the State in caring for their child,” she said.
The State now needs to review its attitude to children and families in key areas such as health and education, Ms Logan told the forum.
Social workers and health professionals working within the confines of State policy have voiced their frustration at not being heard, prompting the Ombudsman to call for closer communications between the public, the professionals and the policymakers to bridge the gaps in services.
Dr Kenneth Burns, lecturer at the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, called for a proactive approach in implementing policies on child abuse and protection.
“In the healthcare system in 2010, there are quite a number of children in the social care system whom we are not responding to adequately. Quite a number are on the waiting list for a social worker. But by the time they reach the top of that list it can often be too late,” said Dr Burns.
“It is demoralising that it takes another very serious inquiry to spring us into action. We don’t seem to pause for a moment to look at how we would like to improve children’s services. After Kilkenny, Monageer, Roscommon and now Ryan, it would be nice to see a bit more proactivity,” he said.
Dáil na nÓg council member and leaving certificate student Ciara Ahern said Irish society did not give enough credit to the younger generation, whom she said were “intelligent and proactive in our thinking”.
She called for an end to the practice of “sweeping problems under the carpet” and said there should be more open debate and education on matters of importance such as child sexual abuse in institutions.
“These things should be taught in the classroom. The church needs to stand up and say it was wrong for the abuses of the Ryan and Murphy reports. If the church took responsibility then our generation would be happy to make things better,” she said.