Fix broken support system before penalising parents, says advocate

Barbados should not criminalise parents for their children’s behaviour when the social support system for struggling families is “completely broken”, child rights advocate Dr Marsha Hinds-Myrie warned.

Pushing back sharply against a proposal by acting Director of Public Prosecutions Alliston Seale SC to sanction negligent parents, Dr Hinds-Myrie insisted that policymakers should urgently address the gaps in early intervention and assistance that leave many parents with nowhere to turn.

She suggested that while penalising parents of law-breaking children may be appropriate in countries with strong support systems, this was not the case in Barbados.

“I can completely understand in a society like America, Canada, the United Kingdom, a parent being held responsible and called negligent with respect to a child who is exhibiting antisocial, problematic, attention-seeking behaviours, and that parent does nothing to support the child,” she said.

“Why can I understand that in those societies? Because there is so much opportunity for that parent to get help and intervention for that child, that if that parent opts not to do that, I am comfortable with it being called negligence. But the reality is that is not what happens in Barbados. In Barbados, we have a social system that is completely broken.”

The child rights advocate said that the uncomfortable truth in Barbados is that there is a lack of early-intervention options for families.

“If I have a child in Barbados who is eight years old, and I realise this child hits the dog in the house, cannot get along with its siblings… where do I take that child?” she asked. “If you could tell me, well, Marsha, you could take it to the Child Care Board, there is the XYZ programme, and you know they do community outreach every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for children who struggle with anger management…. We do not have any of that in Barbados.”

Given those realities, she questioned why and how officials would propose punishing parents who have nowhere to easily turn for help.

“I do not understand the rhetoric from the [acting] DPP, who I believe is well positioned within the system. If I know about the systemic challenges as an advocate working on the outside, certainly he must know about them from the inside. Make these parents accountable when he knows of the significant gaps and holes in the social safety net that these parents would need to have.”

Dr Hinds-Myrie added that today’s parenting struggles are directly linked to longstanding failures to support children with behavioural issues. She recalled her time teaching at the Parkinson School in the early 2000s.

“I had children with behavioural issues then who would now be themselves parents, so I am not surprised that they would struggle to manage their children because their own needs when they were children were not addressed,” she said.

She noted that while corporal punishment was phased out decades ago, a move she supports, Barbados never replaced it with structured programmes to help adults develop effective parenting skills when faced with a child exhibiting behavioural challenges.

“We do not put a real significant focus on cultivating parenting skills in Barbados,” she said. “This is part of my discomfort with just saying punish the parents.” shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb