Who Cares?
I have just been reading an article on the BBC website about the subject of a BBC Newsnight report on 'Teens in Care'. Or lack of care as it appears.
The report makes for depressing reading citing steadily increasing numbers of young people effectively abandoned and left to fend for themselves without proper support or guidance.
It is a sad indictment of our age that there are so many children needing state care at all these days. I don't remember, growing up in our sprawling West London estate, so many children needing to be taken into care. I know that it obviously did happen elsewhere as my mother was, for a time, a foster parent for children who were temporarily taken into care due to a parent's illness or similar circumstance. Somehow, though, it seems that extended family, friends and neighbours all looked out for each other and this is something that appears to be missing in today's society.
I don't know where everything went wrong. Is it possible to mend our modern society or is it too late?
Yes, it's such a dreadful shame there isn't the support and care for the teens when they leave care. They really all need to go to a halfway house where they can learn the skills they need for independent living before they are allocated accommodation.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I used to have a friend many years ago, when I lived in the London Borough of Hillingdon, who was quite a bit younger than me. She and her sister had both left care and were two of the most practical people I knew. The younger one even knew how to cook kidneys; something I hated and would never have cooked but I wouldn't have had a clue how to do it!
I think things are changing so much now that that probably doesn't happen quite so much these days, more's the pity.
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