Thursday, April 28, 2016

Discourse On Parenting And The Law


When I was a parent of young children I was employed by a child protection agency. Once a week I use to sit at a meeting where workers would discuss children who might need protection or care. At the same time, my two children were being raised in a construction site. We were renovating a century-old wood frame house. It was in bad shape. Plaster walls were being torn down, decades of rodent droppings were regularly discovered between walls, under the floorboards were desiccated carcasses of ground hogs and while we were reasonably careful, there was always construction debris scattered about. There was no running water for weeks at a time and our toilet was a porta potty. I have often wondered whether or not my co-workers, if they had only known, would have thought that perhaps my children needed to be brought into care because we could not provide safe environment for them.

In the last week or so the national press have reported on two stories where parents have been judged on their parenting practices. One was about a Winnipeg mother who was investigated by the local child protection agency for allowing her three children to play in a fenced-in back yard (Globe); the other was about the Lethbridge, Alberta couple who were charged and convicted of  "failing to provide the necessaries of life" (CBC) after their 19-month-old child died from bacterial meningitis.

In my mind, investigating the mother in Winnipeg is quite simply a case of an over-enthusiastic (nosy) neighbour  making a complaint about nothing. The child protection agency had no choice. It is obliged by law to investigate when it receives a complaint. The agency, however, should have quickly closed the file and commended the mother for doing a great job of encouraging the children to play outside. Clearly the children were not at risk.

The couple from Lethbridge however, did put their child at risk. They ignored the symptoms, they ignored a suggestion from a friend who was a nurse that the child could have meningitis. Because of their personal belief in natural medicines and I suspect their professional ( he owns a company that sells natural health products) commitment to a specific set of values they saw no reason to trust medical science. Their child died because they did not take their son to the hospital. They had the moral responsibility to do everything they could to help their child. And they didn't.

In spite of what some people may want to believe, the trial and subsequent conviction was not about  the pros and cons of the anti-vaccine movement, the horrors of the pharmaceutical industry or whether some ailments can be best treated with good basic care along and good nutrition. The jury's decision had  far more to do with the fact that the couple were unwilling  to use all of the resources available to them and their child. It does not matter why they chose not to do so. They didn't. The jury was right to find them guilty. We, as parents, have the absolute right to raise our children in ways that we think are safe and that will allow them to grow and mature into competent adults . We have however, the greater responsibility to ensure that we access ever possible resource so that they can achieve that goal.

I would imagine that every parent has a list, filed in the back of their brain, of nightmares that almost happened to their children while under their care. Stories of kids falling down stairs or chewing on a glass thermometer are not unique. Most of us (and our kids) got through these and other potential nightmares without any long term consequences.  Most of us got through these events without  anyone outside of the family ever knowing about them. Most of us were never investigated because our neighbours did not make the call to a child protection agency.

It may be a fine line between being an interfering neighbour and a legitimately concerned citizen But children do need protecting. While it may appear to be a waste of money and scarce resources to investigate kids playing in a backyard - I would rather live in a society where the occasional interfering neighbour raises concerns than in a society where a 19 month-old baby dies because no one thought it was their job to express concern.

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