Today I have happened by chance with this shocking image. This is an advertisement for Concordia Children's Services, a center that welcomes and educates orphaned, abandoned and abused children until they are destined for a definitive home.
The text that accompanies the image reads: "If you don't help feed them, who will?" (If you don't help feed them, who will?).
From this campaign, observing the image and the text, I extract three possible objectives:
- Request financial or voluntary help to help get resources for all homeless children who arrive at this children's center.
- Prevent it from happening, that is, if as parents we do not feed our children, if we do not offer them the warmth of our arms, the love they deserve and if we do not respect their physical and emotional integrity, probably no one in the world will.
- Promote breastfeeding. Breastfeeding involves an exchange of oxytocin between mother and child that helps create the emotional bond. Children whose mothers establish the aforementioned link are more protected against possible abuse (I know it sounds hard, but it is one of the reasons why large organisms defend and promote breastfeeding).
I imagine that the real objective of the campaign is the first of the three options, however I will focus on the second (and indirectly on the third) because it has come to mind when I see the photo.
It has long been thought that child abuse or neglect is something exclusive to the most disadvantaged social classes, however we see more and more often cases of seriously injured (and even deceased) children belonging to well-off social classes. And this is something that it should never happen, neither in the rich families, nor in the poor.
I know that I often fall into the illusion, perhaps utopian, that the society in which we live changes. We are so immersed in capitalism, so accustomed to comfort, to pay for them, to delegate functions to others and to receive favors that we believe we should always receive forgetting that we must also know how to give and know how to think about others.
At the entrance of Laura Gutman's new book you could read this. Everything that we have not overcome and that we drag from our childhood prevents us from turning over and emptying ourselves into our children, some so incapacitated that they never connect emotionally with them, increasing the risk of physical and / or psychological abuse.
Let's respect babies and try to understand that having a child is a great responsibilityWell, we have their lives in our hands. Our future depends on us.
