Losing your child at McDonalds....

Recently there have been a couple of media reports that have caught my attention; added to this I received a link to a very interesting and somewhat disturbing website – not disturbing in any weird or depraved way, but disturbing that people actually are so stupid!

The first story and the second are linked, albeit they are 12000 or so miles apart. Last weekend a two year old girl was found wandering in a car park at a McDonalds in Otara, South Auckland. For those not in the know South Auckland is probably New Zealand’s most deprived community; it has above average unemployment, poor education achievement rates, over crowded housing, high rates of domestic violence, drugs, etc.

Now, a lost two year old isn’t that unusual – what parent hasn’t had a toddler wander off?  What is more unusual in this scenario is that it took the family two days to actually front up to authorities and claim their child – their explanation, they thought someone else must be looking after her!

The second story was about something related to the above – the lack of parenting skills in modern society. The generation osmosis of ‘good parenting’ has been lost, with many children raised by surrogates, at day care and the like. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating a ‘keep the mums at home’ campaign, but there is a need for basic common sense parenting to be a pre-requisite for a successful future life. It goes without saying that with kids it is often ‘monkey see, monkey do’, that behaviours good, bad and indifferent are observed, stored in their sponge like minds, to be reproduced at a later date. If poor parenting is the norm it is logical to assume this will escalate and snowball as time progresses, hence we have a generation that are not able to adequately care for children, but don’t actually know when they have been lost!!

The last bit I guess is at a tangent, but could be thought as the glue that needs to hold the lot together. This is something called Health Literacy, which has been defined as

Health literacy is the ability to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions (Kōrero Mārama, 2010).

It probably comes as no surprise to find that over 1/3 of the NZ population has been assessed as having poor health literacy – meaning they are unable to make sound health choices, follow medical instruction, understand the requirements of their treatment, and so on. Is it any wonder then that countless health dollars are spent ‘fixing’ these issues?

People with poor health literacy:

• are less likely to use prevention services
• have less knowledge of their illness, treatment, and medicines
• are less likely to recognise the first signs of medical problems
• are less likely to manage their long-term/chronic condition
• are less likely to communicate their concerns to health professionals
• are more likely to be hospitalised due to a chronic condition
• are more likely to use emergency services, and
• are more vulnerable to workplace injury.

Indeed it would be very simplistic to generalize that people with poor health literacy are more likely to leave their child at McDonalds, not claim them for two days and likely have inadequate parenting skills to assist their child out of the poverty trap!