Tag: children

Universal Children’s Day: Giving Refugee Children a New "Normal"

paulmcadams
Today is Universal Children’s Day, celebrated November 20 to mark the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child over a quarter century ago. It’s a day to recognize children’s rights and to shed light on the progress made in securing such rights while not forgetting the challenges and disparities that persist. In last year’s State ofthe World’s Children issued by UNICEF (there should be a new one soon), it highlighted some persistent realities:  
  • Almost half of children under 5 in the poorest countries do not have the right to an official identity; 
  • The poorest 20% of the world’s children are twice as likely as the world’s richest 20% to be stunted by growth;
  • Children in 4 out of 10 households in the world’s poorest countries do not attend primary school;
  • Girls still have less access to quality education than boys in the world’s poorest nations;
  • Children going to school in the world’s poorest nations have inadequate access to toilets (both at school and at home);
One of the encouraging aspects of the report is that it highlights stories – of inspiration, innovation, care and dedication – on how to fulfill children’s rights. The stories focus on things that make sense: engaging youth, sparking creativity, working with communities, and reaching all children, among others. Reading the report, I came across something UNICEF refers to as their “Innovation Map”  – examples from around the world of successful projects. To take but one example, a project in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan(established in 2012 and currently hosting about 80,000 Syrian refugees) aims to solve the problem of girls and women unable to access the female toilets in the camp because there was no lighting. Channeling electricity to the toilets was not possible due to vandalism, so solar panels were installed above the toilets to provide the electricity for proper lighting.

Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
It’s a small innovation, but a necessary one. Just for a moment imagine what life is like in a refugee camp. In the case of Zaatari, the number of toilets available means that an average of 51 people share one toilet. The average person reading this blog probably shares a toilet with less than a tenth that number.
Crappy toilet statistics are only one aspect of living in a refugee camp that makes life harsh. Each refugee has 35 litres of water per day (the average consumption for Canadians was a whopping 251 litres per day in 2011). Just over half of the 28,000 school-aged children are enrolled in one of three schools operating on double-shifts. Two field hospitals have 55 beds in total (remember, there are 80,000 people living there, with 80 births per week). To put it simply, life in a refugee camp sucks. The connotation of “camp” implies a temporary condition, an in-between living arrangement from what used to be your home to a place where you don’t have to worry about being killed on a daily basis. The reality of such camps is quite different: a sense of permanence settles in, a sense of despair, and a sense of normality. I’m reminded of a TED Talk by George Takei in which he discusses his time as a child in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War: “Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps.It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality.”
As adaptable children are, they shouldn’t have to consider life in a camp as “normal.” There are nearly 50,000 children living in Zaatari camp now. However miserable life is in that camp, conditions in other camps, not to mention the unimaginable struggles Syrian refugees have faced crossing into Europe, can be even worse.
The sheer number of Syrian refugees is astounding. In total, Jordan currently has over 630,000 refugees; overall the number of registered Syrian refugees is nearly 4.3 million. A quarter of them – more than one million – are children. When I try to get my head around such numbers and weigh the reality of refugees’ lives with the ongoing debate of closing our borders to them, I find it very difficult to accept any argument – founded in ignorance, fear, xenophobia or racism, but often a mix of all these things – that supports measures to ignore their pleas and maintain their suffering.
Canada’s new government made a promise to welcome 25,000 refugees by the end of this year and is currently in the process of making sure this happens. Under normal circumstances, it’s an ambitious target, and recent terrorist attacks in Paris (and Beirut, and now Mali) have prompted some to put into question the need to adhere to the deadline of December 31 or even to admit refugees at all. To me, the date is not relevant; moving refugees out of misery is, and whether or not it takes two months or a little longer shouldn’t be a benchmark for success. The government’s approach is a sound one, since it focuses on refugees already registered in camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. The least Canadians can do is extend a warm welcome to those in need, and give a new place for thousands of refugees to call their home. It’s time to give refugees another option of what “normal” can be.

Find out how to help: The CBC Montreal website recently published a useful post on how Quebecers can help. 

Update November 23: I referred to the government’s plan as a “sound one” – now that the government has indicated it will not allow unaccompanied men into Canada, it’s not looking sound, nor is it fair. Tom Mulcair summed it up well by saying: “While security concerns remain of vital importance, will a young man who lost both parents be excluded from Canada’s refugee program?” He added, “Will a gay man who is escaping persecution be excluded? Will a widower who is fleeing [ISIS] after having seen his family killed be excluded?” A proper security screening is important for any refugee, regardless of their status as accompanied or not, and regardless of their sex. It is, as many have noted, very uncanadian.

The unavoidance of new bad words – a parent’s perspective

paulmcadams
I’m driving my younger son home and I ask him how his day went. He hesitates for a moment and tells me, “Why do they keep inventing more bad words, Daddy?”
Crap I know where this is going.

“What do you mean?” I ask him.

“You know,” he says, “the people who make up bad words. They keep coming up with new ones I’ve never heard of before.”

“So you heard a new one today at school?” He nods and says yes. Two kids were calling each other a name during recess and laughing about it. I know he doesn’t like saying bad words out loud, so I ask him to spell it out for me. He misspells it.

“That’s the name of a country in Africa,” I tell him. “But I know the word you’re talking about. It’s an old word that we shouldn’t be using anymore. It was used long ago to make people feel inferior and it was really bad.” I told him a little about the book on slavery I’d finished reading the week before.

“So it didn’t exist when you were young?” he asks me.

I told him it did. It’s the kind of discussion that catches me off-guard as a parent but I know I have to face these kinds of conversations whether I want to or not. As much as I want to protect my children from a world around them that is insulting, uncaring, rude, arrogant, stupid, shameful, discriminatory, racist, and sexist, there will be more and more times when I’m not around to shield them from any of it. My mother’s approach was one of avoidance: we never talked about kids swearing, doing drugs, drinking or having sex. None of that existed once I entered my home. She didn’t want to talk about it and neither did I. So when I have my son come up to me and tell me a swear word that’s new to him, I can’t fall back on my own experience to guide me on a proper response.

But despite this I’m glad he’s comfortable enough to talk to me about it, and however uncomfortable it is for me to answer him, I have to respond. As my children mature and learn more about the world around them, I realize they’re exposed to a lot more crap than I want them to be, but at the same time I need to realize that they are capable of making decisions about what to say or not say, how to be kind and respectful rather than mean-spirited, and how to speak up for what’s right. And talking to them about the stuff that was taboo when I was a kid is one way I hope will help.

“When the kids during recess were using that word, did you say anything to them?” I ask him.

He tells me no. “Maybe next time you hear that word you can tell them it’s not nice to say it. Like, ever.” He nods. I know he’s a good kid.

I drive down our street and pull into the driveway.

“There was another word I heard today, Daddy.”

Oh crap.

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November 20 is Universal Children’s Day. This year UNICEF is focusing on putting hidden violence and abuse of children in the spotlight. Let’s talk about it end violence against children in all its forms.

This is not a top ten list on how to be a good father

paulmcadams
I get annoyed with lists. Top ten tips for a greener household, top five exercises to get in shape, top twelve best foods, top ten things great fathers do. Come on. The top five, ten, or whatever the number of things that help you become a great father are worthless but I know they are ideal social media fodder and perfectly suitable to our era of convenience and quick fixes. The truth is, if someone were to ask me what makes a great father, I would just say, “Spend time with your kids.” End of story.

I was scared at the prospect of becoming a father. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it, and thought how weird it was that I spent much of my formative years learning about useless things like Pythagoras’ theorem, compound interest, the types of flora in the arctic and how to conjugate verbs in tenses I would never, ever use, yet no one ever told me how to be a good parent.

The second-hand smoke isn’t so nice, but thanks for being there.

I didn’t have a father long enough to learn from him. He passed away when I was three, so my memories of the two of us can be counted on one hand (well, two fingers). My mother regularly reminded me that she was both my my mother and father and always did what she thought was best. Through that I figured out, much later in life, that I should go ahead and try to be as much like her as possible. That meant being there for my kids.

Over the past twelve years I’ve done more kid things than I ever did in my childhood. I’ve drawn innumerable pictures of SpongeBob and Batman, and played with Lego, toys cars, and action figures. I didn’t think it possible to watch the entire series of The Suite Life on Deck and Wizards of Waverly Place but I have. I’ve played in sandboxes and swung on swings that strained to support my weight. I’ve played tag in the pool and whizzed around on a scooter. But I’ve also cleaned up plenty of barf and poop and pee, zipped up coats and tied shoelaces and tried in vain to convince my children to comb their hair. I’ve tried to feed them healthy foods but have given in to Kraft macaroni and cheese far too often. I’ve listened to them tell me stories they made up in their heads and adventures they lived on the playground.

I’ve tried to hug them as much as possible, I’ve said “It’ll be okay” after they’d fall and “Je t’aime” every night before going to sleep. I’d sit on the floor in the hallway waiting for them to fall asleep, trying to be as comfortable as possible and failing miserably because it hurt every time I would sit like that at the end of the day. I’ve screamed at them and felt horrible after. The louder I screamed the more I would think to myself, shamefully, My mother never spoke to me like that. I’ve said I’m sorry and hugged some more. And I’ve been lucky enough to have a wife who tells me I’m good when I’m good and lousy when I’m not.

I’m not perfect, but I’m there. I want to be there when my children need someone to talk to, I want to be there when they need a hug and won’t admit as much, I want to show them how to shave and how to badly tie a tie. I want to say to them, after each one asks me a few years from now to borrow the keys to the car, “Over my dead body” because that’s the answer I got growing up. The mundane moments of parenthood might not be very memorable, but taken as a whole they irrevocably strengthen a love that no child and no parent should live without. There are no top ten things you should do as a father, there are millions of things, starting with being there.