Child protection is a choice. Are you making wise, and rich, choices?

Part of the definition of poverty is the inability to make choices. The more focused we remain on financial definitions and constructs of patriarchy, the more people, particularly women and children, become impoverished. I choose to keep kids safe. I choose NOT to be impoverished in child protection matters.

The recent Blog Action DAY Against Poverty produced a record breaking myriad of excellent and though provoking posts on ending world and local poverty. I agree that financial poverty needs to end and that there needs to be sufficient fiscal contributions for ALL people to live a life where their basic human needs are met. However, I also yearn for a world where ALL people are given choices in keeping their kids safe. When starved in the third world or surviving domestic violence and daily life in the first world, child protection choices get forgotten.

Children matter and children remember how parents parent.  What will your babies remember about you?

Mothers in the third world look to us in the first world and aspire to have lives like ours. They yearn to be able to live like we do, wear what we do, raise our kids the way we do.  When they see us feeding our babies out of bottles, they think that is what is best for their babies too. When they see us dress in the trendiest clothes and give our kids every technological gadget on the market, they think that is what being a good parent is. When they see us invest heavily in our children’s academic education and financial security they stop watching us because we are so far removed from their lives of mere survival. They wrongly think that are failures and they begin to give up all hope because they cannot make choices the way we do.

This makes me furious at us. This makes me want to sob and to shake us all. So many of us also invest heavily in emotional intelligence, empathy and care as a value. These are things that do not cost money yet produce triple bottom line outcomes. But, too many of us do it privately and in isolation: in places where other impoverished parents cannot see what we are doing. Too many of us are scared by what child protection means (“Does it mean I am being a bad parent?” is a common, yet totally wrong, fear.).

Too many of us are scared by the ability to make our own choices or to stand up and publicly say that child protection, good parenting, is the top of our value list. Too many of us have the inability to make choices around child protection because we are impoverished by a system that takes away our control. Too many of us are…stupid, lazy and fixated on financial goals.

When third world mothers see us making poor child protection choices, they may well follow suit. Is this what we collectively want? Throwing money and food at these parents will not help child protection beyond survival level. Modelling a care model; care for everyone, including children, is a non financial way of making maximum impact on reversing the impoverished nature of an inability to make choices.

Being an out of control parent is so much easier that being a good parent. But, out of control often reflects disempowerment and an inability to make choices. I am in control, I am rich and I care. I choose to give money because money buys basic necessities but I also choose to give service, knowledge and consistent modelling of child protection at a grass roots level.

Is child protection in poverty in your home or do you make child protection choices? What will you do today to model child protection to impoverished parents everywhere? Here’s a few ideas to get you considering child protection in a poverty framework:

What is child protection?

Parent Sense: The BITSS model of Protective Behaviours

Coffee, Tea and Chocolate for Child Protection

How do you display your bottom line on protecting children.

Gorgeous post card painting is from talented Cairns artist and mother, Jean Burman. Her post and painting for Blog Action Day: We are sometimes rich in a way that is hard to measure.