Opinion Articles

SOUL MATTERS: Your Children Are Not Just Your Children
By Helen Keevers
Helen Keevers is the Manager of the Child Protection Unit, Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

“We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today”. (Stasia Tausher)

At the close of this year’s Child Protection Week (September 3-9) with its theme “Creating child friendly communities” it is important for us to reflect on how we can all play a part in the protection of children.

Child Protection Week invites us to become involved in activities that highlight the need to make our local communities child friendly, ensuring the well-being of our children. It also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how we relate to children – our own as well as those in our broader community. As this year’s theme reminds us, child protection is everybody’s business, the responsibility of the whole community.

It’s easy to put child protection in the too hard basket, seeing it merely as the arena of professionals, not part of everyday living, not something I have to worry about. Yet our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours provide the foundations of a child friendly community and therefore are integral to the protection of all children.

What does a “child friendly” community look like? How do we take this concept from rhetoric to reality?

Remembering what was important to us as a child helps us to see issues through the eyes of children, and not just from our adult perspective.

Children prefer us to spend our time with them rather than our money on them. They appreciate realistic and fair boundaries around their choices and behaviours and, in turn, need us to offer models of behaviour to which they can aspire. The values we live out are the values children will inherit.

Children should never be used as pawns in adult conflict, at whatever level.

Their innocence should be celebrated and their imaginations encouraged. In a time when the boundaries between adulthood and childhood are becoming increasingly blurred, children need space and time to be child-like.

Above all children must be protected from all forms of exploitation. Community members need to be made aware of the indicators of risk of harm to children. Appropriate policies, structures and resources need to be put in place to ensure children’s safety.

When we take seriously our responsibility to work for a child-friendly community, it’s not only the children who benefit. We, as individuals, and the community as a whole gain from our efforts to see the world from their perspectives and the adults of tomorrow are given the best foundation on which to build socially responsible lives.