Editorial - Tuesday June 4, 2013

Teaching kids what?

ON one hand the government's decision to spend $19.5 million over the next five years feeding kids who arrive at school hungry was long overdue, for compassionate and financial reasons. It is abhorrent that some children leave home with nothing in their stomachs, even if some people are prepared to allow that to continue on the grounds that providing food is a parent's most fundamental responsibility to their child. And there is no doubt that children who do not prosper at school because of hunger will cost the taxpayer much more than $2 million a year as they grow up, no doubt perpetuating the problems they faced in their childhood when they in turn become parents.

It can also be argued that the state's assuming responsibility for children at such a basic level is a step too far in taking over where some parents decide or are forced to leave off. The extraordinary fact is that this is a country that sets much sterner penalties for those who do not provide their pets with what the law describes as the necessaries of life than it does for those who do not do so for their children. More importantly, feeding kids in schools should be seen as delivering a message that will cost this country dearly in the future.

One school of thought has it that providing breakfast before school starts will teach children the importance of a full stomach if they are to learn. It is generally accepted that rumbling stomachs are not conducive to learning, but it should not be accepted that kids who have the taxpayer to thank for a couple of Weet-Bix and some milk will be better parents for that. It seems more likely that if breakfast in schools teaches kids anything it will be that if they don't feed their children the government will.

That logic is one of the reasons we are even talking about breakfast in schools. Poverty might be a reality in this country, as it always has been, but applying yet another social welfare band aid is not the solution. Hungry children are a symptom of a much more serious disease, one that governments past and present have shown no real interest in treating.

Critics of breakfasts in schools might sleep a little easier if they thought that was no more than an immediate response to an immediate problem, to be followed by a more comprehensive effort to resolve the issues behind the fact that some children aren't being fed properly, if at all, in their own homes.

The first thing that needs to be done is to quantify the problem. We are repeatedly told that children are going to school hungry but we don't know how many, and we don't know why. It could well be that many children don't have breakfast at home because they refuse it. Some kids do that. There would still be benefit to their being fed before classes start, but it isn't good enough to assume that large numbers of kids are missing out because their parents are failing them.

There is no doubt that some parents are very happy to let the state take over the job of feeding their kids, but even then there can be two sides to the story.

The writer has been told that a handful of children at one Far North school who were arriving without lunch were joined, within a week, by the great majority of their peers when the fruit in schools programme was adopted there, the majority of parents in that community obviously being happy to leave the job of feeding their kids to others if that was what they wanted to do.

That could be seen as an abrogation of their parental responsibility, or as a justifiable acceptance of the opportunity to make a very restricted household budget stretch a little further. Either way, another not so small step was taken at that school to teaching parents that if they couldn't be bothered providing the necessaries of life to their children the state/charity would take over.

Meanwhile the harsher critics of breakfasts in schools have been asking for evidence of one family who genuinely cannot feed their children, obviously in the belief that even the poorest household will be afflicted by poor spending decisions, another way of saying the kids come somewhere down the list of priorities after tobacco, alcohol, drugs, pay TV and whatever else might appeal to their parents. That might smack of prejudice, but to the writer's knowledge no one has yet come up with a family who are doing their very best and still can't give their kids a slice of toast or a bowl of cereal in the morning.

The critics might be silenced if the decision to provide state/charity breakfasts was accompanied by an undertaking to find out what's going on in these children's homes. The problem with that of course is the degree of intrusion that would be needed; it would be distasteful to most who make the decisions in this country to examine these hungry children's home lives on a case by case basis to find out why their parents are falling short, even if the motive was to help rather than punish. That's not going to change, so feeding kids at school will remain a band aid solution that is no solution at all. In fact it's a good bet that providing breakfasts will exacerbate the problem by further entrenching the government's role as a surrogate parent.

The obligation to establish why it is that some children are hungry is paramount. Assuming that every child should have at least 21 meals a week, providing five of those meals each school week isn't much of a solution. School day breakfasts represent less than 22 per cent of the 1095 meals they should be getting every year. Anyone who thinks that cereal and milk during the school terms is going to solve the problem is dreaming. It will do nothing to improve their lives at home, and that's where the real problem begins and ends.

If society as a whole is going to take responsibility for providing school breakfasts it has a right to expect that something will be done to address the underlying problem. That means sweeping aside the privacy rights we all believe we are entitled to in the interests of assisting the most vulnerable members of our society, and actually achieving something that will not only improve their lot but will make this a better country in which to grow up. Those who have berated the government's promised contribution to the problem of hungry kids as a drop in a very big bucket must accept that doling out food, or money, to dysfunctional families is a stop gap measure at best, and until we find out what's wrong and fix it nothing will change.

If some parents are prepared to accept charity on this scale, they must be prepared to undergo meaningful scrutiny to find out why they aren't coping. If benefits are too low to survive on then they must be raised. If some wages are too low to survive on that must be addressed, preferably via the tax regime rather than welfare. Either way, parents must understand that charity will not be given unquestioningly, and that the responsibility for raising their children, including but far beyond giving them breakfast Monday to Friday, lies with them, not with their neighbours.