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.
