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NEW
INTERNATIONALIST 164  |
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THIS
MONTH'S THEME
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A NEW APPROACH TO CHILDREN'S RIGHTS
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Help the parent: free the child Hundred dollar slaves Children of the street
The daily cycle White babies wanted Are children necessary? Why reading helps children survive Why children fail Lazy Penny No kidding
You can't cook excuses |
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FROM
THIS MONTH'S EDITOR |
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I decided I had to choose, and it wasn't easy. To be part of the NI team addressing large ethical issues offered the chance to expose the suffering that bathed the world. Psychotherapy by comparison seemed like a fad, part of the narcissism indulged in by an affluent society. At other times, the opposite seemed true. Why was I writing words into thin air? Who could prove that any of these pages, however painstakingly composed, pasted up, printed, mailed-out, ever did a scrap of good? Was a single life ever saved? At least in the therapy room, pretty regularly, I could see change happening before my eyes: gratefully witness the sudden openness in a face lighting up with relief as an ancient pain unhooked itself and flew free. This was reality, moving and important, shared with a real human being - and at moments like this, writing words on a page seemed unreal. In practice, though, the similarities between the two kinds of work revealed themselves more than the differences. It became clear that both the wish to write and the wish to be a therapist arise out of the same desire to heal: whether the pain stems from relationships with an individual's family or within the global family. The pain in either case seems to be caused by imbalances in love and power. Where one person, or one part of the world, garners most of the power, there is bound to be pain. The disempowered, in families as in the world at large, are usually written off by the powerful as weak, or foolish. The powerful fill the air with their reality, and the less powerful live in response to a reality that is not theirs. So my two kinds of work, instead of pulling apart, began to support each other. The feedback in the therapy room of real people taking power for themselves and changlng their lives for the better gave substance and grounding to the theory on the page. At the same time the broad audience of the magazine solved the problem that only a handful of people could be reached in one-to-one therapy. And when it came to an issue like children's rights, I wanted to reach as many people as possible. If all this sounds disgracefully evangelical, that's a hazard everyone at NI has to face. Anyone who wants to see changes in the world, and wants people to see things their way, stands guilty of the charges of arrogance and obsessiveness. Who do we think we are, anyway? As a parent, my right to look after my children as well as I can matters more to me than anything else. So this issue is dedicated to all the mothers that I know - and a few fathers - who have felt pushed to the brink of exhaustion and misery, but hung on tight for the sake of their children. |
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Letters
COVER PHOTO: Mark Edwards |
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Anuradha Vittachi for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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I'm guest-editing this issue. Long-standing NI readers may remember that I used to be a regular member of editorial team. But a couple of years ago I decided to take off my journalist hat for a while: being an editor and a mother of two children and a psychotherapist all at the same time was wearing me out.
