Our Most Precious Resource

Anyone would identify children as the most precious resource on the planet. They are ours to raise into meaningful adulthood. They are ours to love and protect. And most parents do their utmost to ensure their children do grow into adulthood, unharmed throughout the passage from infancy to childhood, the teen years and young adulthood.

We worry incessantly, and never stray far from the imperative and impetus to offer needed emotional support and stimulating opportunities to our young.

But then, there are those children whose needs are neglected. Children who are left to fend for themselves in a world that can be most unfriendly to an unprotected child. Some children prove adept at finding ways to look after their own needs and grow to successful adulthood. Too many others, lacking needed human warmth, fundamental to the needs of any human being, consider themselves unvalued and as a result find it impossible to value society.

There are the over-protective parents, those who suffer the anguish of doubt whenever their child is not in the immediate vicinity where their well-being can be measured and assured. And there are the casual parents whose obligation to their young doesn't make it past the greater necessity of the parents to live their lives as unrestrained to their own pleasures as possible - and the needs of the child fall by the wayside.

Two apposite and opposite events of recent vintage: A three-year-old girl brought along by her loving grandfather on a trip. The grandfather, a successful businessman and pilot, set off with a colleague and the child for a brief trip in poor weather near Golden, B.C. where the plane crashed and the child was the only survivor. Suspended for five hours in the security of a car seat, upside-down - where she could view the dead bodies of her grandfather and his friend. And her beloved Teddy-bear.

She was rescued, and will live to see many more days.

In Quebec City an emergency call came in to police from a woman who late on Sunday night heard the sound of a baby crying as she walked by on a downtown street. She investigated and discovered an infant left alone in a locked car. "When the police arrived on the scene, the car was cold", according to a police spokesperson. The temperature was below freezing, the child lightly clad, with bare feet. It wasn't known how long the child had been left there.

But the parents were found nearby, in the bar portion of a theatre where they had spent a pleasant evening together, sans baby. When the police explained to the infant's father what the potential consequences were that they might face, he became abusive. "He railed at them and told them it was not the first time they did that," according to the spokesperson. An investigation is proceeding.

Criminal charges should be laid. That child should be removed from the 'protective' custody of its obliviously neglectful parents.