Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. I was struck to hear of the research from county councils, predicting that the number of children in local authority care could reach a hundred thousand by 2025. That’s a 36 per cent rise in children being placed in foster or residential care in just a decade. Many aspects of the care system are fraught. Some parents are children themselves. Some who take in vulnerable children struggle through lack of support. Some children in care find their care home itself is not safe. Every decision is hard, each choice has risk and cost, hurt and rejection linger, denial and fear threaten. Childhood is the epitome of vulnerability – not least because crucial decisions are made without our having any say in them. Childhood is a symbol of potential, of a destiny that could turn out any number of ways – but also of weakness, of the possibility that all such potential could be damaged or destroyed before our lives have scarcely begun. In any household, arguments about where to send children to school, what to do if they won’t eat vegetables, or how much screen time is too much, disclose old hurts about a family’s past and deep aspirations about its future. In just the same way the pain and bewilderment of the care system exposes society’s underbelly of unresolved confusion over what’s truly best for children when life is against them. Christianity’s founded on a conviction that the creator and sustainer of the whole universe had a human mother, tottered as a tiny child, and faced threats and perils from his first moment on earth. His birth was practically outdoors. His cot was an animal trough. His first neighbours were livestock. His beleaguered parents had no extended family close by. He faced violent danger from a homicidal tyrant when only a few weeks old. He became a refugee and travelled 500 miles to find safety. You’d think, if there’d been a decent county council in Bethlehem or Egypt at the time, they’d be saying ‘We need to set up a multi-agency case conference about him.’ Psychologists have taught us that profound, sometimes precognitive childhood experiences can shape our whole understanding of the world and ourselves. Our ability to trust and to love are cultivated in early rhythms and encounters. Surely those terrifying moments of danger and dislocation left their mark on Jesus’ imagination and character also. Perhaps it was precisely those memories of himself having been at risk that caused him later to say, ‘Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me.’