#BTColumn – Children care must be constant

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Sean St.Clair Fields

I listened to a newsfeed a few days ago about the findings of a study on the wellbeing of young people in Barbados that was conducted by the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF)’s Generation Unlimited Study.

Suffice to say, I was not surprised by many of the conclusions that were drawn, since other commentators including myself have articulated similar sentiments over the years.

As reported in the Barbados TODAY September 29, 2020 Edition, according to Dr. Aloys Kamuragiye (UNICEF’s Representative for the Eastern Caribbean Area)

1. “More ought to be done to nurture adolescents in particular through the vulnerable stages in their lives”

2. “Boys are underperforming at virtually all stages of education”

3. “Products of single-parent households were significantly more likely to be involved in gang and gun related violence”

It certainly does appear by his submissions that we are failing our children particularly those within vulnerable social/economic groups and while Minister Dwight Sutherland has pledged greater stakeholder collaboration with UNICEF to produce programmes for the advancement of the Barbados youth development agenda, perhaps the Government of Barbados should take pause to first identify the catalyst(s) for these types of issues.

I shall like to submit that our attention should focus on the new Barbadian family model when compared to what existed before.

Some commentators have cited peer pressure, fatherlessness, absence of a role model as major contributors to our children’s deviance and underperformance. Others have proffered the breakdown of the Barbadian family unit as another.

Having being raised by my grandmother, I am convinced that if we didn’t have responsible adults to supervise us as children and if our uncles and grandfathers didn’t fill in for absent fathers, we might have willingly or unwillingly participated in the drug trade, prostitution or other illegal activities as so many others did just to survive.

Although my family was poor like most others in the neighborhood, I was fortunate that I had aunts and uncles who did not allow me to stray or starve.

This begs the question. What type of care and supervision is currently being provided to our children in our new Barbadian family model? I see a new paradigm evolving that mirrors a clear and present danger if we don’t take these issues seriously. For if we are not careful, I fear that we may inadvertently orchestrate our own demise when we continue to work tirelessly to make prosperous our future while abandoning the responsibility of raising our children as they ought to be raised.

There is no denying that children need adequate supervision, care and instruction. However, as our women continue to break the glass ceiling and take their rightful place in the boardrooms, someone has to fill the void
that is left when the responsibilities of these senior posts reduce the quality and amount of time they would normally spend caring for their children.

Additionally in Barbados, it certainly does appear that the pendulum has swung to the other side as more women are taking up posts of CEOs, Directors and Permanent Secretaries while fathers continue to be unavailable, with grandparents, aunts and uncles at work and too busy with their own lives.

Furthermore, if we also factor that some of our women do not appear to have the interest in or the time to have children, then it becomes crystal clear that we now face a most perilous dilemma as a nation, when the deleterious effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are weighed, coupled with the fact that our naturalized population is shrinking and that the children we are actually producing, are mostly coming from single parent households within the poorest and most vulnerable social/economic groups.

My friends, this is the harsh reality we now have to face.

As mentioned earlier, somebody has to care and supervise our children if we are serious about their positive development.

Whether it’s the mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, somebody has to be present to care and nurture our children when they are at home. Perhaps we need to think outside our cultural norms and let the burden of care and supervision of our children be shared equally between the mother and the father.

I see no reason why it cannot be mandated by law that a child is required to spend just as much time with their father and his side of the family as they do with their mother’s in those cases where the mother and father
are not together.

If nothing else, doing so would exponentially increase the number of responsible persons to care and nurture our children no matter which home they may reside at the time.