Give Me a Break:When your toddler is refusing to go into the car seat or your pre-teen is having a tantrum in the changing room at Zara, it's maybe not the time to ponder the issue of children's rights. What about parents' rights, you're probably thinking. Children seem omnipotent these days, demanding too much and respecting fewer boundaries than we did when we were kids.
Seriously, look around you - has there ever been a better time to be a child? TVs in bedrooms, iPods, foreign holidays - and all provided by parents who would rather cut out their own hearts than have their children disappointed come Christmas.
That's not actually the way it is. On Saturday, at a Children's Rights Alliance meeting in Dublin's Gresham Hotel, I met many parents whose concerns are far more serious. There was the mother whose blind daughter wasn't allowed on a school trip due to her disability. There was the mother whose two children with conditions on the autism spectrum come home from school so stressed out (due to not getting the support they need) that she has to spend every evening reassuring them. There was the father concerned that children don't have the right of equal access to both parents following marital separation. And there was the mother worried because a youth club worker in her area was withdrawn from the club after being convicted of a sex offence, yet none of the parents were informed.
These are all issues of children's rights, and what came out of the meeting was that parents' lives would be easier if children actually did have rights, instead of many parents having to fight for them. I was impressed by the fact that the meeting was so well-attended. Parents got free advice from experts such as psychologist David Coleman, Children's Rights Alliance founder Dr Noirin Hayes, and Michael McLoughlin of Youth Work Ireland. On top of that, they got free lunch and €30 childcare vouchers, so keep an eye on www.childrensrights.ie and participate in events in your area.
The Children's Rights Alliance is a coalition of more than 80 non-governmental organisations working to help children in Ireland by campaigning for full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This might seem completely irrelevant to you if you think you're children are fine, thank you. Unfortunately, a lot of children are not.
Your eyes might glaze over at the claim that one in nine Irish children (110,000) lives in consistent poverty and that one in four (240,000) is at risk of relative poverty - my goodness, aren't they always underfoot in the mall and at the cinema? But if your eyes are glazed, you're blind.
The principal of a large girls' secondary school on the outskirts of Dublin told me recently what poverty really means. It's girls who are unable to afford the €2 it costs to attend a school charity fundraising event. It's girls who come to school with no breakfast or lunch because at home there is only a tin of beans to be shared among the siblings. These girls' parents are employed, they have mortgages, they have cars. But these parents cannot cope. They are overwhelmed and it's their children who are really suffering.
If children had rights, we'd be making sure they had food to eat in school, rather than assuming they can eat just because their parents have jobs. In fact, this principal pointed out, we'd provide the food for all children so that the children who really needed it weren't stigmatised. Sound radical? Not if you believe in children's rights and that it is the children that taxpayers' money is serving, not the parents.
The incredible number of children in this country who have no right to decent housing now numbers 50,000. These are children living in sub-standard, overcrowded, inappropriate accommodation. If they had rights, this couldn't happen.
There are many other examples of their lack of rights: there are no statutory guidelines for reporting child abuse; 50 children are being detained in adult prisons at any one time; children have no entitlement to be heard in court; there are 2,000 children living on the side of the road without water and toilets because their parents are Travellers; one in five children doesn't make it to the Leaving Cert.
And this is a great country in which to be a child? No way. If Ireland is to become one of the best places in the world to be a child, as the Children's Rights Alliance hopes, we have to change radically the way we view childhood. Maybe this will put parents' rights and childrens' rights in conflict in a few cases where parents deserve a wake-up call. But in so many situations where parents cannot cope, supporting childrens' rights can actually help parents do what's right by their children.
In Denmark, they think of each child as a "project" - a special, sacred being to be encouraged and resourced to be the best person he or she can be. Look back at your own childhood: isn't such respect what you would have wanted for yourself? We can have that now for our children if we stop thinking about how comfortable we all supposedly are, and look at the reality of how uncomfortable life is for so many of our children, for so many reasons.
