Feeding the kids: don't allow it to rest here
Feeding your offspring is one of the most primal urges on this planet. So how have we got to the point where at least 80,000 parents apparently do not respond to this urge?
This starts with a fable about cats. Not cute cats. Semi-feral, semi-starving cats.
These skinny and bedraggled moggies lived next door, somewhat loosely, back in the early 1990s.
Ours was a student flat and in a mix of idealism and frugality we’d banned cats, along with television, Nutella and a couple of exes (ex-partners and ex-flatmates – not always the same people, by the way).
The neighbours were a large family and belonged to one of the more strict churches – after all this time it's not clear which, but Jehovah's Witnesses rings a vague insistent memory bell.
They had a cat. One female cat. A cat which, for either religious or financial reasons, was never spayed.
The result, mother nature being the heartless brute she is, was that this cat was the regular target of all the neighbourhood toms and was permanently having kittens.
The family didn’t feed the kittens when they arrived and the result was they seldom survived beyond the first year. They either died off from disease, being bowled by cars, trains, or being mauled by local dogs.
It was, frankly, pretty bloody awful. Early one winter the cat and kittens were skulking around our back yard. The kittens were still pretty tiny and skinny but the mother looked worse. Skin and bone.
It was all too much
It was a cold and damp evening and despite knowing it would be making a rod for our backs, it was all too much. I got out the milk, warmed it and put it out.
What stays with me after all this time is this: the mother cat wouldn’t touch the food. Not until the kittens were full.
She hung back, despite looking a damn sight more ill and starving than the kittens. I went around and tried to shoosh her towards the milk but she wasn’t having any.
In the end I dug out a tin of tuna and put it out for her – the kittens were still too small for solids. Only then would she eat anything.
And I’ll never forget the look of desperation in that cat’s eyes.
I thought of that cat when the television programmes first started running, a few months ago, about kids turning up to school in south Auckland with no lunch.
It was great TV. For those who didn’t see it, children at one of the region’s poorer schools were asked to leave their lunches on their desk when they went out at playtime. Most of the desks were empty, although some had something utterly un-nutritious like a bag of chips.
Basic driver of behaviour
The point is this: feeding your offspring is one of the most primal urges on this planet. It is right up there as a basic driver of behaviour, only slightly behind the urge of self-preservation and the urge to reproduce.
Animals possess it in abundance. So, too, do most adults.
This is actually why Hone Harawira's Feed Our Kids slogan has been so successful. Simple – one might say simplistic – but it hooks in to that primal instinct, and any political slogan which can engage gut feelings at that level has a lot going for it.
Call it New Zealand egalitarianism, call it the Telethon Syndrome if you want to be a bit more cynical about it, but a political reality in this country is that we don't like the idea of children going hungry.
Partly it's because we produce food more efficiently than any other country in the world, and we should be able to feed our own offspring. More fundamentally, it is more just a gut feeling that this not what New Zealand is about.
Then there is the purely practical issue that this country already has a large problem with the "long tail" of the bottom 20% or so of people coming out of our schools.
Roughly that percentage are functionally illiterate for today's world, and a larger proportion, according to a Department of Labour study in 2010, are functionally innumerate.
They tend to come from the poorer families and its a pretty reasonable bet the children coming through now who are not eating adequately are going to represent the next generation of that bottom 20% unless something is done.
The long-term impact of this bottom 20% – and it has been happening now for at least 30 years – is the stunted and frustrated lives, inability to cope with an increasingly complex world, emotional turmoil, to say nothing of its influence on New Zealand's poor workplace productivity, is incalculable.
But it is colossal in its social, health and economic damage.
So $1.9 million a year, aimed at cutting in to this, is not a bad investment. There is no doubt the government had to make the move it did, and not just for reasons of political calculation (although it would be an extraordinarily naive person who did not conclude this played a part).
But it should not stop there.
It may be the parents of the 80,000 children we are told are going to school unfed are also going to work unfed, but I have to confess I rather doubt it.
I'm fairly sure we would have heard by now. That degree of malnutrition would have been coming through in health and workplace accident reports, and these are notable by their absence.
Warped and stunted
The question of just why this most primal of social drives, to feed one's offspring, has become warped and stunted needs a lot more work.
One can suggest possibilities. Poverty, obviously – but there are foodbanks, not to mention Working for Families (which, I know, does not cover beneficiaries, although it may do so if a human rights case currently before the courts goes the way of the plaintiffs).
Drug abuse (and I include alcohol abuse in this) also probably plays a part. Few things will cause a total and abject abnegation of any responsibilities than being out of your head on something – indeed, often the entire point of such abuse is to get away from those responsibilities.
And that is the key thing which I feel has been missed in the binary, not to say bipolar, debate of this week.
Too much of it seemed to imply that the government's Kick Start programme was all important but stingy and that any personal responsibility is irrelevant.
For the other side, it seemed, the issue of parental responsibility is so paramount it meant the government should not do anything.
In a perfect world, personally, I'd agree with that second position. But we live in a far from perfect world. The $1.9 million going in to the Kick Start programme is not a bad investment, under the circumstances.
But this cannot be allowed to rest here. Just why parents of 80,000 children have apparently managed to shuck off this most basic and urgent of drives – that of feeding one's offspring – needs a lot more work.
And slogans won't help much. This is a much more complex, and disturbing, issue than that.
Rob Hosking
Fri, 31 May 2013
Fri, 31 May 2013
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Feeding the kids: don't allow it to rest here
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