Australian children and young people’s well-being at risk
Professor Fiona Stanley, the Chair of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), claims that as a nation Australia is behind many other developed countries when it comes to the wellbeing of our children and youth. She offers strong evidence to support her claims, in her article Raising a Nation, published in the September issue of Sydney’s Child. To make her point she compared it to our national focus on the Olympic Games: she asked us to imagine Australia not bringing home even one single medal, let alone a gold one – and that is the equivalent of where we stand in comparison to other countries: not even in the running. She asks how it is that in a country as successful as Australia we are prepared to accept such mediocrity when it comes to the welfare of our children and young people?
Her organisation produced a ‘Report Card’ last year which identified and measured 42 areas of children and young people’s welfare, and compared them to those in other countries and this is what they found: Australia ranks 20 out of 27 nations for infant mortality, which is when babies die before reaching the age of one year. Teenage pregnancy rates are much higher than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average, with Australia ranking 21 out of 30 member countries examined. Road deaths are 12 times higher for young people in Australia than for their peers in Portugal. We are also seeing an increase in child abuse and neglect, obesity, mental health problems, binge drinking, antisocial behaviour and bullying.
Our family relationships, in particular, ranked poorly: 21 out of 27 nations in terms of ‘children eating a main meal with their parents several times a week’, and 18th in terms of ‘parents spending time just talking with their children more than once a week’. She blames these failings on adults trying to keep up with expectations of increasing material affluence, which means they simply do not have adequate time available to them to perform their most important role, which is parenting.
ARACY has many suggestions about how Australian society can improve its performance for the betterment of conditions for children and young people, but an especially good idea was setting up a Parliamentary group to review all proposed legislation for its potential impact on children. That is because every service, every development, every funding decision, and every health or transport initiative impacts directly, or indirectly, on children and families – in either a positive or negative way. And, she says, if something is good for children it is going to be good for the whole of society. I think that is an excellent idea, and that the State Government should do this, as well.
To learn more about ARACY research and collaboration for the wellbeing of children and young people in Australia, or about the Report Card comparing Australia to the other OECD countries, please go to http://www.aracy.org.au/
