Difficulties of Childhood

All children live in families or perhaps it is more accurate to say, all children live in relationship with someone or ones who are deemed older and wiser and hence responsible. Survival depends upon it. For the majority of children family is the biological or adoptive parents or stepparents, grandparents, uncles’ aunts, and cousins who create a rich world of sustenance, dispute, fracture, love, and containment. Other children live in ‘family’ created by the state, foster parents, group homes with paid carers and in some countries orphanages. Even those children without obvious carers in the most deprived places on earth, slums, rubbish dumps, missions, reserves and the streets, form relationships of dependence where the older and wiser may be as young as 5 and the dependent 2 or 3 years old. We know from unfortunate naturalistic studies created by war and natural disaster that babies deprived of relationship die at a much higher rate than those with less optimal physical care who are loved. From the outset we are and depend on being relational. 

Not all children are born or arrive into circumstances that promote their best interests and not all of us begin with an equal balance of advantage at an individual level. Intelligence, attractiveness, health and conditions like autism and chromosomal abnormalities mean some children begin with additional challenges. Not all children are born to mother’s whose health and self-care has been optimal or into a world where necessities like good food and fresh water are readily available. The family the child enters will also determine their trajectory as we know that even infants are impacted by violence and conflict. Additionally, race, culture and religion can all advantage or disadvantage a child from birth. Each level of system from that inside the body to the neighbourhood and culture in which a child resides will impact on their life. 

Yet no family is immune to struggle and even the kindest and most privileged will at times encounter difficulties with and for their children. Advantage does not protect against a child born with a genetic abnormality, a difficult temperament or birth injury or the ordinary vicissitudes of life, illness, accidents and death of loved family members…

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