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Parenting

Kim Clijsters and Building Strong Families

Tennis star Kim Clijsters advocates for stronger families

Belgium tennis star and US Open winner Kim Clijsters and her husband, basketball star Brian Lynch, were at the European Parliament as ambassadors for SOS Children's Villages speaking about how to strengthen children and families by breaking the cycle of poverty. Clijsters and Lynch, parents themselves, echoed the words of the other panellists (including myself) making presentations to parliamentarians (a two minute video of the panel is available here). What she said was that strong families protect children from abuse, from early school leaving, and a host of other problems. But strong families are threatened most by poverty, something families themselves can seldom control. Furthermore, if we look at why children end up in alternative care, like foster homes, group homes, and even jail, poverty is by far the single largest contributing factor.

And yet we continue to build prisons rather than schools. In Canada, Treasury Board President and senior government minister Stockwell Day recently justified billions in expenditures on new prisons at a time when crime is decreasing by telling the public that there had been an increase in "unreported crime". It was embarrassing to think a senior minister could say something that sounded like it was borrowed from Tom Cruise's film, Minority Report. Such irresponsible governing, whether by a government on the left or right, is wrong. Especially when almost all of those unreported crimes are petty thefts and other illegal acts related to poverty, not violent crimes requiring incarceration.

At a time when the economy is in dire straits, and millions are unemployed, we can't forget that without hope for a better future and the means to achieve it, we will lose a generation of children. Our children's resilience depends on a society that addresses the problem of their poverty. Our knowledge economy depends on kids staying in school. Strong families of tomorrow depend on children learning how to parent by being well parented today. It has been estimated that every dollar we invest in prevention of children's mental health problems is the equivalent of seven dollars in treatment and services (like jails) later on.

If Clijsters is right, then we need to do more to eradicate poverty. How can we talk about a child's resilience if that child is being forcibly removed from her family because her parents can't feed her? First things first. Most child welfare problems are problems of poverty not irresponsible parenting. If we want a generation of children to grow into a generation of responsible citizens who contribute economically, we had better begin to think about how to help our children when they are still young enough to see a large return on our economic investment in them. To my mind, that means schools, housing, counselling, public transportation (poor people need the means to get to work), and of course, employment.

The great news is that we have across North America examples of how communities, businesses, and governments can work together to achieve these goals. One need only look at the work by Bill Strickland in Pittsburgh at the Bidwell Training Center to see solutions in action. Strickland has designed a vocational center where people with little education are getting the training they need to find guaranteed employment in industries where there is a shortage of skilled labor. As Strickland likes to say, "The impossible is possible."

I think he would have felt right at home sitting besides Clijsters and me in Brussels arguing for stronger families through poverty reduction.

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