OPINION: Ireland props up Unicef's childcare league table and will pay the price for creating a new generation of damaged kids, writes Fintan O'Toole
AS THE reaction to the appalling killing of Aidan O'Kane has shown, public discussion of troubled children in Ireland has now borrowed a word from England - "feral".
It is designed, not to convey information, but to distort a basic truth. It has always been used to describe those rare cases of children raised by animals - the wolf girls and dog boys who have provoked such fascination through the centuries.
By using the term to describe unruly or dangerous children on our streets, we conveniently occlude the fact that these kids were not raised by animals. They were raised by people. They are products, not of wolf packs or gorilla tribes, but of our society.
We know that in the vast majority of cases, disturbed children are not born but made. The brain doesn't come fully formed as part of the package that emerges from the womb. It is quite literally shaped by two forces - nutrition and loving one-to-one interaction with adults. Neurological circuits are created by good interaction. They're also damaged by bad interaction - high levels of stress hormones in early childhood "literally disrupt brain architecture".
Children who have too many bad experiences and too few good ones have a high chance of growing up to be disruptive and antisocial because they have poor levels of cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional development.
If we know all this, we also know that, even leaving aside any sense of justice or compassion, it is obviously in the interests of society to try to ensure that the number of such children is as small as it possibly can be.
Damaged kids can cause a lot of damage to others, not least to their own children. And the risks are higher now than they've ever been. As well as the inherited cycle of deprivation that we've failed to deal with, we have two huge social shifts. One is the rise of single-parent families, where the burden of caring lies heavily on one person, usually the mother. The other is having both parents work outside the home, making the quality of childcare systems crucial.
Knowing all of this, we must also know that we are collectively failing our children and creating terrible trouble for ourselves.
Last week, Unicef published a report card on early childhood education and care in 25 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It used 10 benchmarks, including a national plan that gives priority to disadvantaged children; child poverty; parental leave; the training of childcare staff; the ratio of staff to children in pre-school care; and access to essential health services for children.
Most countries met at least half of these benchmarks. One (Sweden) met all 10, and France and the other Nordic countries met eight. A number of countries that are significantly poorer than Ireland - Hungary, Slovenia, Portugal - met at least four.
Even Mexico, whose gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is a little more than one-quarter of ours, managed to meet three of the benchmarks.
Ireland met precisely one, that of having 50 per cent of staff in early childhood education with relevant third-level qualifications.
We are, as a result, at the bottom of Unicef's league table.
Across a range of objective measures, we are betraying our children. Effective parental leave in Ireland is 18 days, compared with 116 days in Norway, 103 in France and 95 in Hungary. The number of three-year-olds enrolled in childcare is way below the OECD average. For four-year-olds, we're the second worst in the OECD.
Public expenditure on childcare, as a percentage of GDP, is joint lowest (with South Korea) - our level is one-fifth of the internationally recommended minimum of 1 per cent of GDP. We don't even have a national plan for early childhood services.
We can see the results of this neglect in the school attendance figures released last week by the National Education Welfare Board. Absence from school is closely linked to poor educational performance and to the likelihood that a child is in trouble. We have a big problem: more than 55,000 students miss school each day.
The red lights start flashing when a kid is missing for more than 20 days a year - one in 10 primary-school pupils (50,000 in all) and one in six second-level students (55,000) are in this category. Unsurprisingly, these kids are far more likely to be from local authority housing, with one parent or families where the main earner is unemployed.
The consequences are predictable. We are, quite systematically, creating a new generation of damaged kids. We have one chance to give these kids what they need and we're not taking it. There is an absolute certainty that many of these kids will go on to harm themselves and others. There is also an absolute certainty that we will spend 10 times as much trying to limit that damage as we could have spent preventing it.
If we want to call these kids "feral", we should remember that we're the wolves who reared them.