Don Armitage: Dairy, dairy me - it's an inconvenience store

Store owners decide what they sell and therefore what kind of custom they have.

COMMENT

If I was 'Everykid' this is what I would say to those adults involved to a greater or lesser extent regarding dairies being directly across the road from schools, and other harm kids undergo.

"You adults are falling down in your responsibility to look after us in several ways.

First, you are raising some of us to think it's okay to terrorise people, including in the presence of even very young children.

What's behind that? I don't know, it's never really discussed.

Second, the shops are located so to maximise making money out of selling fatty, salty and sugary food to us kids a short distance away as we come and go to school 200 days of the year, and the owner doesn't see anything morally wrong with that.

It's rotting our teeth and causing us obesity which will have lifelong effects and shorten our lives.

Thirdly, the schools don't think it's their job to police the location of such lethal delivery devices right next to their establishments.

Fourthly, in cases of crime against those shops, the police just respond to the immediate event and pass on the consequences to other organisations.

None of you adults are dealing with eliminating the harmful effects to us kids.

I'm just 10 or 11, so I'll respond to the adverts for pies and soft drinks and call in there, and while I'm at it notice that it's quite normal for adults to sell cancer-causing and highly addictive drugs to me once I'm over 18 - in seven or eight years from now.

I expect the shops to continue selling their lethal products and us to suffer.

No wonder youth mental health and other rates are so high when even the adults can't make sense of the world — and do not remove sources of harm from children's lives.''