The lives of millions of children go by in the midst of poverty, abandonment, lack of education and protection, discrimination and vulnerability. For them, life is a continuous struggle for survival.
Whether children live in cities or in rural settlements, they run the risk of missing out on their childhood and of being excluded from essential facilities such as hospitals and schools, unprotected by their family and their community, and under the constant threat of being exploited and mistreated. For them, the concept of childhood as a time to grow up, learn, play and feel safe doesn't exist.
We, as adults, must insure that all children enjoy childhood.
There are many reasons why children end up living in the streets, in very vulnerable conditions, and this is as much a cause as a consequence of vulnerability and illiteracy.
So often, parents die or are in no condition to care for their children properly; violence and abuse reign in the family and children are forced to work in order to contribute to the family's upkeep. Many dangers lurk in the streets. Children are subjected to all kinds of abuse and fall prey to drugs, hunger and illnesses.
How can we build a suitable world for children? They are tomorrow's society. As adults, we should accept our responsibility towards them. If we wish to have a more just and balanced society, we must work to eradicate the vulnerability that a great part of children endure.
In developed countries, there exists growing concern about the disregard for children's rights. Abandonment, mistreatment and sexual abuse are often mentioned in the media. The proximity to children's problems in rich countries, should bring us closer to their circumstances in developing countries, and make us reach the understanding that children are the weakest and most vulnerable link of society.
It is also possible, however, to see how vulnerable children take the initiative. They organize themselves, sharpen their wit and fend for themselves when no one else will. Spanish psychologist Enrique Martínez states:
"It always made me curious and it now provokes pleasing admiration in me, because I love life, the ability of those children to manage. I know dozens of seven- and eight-year-olds who lavish care on their younger siblings, bring them up, educate them, and gracefully carry them on their fragile hips.
At nine, they manage to balance the teetering family finances by selling tissues at road crossings. Children who, at twelve years of age, learn how to jump start my car and set their lives alight with a mere can opener. Or when they are almost thirteen and nothing makes sense to them and they have nothing left except for the clarity of mind to know they don't belong.
I wish the day will come when people's moral conscience gets it right and erects monuments to tissue sellers at traffic lights, to winged and dedicated teenage messengers, to publicity distributors, to used cardboard and paper pickers, to those who, with their submerged economies that resemble underwater currents, make the humblest vegetable gardens green again, keeping the voracity of some from engulfing everything."
We adults think that we have the solutions for each and every one of the wishes and lacks of children, but to what point do we pay attention to the simple greatness of their true aspirations? We build a world perhaps in keeping with our limited vision - a television screen, short-term objectives, security, privacy, asphalt and productivity. Our positive realism is a crude substitute of reality illuminated by the imagination which is recreated in childhood. Our routine is set against their improvisation; our world measured by clocks is set against their timeless and vast universe; our tension is set against their flexibility; our inertia set against their eternal movement.
The right to be children is the right to not be premature adults. It is the right to play. It is the right to be valued and to learn to value; the right to coexist and to respect diversity. It is the supreme right to not have to worry about food and shelter. Let us all make a suitable world for children; we adults will also enjoy it.
