Hi,
I’m writing this newsletter after being awake most of the night. My son was in pain. He cried and cried. He would only settle in my arms while I walked around. He refused his father’s arms and kept calling for me.
I think that even if a nurse had been around, I couldn’t have been replaced and taken some time off to sleep. My presence and care were essential to him yesterday, just like they have been most of the time since he was born.
In the morning, I announced that I had to take him to the doctor and I was pretty zonked out – don’t expect too much of me workwise. Thankfully my job is flexible, though in some countries this wouldn’t come down to your job – this type of care is taken into account by the state. For example, in Sweden, parents and caregivers get compensation from the government if their child is sick and they need to stay at home to care for them. But in most other places, caregivers have to do some high-complexity juggling if a kid gets sick and can’t go to school.
This isn’t just an anecdote. My colleague Lynn Berger starts off on a new adventure as our Care correspondent this week, and it’s a good time to reflect on the issue of care.
The type of care that parents give to their children on a daily basis is usually an invisible form of labour, because it doesn’t contribute to GDP in a way that’s easily measurable. Think of breastfeeding, which is never taken into account in the GDP because it doesn’t “produce” anything concrete. By contrast, the market value of milk formula production and sales are counted. How weird is that?
As care is made invisible in the public sphere, it is often taken for granted. Yet, care is necessary for all of us to survive as human beings and to thrive.
So, can we switch our priorities and put care first? This is a crucial question when it comes to children and their carers. If you’re interested, read Lynn’s mission statement here. And give her a warm welcome by signing up to her newsletter here. You will thank me later!
(By the way, Lorenzo is fine. He had an ear infection but he’s better already!)
Empathy and a female VP as a new role model
One of the words that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden emphasised as they celebrated their victory was empathy. I’m surprised this word isn’t used more often by world leaders. Of course you need empathy to take care of other people, even more so a whole nation of people. I wrote more about empathy in a piece about Trump’s childhood (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have much).
This is why I enjoyed this comment by Stephanie Land, who worked as a maid while she was a single mother and wrote a book about it. “As a country in crisis, we desperately need that compassion. We need leaders who are able to vividly remember how it feels to experience hardship, trauma and pain, who make us feel less alone,” she wrote.
And if I was in doubt that having Kamala Harris as vice-president was good news for children and families, this detail in a story won me over completely: “Aged 13, she mobilised the neighbourhood children to protest against rules that stopped them playing on the lawn in front of their apartment building. The protest was a success.”
Yes for free play!
In other good electoral news, Sarah McBride became the first transgender state senator in the US, after being elected in Delaware. She has an impressive track record, and what she wrote after the election got straight to me: "I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them, too."
Smacking? No, thanks!
Before the projections announced Biden and Harris as winners, I spent a huge amount of time online, scrolling on Twitter and hitting refresh on several news pages.
One particular tweet caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks.
"When a child can’t read, you teach them. When a child can’t tie their shoelaces, you teach them. So it makes no sense to me that when a child does something wrong, you punish them," Emili, aged 12, wrote about corporal punishment.
Emili explains so clearly why corporal punishment makes no sense from a developmental perspective, and is often a way for parents or caregivers to let out tension if under stress.
I recognise it from my own personal experience. Like my colleague OluTimehin Adegbeye, our Othering correspondent, I was raised with parents who practised a “not too often and not too hard” discipline.
But no matter what my parents considered “not too often and not too hard”, I remember those smacks quite vividly.
Now, when I feel so stressed that I want to scream at Lorenzo or shake him, I tend to just leave the room. I do it because I remember physically what it felt like and I don’t want to do it to him.
Here’s the good news, the reason why I came across what Emili said: Scotland has become the latest nation to outlaw corporal punishment of children, following directives by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“Experience in other jurisdictions, including Ireland and New Zealand, shows providing children with protection against assault by removing defences for physical punishment fosters cultural change and facilitates support for positive parenting, improving outcomes for children,” writes Bruce Adamson, Scotland’s Children and Young People’s Commissioner, one of the backers of the bill that came into effect on 7 November.
So, no more skelps, as they say in Scots. Which nation will follow suit? And what do you think of corporal punishment with children? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Until next week,
Irene
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