Voice for Children

Children have rights did you know that? As soon as a child takes their first breath they have exactly the same rights under The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as any other citizen of this country. And Canadian children have even more rights as outlined in The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Children because Canada signed that declaration. Did you know about that? Who enforces those rights on behalf of children? Do those rights keep children safe? Not for one second! Why not? Why don't the lovely words in all those documents keep children safe? What do the words mean in our day to day lives? I would say not much in New Brunswick this past week. Not much for the young child whose mother did nothing while she died an agonizing death from a perforated bowel cause by a mechanical pencil inside her or for the infant who sustained a gash on her forehead so deep the bone could be seen and whose father told a wild story about how it happened. Why can't we as a civilized society, what ever that means, move beyond the behaviour of previous generations. We can't because we are still running the same strategies that our parents did. I agree that we may not know we are running them but we are running them all the same and what I run I own. When we run the same outdated command and control parenting strategy that was "done to us" that we hated, that we vowed we would never do to our kids, if we ever had any kids that is. And yet we are doing the same things. Why? Our children hate it are they trying to get our attention...they are telling us that they hate what we are doing. Are we listening or are we just doing the same things our parents did to us...sending them to their room without supper, yelling at them, grounding them, threatening them or in the utter out of control frustration of the moment "cuffing them on the side of the head" or maybe even worse. And when what we are doing doesn't work we just do it harder, longer and the more out of control we feel the harder we try to control our children. How much louder must our children's message get before we hear it? How many of our children will turn to alcohol, sex, drugs, street gangs or even suicide before we start listening, really listening to our children, the loves of our life, that we birthed and bathed and fed and cuddled and began to turn away from as they developed minds of their own with opinions that differed from ours. That we thought should be seen and not heard the refrain of our parents...the refrain that is killing our kids. The system is broken...don't fix it. It doesn't work. We need a new way to interact with our children a way that begins with us! Not them, us.
"Sometimes your job isn't to reason with your children or to teach them or even to offer them a sterling example or maturity you simply must be with them. That is all it takes." (The Devil's Teardrop. Jeffery Deaver)