On the children's side

"It takes an entire village to raise a child," says an old African saying. In fact, the family is not enough, a wider network is needed, a community that can offer further relationships and opportunities for growth. And know how to be a lifesaver in moments of fragility. Yet, more and more often, there is the risk of considering the family as a private universe, in whose intimacy it is good not to intrude, as if the family bond created a border with the outside world. However, behind this privatistic and isolated conception of the family there is hidden an individualistic and fragmented model of human relationships, which exposes the child and other vulnerable subjects to many risks and betrays a "proprietary" vision of the minor. From a juridical and also pedagogical point of view, the child is nobody's property, not even his biological parents, and has the right to grow up in an emotionally and educationally adequate family, which integrates with the rest of the community.
Children must be looked after and protected by their parents, but they are not their parents.

The State today recognizes a shared responsibility towards children, since parents are the first responsible educators of their children, but they are not the only ones. It is also necessary to overcome and resolve the dichotomy between the rights of the child and the rights of the parent. "Parental capacity does not automatically derive from procreative capacity", Chiara Saraceno reminds us, and parents, rather than rights, have duties towards their children. The most important aspect is that minors are holders of rights per se.
The role of the state is to protect children and contribute to shared responsibility for them.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, also signed by Italy, states that the well-being and interests of children and young people must always be considered paramount over those of adults. Unfortunately, however, in the current social crisis, the needs of adults often make those of children invisible and the risk is that the needs of children are considered accessories and therefore superfluous. There is a return to an adult-centric approach, focused on defending blood ties to the bitter end, even when the family is not emotionally and educationally adequate.

Today we are witnessing an exponential increase in juvenile problems, an increase in vulnerability, which manifests itself in various forms such as domestic violence, an increase in separations and divorces, family breakdown, an increase in adult pathologies and antisocial behavior the fragility of the parental relationship.
The typology of minors in difficulty is increasingly complex and transversal, as well as more numerous, and coming from different social classes. In the past, the minors in charge of the services often belonged to families with problems of cultural and socio-economic poverty. Today, on the other hand, family conflict, parental relational and health problems (addiction and mental health problems) and the migratory background are among the emerging problems and concern a plurality of social classes. Individuals, families, the younger generations are often left alone in the face of the bewilderment of having to face their own lives.

In particular, conflictual separations represent a growing and particularly complex case, transversal to social classes, which deserves specific attention.
In many cases, the conflict between parents takes on such a resonance and prominence with respect to the needs of the children as to overshadow the latter and create particularly serious situations such as the media exploitation of the children's discomfort to obtain an advantage in the separation process.

Some believe that economic difficulties are almost always the cause of family fragility, when instead scientific studies and empirical evidence attest to exactly the opposite: an adult with psychiatric and addiction difficulties often finds it difficult to manage his parenting and therefore also his working and social life, consequently worsening one's economic conditions.
 

An adult with scarce economic resources certainly struggles more to manage everyday life and being poor exacerbates and makes problems more visible, but a poor adult is not automatically a neglectful parent. In short, there is no causal link, an automatism, between poverty and educational difficulty.

Purely economic support to families in difficulty therefore does not represent the solution, nor does it guarantee an improvement in parenting skills, as demonstrated by numerous researches, including Italian ones (Zancan, 2018). Indeed, it is harmful if the parents' problems concern addictions or are connected to mental health, because it exposes the social service to continuous requests without guarantees. One form of support for families in difficulty is foster care, an extraordinary instrument of solidarity in favor of children and parents at the same time.
Fostering is a form of "co-parenting" and is the opposite of "property", because it means taking on parental responsibility without the certainty of being parents forever. Fostering is not a shortcut to adoption, it doesn't push away, but keeps the family of origin close. Foster care is one more family for the child, not one less. Child protection intervention is all the more effective the earlier it is.

The worrying increase in "filicides", of which there is too little talk, requires a greater educational and informational investment on the subject. In fact, 447 died from 2000 to 2017, a gruesome figure. We have to make a cultural and social change so as not to make any family feel alone, but to have them supported by a community that supports them in times of difficulty. The family is not an idealized private world, but a primary social bond which today is exposed to a serious structural crisis which risks harming children above all. For this, the entire community, the entire village, must take action to shore up the family and not abandon it to solitude. We need to think about safety nets for families.

Monica Canalis
NP December 2022