A senior figure within the Western Trust has said that parents need to get 'back to basics' in terms of putting away their mobile devices and getting involved in playing with their children.
The comments came at a recent meeting of Derry City and Strabane District Council’s Health and Community, where councillors heard details of the Western Health and Social Care Trust’s (WHSCT) Children and Young People’s Plan, which was launched in 2017 and will run until 2020.
Addressing the meeting, Kieran Downey Director of Women and Children’s Services within the Trust, and Chair of Western Area Outcomes Group, said that they faced challenges, given that there were currently 628 children in the care system locally, with a further 270 children on the Child Protection Register, adding that there were also ‘significant challenges’ in terms of child poverty.
However, Mr Downey said that the Trust was now focused on three key ‘obsessions’, which was ‘ensuring every child has the best start in life, promoting the safety of our children and young people and working together to include the voice of children and young people’.
He continued that by 2020, it was hoped they could be in a ‘trauma-informed’ area, which entails health professionals understanding the impact of trauma on child development and learning how to effectively minimize its effects without causing additional trauma.
Mr Downey told the meeting that one of the most significant factors they were tackling was the issue of ‘toxic stress’ in children, which results from the likes opf physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect or mental illness.
To address this, Mr Downey said ‘we must move away from blame, shame and punishment’.
“Instead of asking children, ‘What’s wrong with you?’, we need to be saying ‘What happened to you?’, and move into understanding, nurturing and healing,” he continued.
“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken adults.”
Mr Downey then read out a quote from the American psychiatrist, Bruce D. Perry, currently the Senior Fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, which stated: “The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive.
“Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”
He also congratulated the local council on the focus it had given to young people in its Community Plan, which he said was a ‘brave and innovative step’.
Commenting, the independent councillor Darren O’Reilly said that more needed to be done locally to ‘engage’ with young people, rather than them being ‘demonised’ unfairly.
The SDLP’s Tina Gardiner then said that she was ‘alarmed’ at a trend she had noticed whereby parents tended to focus more on devices such as smartphones when they were in the company of their children, and asked Mr Downey for his views on this.
“Young parents would come and say to us ‘I don’t know how to play with my child’, and we would encourage them to start with simple games, or make something out of a newspaper with them,” he said.
“They just don’t have the skills and we need to get back to teaching that, and by that I mean that we have to get back to a lot of basic things.”
He then related an incident where he seen a young mother pushing a pram with a set of headphones, who was also checking her phone, and therefore didn’t notice that her child was trying to talk to her.
“Yes, phones are important, but they are ruling people’s lives,” he continued.
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