Expendable Children
The world is full of tragedies, personal and aggregate. Children are tragically the most vulnerable demographic in any society and the most affected by events betraying their best interests, affecting their well being in the most serious ways with far-reaching consequences for the best interests of any society's future. Their very dependence for emotional well being and material support leaves them helpless, the first line of victims in any societal upheaval.China may be experiencing a burgeoning economic growth, where greater numbers of its people are succeeding to middle class status, and where consumer goods are increasingly available to greater numbers of its urban class. But the trickle-down of this newly-emerging prosperity to the rural areas has been slow, and in many instances entirely non-existent. Progress also means that traditional farming communities are losing their arable lands to commercial installations.
In far-flung rural communities there is scant employment, and subsistence farming, leaving people in true poverty and desperate need. The solution to which is often found in parents deciding to migrate to urban centres in a search of employment, leaving their infants and their children behind, most often in the care of grandparents. Entire communities have become accustomed to accepting the reality of "left-behind" children.
These are children whose fundamental needs have been sacrificed, whose development has been arrested through lack of emotional support, whose interest in life has been scarified, and whose purpose to themselves and to society has been denied. There is no one to look after the needs of young children; they learn to live on their own and to look listlessly after their own needs. Grandparents are often incapable of supporting their needs.
One-third of children enrolled in rural schools may represent these abandoned children whose migrant-worker parents may never return home to see their "left-behind" children, but who send scant funds back home for their upkeep. There are an estimated 20 million such children across China, enduring life parentless. In the new China the jobs and the opportunities are located in the big cities. And China has a lot of mega cities.
Huge cities with immense populations that are swelling with development, and for whom the 150 million migrant workers produce sweat labour for inadequate recompense. Grinding poverty has been traded for unskilled construction jobs which, although paying inadequately, represent a higher state of livelihood than what was ever available back home in rural China.
In some remote villages the left-behind children can represent up to 70% of students in a school. Many children have been deprived of their parents' presence for so long they can barely conjure up memory of their parents. This type of elemental deprivation has a devastating effect on children, on their sense of self-worth and their place in a society where no one has the wherewithal to draw them into an adopted family circle.
They languish. In some districts attempts are made through the school system for a casual adoption system, built on a family structure, where teachers opt to represent the interests of such children who are given the option of selecting the teacher whom they wish to regard as a parent. To whom they can go from time to time, to express themselves, their hopes and fears.
"Since the families we form here are not real families ... it's not absolutely sure that the kids will accept you even if they have chosen you."
Chalk up another tragedy, another failure in the human condition to ensure the survival of functioning, well-balanced individuals to further society.
Labels: Environment, Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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