Strong family support and acceptance among peers

Strong family support and acceptance among peers are two building blocks on which healthy development of children stands. Trouble between parents, divorces and ill treatment by step family members leave the formative years of children devastated. The government and organisations like child care centres work towards counselling these children and their families. The paper would profile a children’s centre called Soho Children’s Centre situated in Birmingham (sohocc.bham.org.uk, 2017) and take into account the Big Society Theory. The international laws for child protection laid down by international bodies like the European Union which enforces child protection and child rights would be considered in the study (ec.europa.eu, 2017). The profiling would help delving deeper into the factors which lead to devastations of the lives of these children and recognise steps which can be adopted to benefit the children who are affected by domestic problems and violence.

The following section would explore the various aspects of Birmingham who would enable closer understanding of the community being studied namely, distressed children at Soho Children Centre.

The map below shows that deprivation levels in the various places in the United Kingdom. The map clearly shows that the city of Birmingham falls under the area marked in blue which means that city suffers from high rate of deprivation.

According to the Indices of Deprivation published by the Birmingham Council, the city ranks in the sixth position as far as deprivation index of England is concerned. The graph above published by the council shows measurement of deprivation based on ten parameters. It shows that deprivation rate in significant parameters like income, employment and living environment standard remains high the three years namely 2004, 2007 and 2010. Deprivation due to crime has fallen which is a good sign. One analysing these facts, one can point out that they have serious impacts on the lives of children and their well being. The graph below shows that, in low income families, less number of children live with their birth parents compared to high income families (telegraph.co.uk, 2017). The second graph shows the increase in deprivation among the families in Birmingham as far as income and employment are concerned. This means that the numbers of low income families are surging in Birmingham. This means that more number of children would not be able to stay with both birth parents and some would be forced to stay with hostile step families. Donohue et al. (2014), in this direction points out that violence and exploitation of children in the step families harm their psychological development. Moreover, the low income creates stress among the family members which lead to abusive environment. These hostile environmental conditions lead to complex nature among these children like fear, withdrawal symptoms and tendency towards addictions (telegraph.co.uk, 2017). An analysis of these figures and their interpretations clearly shows that high rate of deprivation in Birmingham is responsible for the exploitation and suffer which a large number of children face.

The international laws for child protection and child rights

The statistics above shows that the population of the United Kingdom has a large number of ethnic groups. The dominant ethnic groups are from Ireland, followed by Asia and Africa. The figure below shows that according to the latest census in 2011, Birmingham has over a fifth of its population from Asia, close to a tenth of its population from Africa and close to five percentage of its population from the Middle East countries. The ethnic groups have their own cultural, psychology and perceptions rooted to their counties of origin. This disparity between British and the people of ethnic culture prevents children from interacting with them freely (Laura, 2018). The children often face disparity on the grounds of ethnicity which hampers their social developments. The children living with parents belonging from different ethnic groups fall prey to domestic violence between them stemming from the ethnic diversity factors like perceptions and beliefs (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, 2017). Thus, ethnicity to some extent results in children suffering from disturbed and tumultuous childhood which hamper their developments.

The graph above shows child mortality rates in Birmingham against the rates in Britain.  The figure clearly shows that in England, the rate of infant mortality fell below 5 percent by 2013-15. The rate in Birmingham remained around 7.5 percent and in comparison to the infant mortality rate in Britain, shows a rising trend. This rising trend in Birmingham can be attributed to the next chart showing increasing number of low income families sin Birmingham (Butum, Stan & Zodieru, 2015). The graph too shows where in England the rate stands around twenty percent compared to a rate of over thirty five percent in Birmingham. Analysis of these two charts clearly shows that low income families are not able to provide their children with proper medical care. The Office of National Statistics, Government of the United Kingdom reports in its press release that there were nearly 2 million lone parents in 2014 compared to 1.9 million in 2004. Seven areas including Birmingham in England have large numbers of single parents (dailymail.co.uk, 2017).  This can be related to the high number of low income families in Britain. This means that low income and lack of support from both parents often result in ill health among the children. The family members living in low income families often abuse each other which have damaging impact on the psychology of children. These factors leave children requiring care of counselling from children centres like Soho Children Centre (sohocc.bham.org.uk , 2017).

Deprivation, education, and low income families in Birmingham

The transport system is advanced and is one of the widest in the world. The Department of Transport oversees the transport network in England. The figure below shows that the 59 percent of the journeys in England took place by public bus and 21 percent journeys took place by train in 2016-2017. As far as Birmingham is concerned, the numbers of people travelling by buses and coaches combined show a drop to 16825 20 in 2016 from 17514 in 2015 (dft.gov.uk, 2017).

England is a mixed economy having presence of both public and private sector. The currency of the country is Pound, which is one of the most sought after currencies internationally. The main employer industries in the country are chemical, pharmaceuticals, arms, software and service providing companies. Some of the notable companies having their headquarters in England are London Stock Exchange, Land Rover, Vodafone, HSBC Bank and Unilever.  The GDP per capita of England is GBP 22907 which is one of the highest GDP in the world. Birmingham is the third largest employer city in England with gross value added GBP 24790 million (Butum, Stan & Zodieru, 2015). The city has employers like Jaguar Land Rover and Cadbury.

An analysis of these facts shows that Birmingham has several big employers. The seventh figure shows that the numbers of children from low income families are showing an increasing trend. This means that the parents of these children would be able to provide them with proper education. As a result these children would not be able to join these multinational companies located in Birmingham due to their lack of education (Varis, 2017). This analysis shows that the factors like low income and violence at home results in low degree of education among children. This factor inhibits them from acquiring employment in the top employers of Birmingham (Butum, Stan & Zodieru, 2015). Thus, lack of harmony and economic stability among the parents does not only prove fatal to the physical and mental growth of children but also their professional growth.

The focussed service to be provided to help the children suffering from disturbed childhood would be children’s centre. The children centre should take into account the laws laid down international organisations like the EU (ec.europa.eu, 2017). The statistical figures above shed light on several crucial factors which one has to focus on in order to provide an efficient child care services to distressed children. The second figure shows that factors like employment and income of parents play a very crucial role in the development of the children (Hood, 2014). Factors like low income and poor relationships among the family members can have dangerous impact on the mental growth of the children. The children not living with their birth parents or living with exploitative step families suffer from mental complicacies which makes them unacceptable at school. The children centre would provide counselling to the parents to help them to cope with family and professional pressures (Dykens et al., 2014). The centre would also provide skill development programmes to parents to help them increase their family income to be able to provide better education to children. This way the children centre would help its users namely the troubled children and their parents to lead healthier lives.

Impact of ethnic diversity on child development

The children centre service may face barriers due to shortage of capital and trained staffs in the initial phase (Butum & Zodieru, 2015). This is because in the initial phase it would not have goodwill strong enough to attract financers which in turn would make it difficult to acquire funds to attract qualified counsellors to council the users namely, the children in distress and their parents.

The management of the children centre would involve the local residents of Birmingham to run the business in its initial stage. The local counsellors would be employed to provide counselling services to troubled children and their parents at low rates. This would serve several purposes. First, the children’s centre would be able to provide services to the customers at lower prices (Varis, 2017). Secondly, the local psychiatrists are aware about the local situations in Birmingham like low income stability among parents which lead to disturbed family lives and consequently disturbed childhood among the children. The company called Soho could provide better and more lasting solution to the parents and the children. Hiring of local counsellors would provide employment opportunities and economic develop of the local community. Thus, the children’s centre would employ local counsellors to run the business which would prove profitable to the customers, the local counsellors and the area of Birmingham as a whole.  The sources of funds would be grants received from the big companies in Birmingham and the financial aids from the government (Taplin & Mattick, 2015).

The children centre in its initial would limit its operations within Birmingham and extend its services into other cities like London to help the community of distressed children. The centre can also extend its services to provide counselling services to the adolescent community suffering from tumultuous lifestyle due to domestic discords as its financial strength and experience of child counselling would increase. This extension of counselling services to adolescents is relevant because the organisation named Soho would be able to help both children and teenagers cope with domestic violence (Hood, 2014). Thus, it would be able to provide children suffering from tumultuous childhood due to domestic reasons with care and counselling right from their childhood and into their adolescent stage. Thus, this extension of counselling services to incorporate both children and teenage community would allow the children’s centre help children recover from trauma due to domestic discords (Rivera, 2016). This benefit which the extension of services of the children’s centre would usher in for the troubled children and their parents makes this suggestion relevant for the management to consider in the future. This would help in improving the dire conditions like low income as shown by the graph above and bettering the childhood conditions of children in Britain.

Child mortality and access to healthcare

Conclusion:

The in-depth discussion shows that a large number of children in Birmingham lead distressful lives owing to factors like abusive relationship between parents, low family income and violent treatment which they receive in hands of step family members. These painful experiences devastate their mental development and ruin their education. The children centres works towards helping these children cope with these pressing situations. However, these centres also need the cooperation of the parents in order to help the children lead healthy lives. Thus, it can be concluded that children centres should counsel both the parents and their children to cope with distressful lives.

References:

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