The Convention on the Rights of Children and the Family.
To be a child today

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I.   Preamble

Preamble, in its Latin root, means something that you do before you start walking. We need to establish here a "preamble", an understanding, a point of departure for the road that we are starting today and this starting point will be the text that we have handed you under the name "Our foundation". 

We are talking here about the human need and experience, repeated in different contexts, of setting parameters and agreements before starting a project. That way we hope to offer you the opportunity to live a common experience and come to a common understanding in spite of the diversity of disciplines and work places that you represent.

We need a certain understanding to do collective work. Even our language, Spanish, offer us rich coincidences that lead to semantic games. For example the verb "to believe" (creer) and the verb "to create" (crear) have the same form in their present indicative tense. When I say "creo" (I believe, I create) I express both my faith and my ability to create, to build, to allow a transformation to emerge from within.

So our starting point, our "preamble", will be to work under the norms and principles agreed upon a decade ago: the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yes, we may have diverse personal and professional references that determined different historical processes among us, but we hope and "believe" that we will be able to "create" a common ferment under one group. Lets hope that those wishes become a reality. 

Our guide document, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, establishes in its preamble that: "… Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the Growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community…" 

Those who proclaimed those words were convinced and jointly proclaimed a shared utopia in spite of the diversity of their backgrounds.

Today we are invited to review our value system, our ideologies, our levels of conviction. What is transcendent tends to become relative in our world today. There are complaints about "devaluated ideologies" and loss of density in that which is transcendent. In our quest for coming to agreements among us we are also trying to cement again our levels of conviction.  

That is why we are here.

II.  Focus on Rights

Continuing with our guide Document:  "… Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding. 

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity."

 This presupposes the commitment of each State to take steps so that each child could exercise his/her rights. 

We could talk of two broad categories of rights. The first is the right of the child to a family as an essential right. The second are the rights of the family to be supported and protected by the State.

a.  Right of the child to a family 

The process of humanization should be the first right to be granted to a child. This process is the result of an emotional-cultural structure that operates within a human group, is not genetically determined and will be activated by maturation.  

The result, an autonomous person, is at the root of all educational process. But this autonomy needs a previous stage of absolute dependence backed by a context of privacy and intimacy that must be continuous and trustworthy.

A "healthy" family, as a primary and natural group, would provide that context.

b.  Right of the family to protection by the State

The family must be protected and helped by the State to be able to fulfill its primary social role.  

- The State must offer effective protection to the family so the family, in turn, will be able to offer protection to the child. 

- So, to be able to assume its responsibility towards the child, the family needs the State to assume its own responsibility towards the family. 

III.  To be a child today. The end of childhood? 

The aim of this topic is to open a few questions for you to work on through the seven modules of this Seminar. We know that there is consensus in defining childhood as the result of a cultural process. This process operates from within the institutions that mold it today.

What we call "childhood" is a symbolic and imaginary production promoted by the so called "bourgeois State" 300 years ago. It is the result of an understanding and a set of concepts that came out of institutional life (mainly family and school).  

Today those institutions are in crisis according to several social sciences and therefore that same crisis, that "exhaustion of the concept" very much affects the creation of childhood. 

The cultural concept of childhood is supported, according to linguists, by concepts that carry a specific set of meanings. Some of the most important concepts have been: docility, capacity for waiting, innocence, among others. 

These concepts, we know, are subjects of debate today. We are told that the institutional concept of childhood has been transformed.

The influence of the media has gathered a devastating strength in creating new meaning and affecting values.  

It is imperative to reflect on what model of childhood emerges from its influence.  

In view of this we will devote the next module of this Seminar to the topic "Family and the Media". 

We consider essential that you work on the question: What kind of childhood is produced today by the media? This will lead to other questions such as:

-          Is childhood as we knew it a thing of the past?

-          Is school as we knew it a thing of the past?

-          Is the family as we knew it a thing of the past?

The media have a direct effect in building the subjectivity of children today. Which are the aspects that define the vision of childhood as provided today by the media? 

By the way media uses advertising, it is obvious today that the child is seen as a body with urgent needs. It is just seen as a consumer to be manipulated by marketing strategies. We can understand then that the historic-cultural milieu determines the idea and the way of being a child or adolescent. 

The massive communication media, as a privileged place to expose the child, dictate then the models of how to behave, to be accepted. They also bring up topics such as statistical data on the rising rate of children having conflicts with the law but they report  this in a way that does not invite serious reflection on the topic. 

The attraction and influence of the media is such that it eliminates the possibility of an alternative way of thinking. For us the question is: are we really protecting children and the rights of children?

There is also another topic, related to a process that started in the second half of last century, and that topic is the separation of couples and family groups. Is the traditional family a thing of the past?. There are many children today who live within several families simultaneously according to new legal and accepted models of attachment and un-attachment. How will all those new parameters be processed in the future both at the individual as well as the collective level? 

IV.   Promotion of resilience 

This is another aspect that we hope this Seminar will deal with. Since the definition of resilience is the subjective ability to resist and even come out stronger in the face of adversity, we can say that this topic calls for a personal reflection.

Resilience was a concept not used in the past, but when we analyze the concept today and look even at our own personal lives we come to realize and appreciate all the elements of resilience that played such an important part in our lives and allowed us to face adversity unscathed. 

V.   Childhood as a process between Nature and Culture  

It could be said that the fundamental task of the time of childhood and adolescence is related to having a space, (backed by the supporting structures), to build a value system that will allow them to interpret, understand and transform reality.

To have a system of meaning and value is like a fundamental grammar that the human being needs to "Believe and Create", to walk through life, to build his own project and from there to build his own world. This system is built within and by the family. It all comes back to the family and therefore we need to find a way to empower the family within which the capacity for resilience is at play.

We are facing here a collective and multidisciplinary challenge. We have to collaborate with the State in the task of protecting families at risk.

We believe that a great vacuum had existed in relation to family policies, even when dealing with policies towards children and adolescents. We believe that today parents are in need of much training and support and this calls for professional help from many fields. We should consider this collective task, this creation of resilience, as an immunization campaign to create strengths to deal with and resist adversity.

The building of that sort of grammar that we referred to earlier, presupposes that we, adults, review our own grammar and see where we place our punctuation marks, our contents, our semantics, our values. Our challenge is to build a coherent world within our ethical values, with the concept of a strengthened  family, so that the child could live and exercise his/her rights as part of his "Right to Happiness" to use the simple enunciation of Dr. Rodríguez Fabregat at the opening ceremony for this Institute.