Children deserve love and security

THERE seem to be a lot of children in the news right now. The stories range from the tragic death of Baby P to the real-life Mowgli child, an extraordinary story.

A young girl called Tippi spent the first 10 years of her life in the wild. Unlike the Mowgli of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, she did so with her parents. They are wildlife filmmakers and photographers and spent those years living in tents in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

My paper is full of pictures taken by Tippi's mother that show a young girl being licked by a cheetah, riding bare-back both an elephant and an ostrich and sitting peacefully next to a leopard. She looks to be totally at ease in all of them. She also looks at ease with and fascinated by the tribesman showing her his technique with a bow and arrow.

Her mother, talking to the journalist who wrote up the story, talks about the child being in the mindset of the animals. The girl herself, now studying in Paris, apparently believes she has the gift of talking to animals.

What a fabulous upbringing, having her first friendship with Abu the elephant at 18 months old. The key seems to have been a lack of fear and a corresponding trust.

What a contrast with Baby P's misery. I find it almost incomprehensible that a baby could be treated as he was. Alas, his case is not unique.

It seems extraordinary that lessons seem not to have been learned after the earlier case of Victoria Climbié from the same area of London.

We need somehow to teach people how to love their children and to put their needs first. How much, I wonder, is due to the "wicked step-parent" syndrome? And why is it that the influence of the "wicked step-parent" is greater than the natural love of the parent for the child?

In-between those two stories, I read of the couple being prosecuted, and possibly having custodial sentences, for the damage caused to their 12-year-old child by his parents fighting each other in front of him over many years.

Does that seem harsh? Yes, at one level it does, but we have to take proper responsibility for those who are dependant on us, especially when we brought them into the world. On the whole, children are pretty resilient, but they are also very vulnerable. Given the right balance of support and independence, security and adventure — and above all given the warmth of constant love and affection — children will flourish. Without them, some may survive, but they will bear the scars for the rest of their lives.

Of course some marriages will fail; sometimes children may benefit from acknowledging that the relationship is no longer right. Often though, I find the children cease to be kept at the centre of their parents' concerns — where they ought to be. I once remember reading of an elderly couple in the divorce courts. Asked by a perplexed judge why they were divorcing after 70 years of marriage, they responded by revealing that they hadn't felt they should do so while their children were still alive.

It is clear Jesus put children at the centre of his concern. He had harsh words for those who did not, and he spoke of the need for all of us to keep a genuine childishness at the heart of our relationship with God. He was referring to the childlike ability to trust, which must have been at the root of Tippi's relationship with her wild animal friends. It is what gets so radically damaged by the kind of treatment given to Baby P and, before him, Victoria Climbié.

Yesterday was Children in Need. What all children need is an environment where they can learn to trust and be trusted, to grow up free of fear and be loved for who they are.