LOOK AFTER OUR CHILDREN!

Children need protection. Because they are so frail they can be subjected to violence and exploitation and become the victims of neglect. Adults may try to model them in their own image and then wonder why there is so much cruelty in the world. And you don't have to go far to find the answers…

A child's smile. You should make a point of getting a child to smile - sincerely, innocently and genuinely. At the same time, it is easy to win a child's affection if you speak to him on the same level. You suddenly start to realize that a child is happy to meet you half way and he starts to speak like an adult if he is not brushed off and not taken seriously but you speak with him on equal terms.

Children don't pass judgement. But sometimes they have to try to make themselves known. They accept everything at face value and in a happy environment they almost always speak the truth. Sometimes they put a damper on things not by the originality of their response but rather by its genuineness and assurance. Quite often one is convinced of a child's intuition and his faultless predictions.

Children are a continuation of us and a continuation of our lives. Here lies the whole meaning of human existence. Do we want a healthy future? If we do, then we, adults, must pay closer attention to children's feelings - joy and sadness, as if tuning in from the side to their childish horseplay or wholesale grief. We can't hold back childish tears and stop them, consigning childish grief to a future in which "everything will be fine", for some reason deciding that we should not share their trivial problems with them. But they only seem trivial. Try to remember how you were at that age. Did it seem trivial to you that you weren't allowed to care about a little friend - a puppy or a kitten? Do you remember? 

By their standards children, too, experience real grief: a much-loved kitten dies, their favourite toy is broken, a good friend has gone away. And a child, too, needs the opportunity to cry, to express himself, pour out his grief and talk to someone. A friend once said that when he started to cry his grandmother hugged him and said: "My poor little grandson. How sad you are. Go on, have your cry." The tears came very quickly and life was rosy again.

There are some children who have been robbed of their childhood. They have survived conflict and violent upheaval. According to gloomy UN statistics, every year at least a million children fall into the net of sexual exploitation or become objects of trade. Every year more than 10,000 children are killed or maimed from exploding land mines. The number of children subjected every day at home, in school or in their neighbourhood to cruelty, neglect and exploitation is unknown, while families try to cope with increasing economic and other difficulties. And it is we - the adults - who are to blame for this.

Children need protection. And we want to speak about this not just on 1 June, International Children's Day. Put yourself in their place and think about the little ones who have had a difficult childhood, over-protected by their guardians, living in boarding schools and children's homes, about children who are being brought up only by their mothers or single fathers, about those whose childhood is being spent in some out-of-the-way place, and this isn't so easy.

These problems must be discussed, spoken about in public and the state should do everything necessary to resolve them. Otherwise our image today in the country's child population will be a reflection of the future. Today in Azerbaijan, as throughout the world, there are many unresolved children's problems: young girls being forced into marriage; exploitation of child labour; violence against children; trafficking in children; child crime and the lack of a juvenile justice system; the incompleteness of the programme of de-institutionalization and alternative guardianship; the problem of integration of boarding school pupils into society; the improvement of programmes to treat seriously ill children, and so on. Many of them have been raised at public hearings "The problems of children in Azerbaijan: realities and prospects", which were recently held in the country's parliament in connection with International Children's Day. And the NGO Alliance for Children's Rights has presented a broad range of questions which require close consideration and debate: the problem of child homelessness; the protection of children in difficult living situations; providing social services for children from the unprotected sections of the population, and also the creation of social monitoring services to prevent violence against children everywhere in the country.

It was noted at the event that Azerbaijan is doing everything possible to preserve the stable emotional state of children and adolescents and to shape a healthy personality. In the past decades 41 documents have been signed and 22 laws have been adopted in the sphere of child protection rights in the country , and in 1992 we signed up to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are new draft laws on parliament's agenda today: on children's rights, especially children's leisure activities and the medical diagnosis of children up to three years of age. And all this is necessary to lay the foundations for a happy future for our children, and that means the whole of Azerbaijan.

Be at hand with children, not near them, and teach them optimism, share their fantasies, make friends with them but don't fuss over them. And, lastly, pay heed to the problems of children who are not your own. One of them may suddenly be low but they cannot say anything even to their own parents. Be sensitive to children's grief.