A Conversation on Responding to Growing Up in Crisis
September 2023
by
Amiteshwar Singh
Daniel Akinola-Odusola
Araceli Camargo
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DESCRIPTION
The climate crisis is adding to an already acute childhood health crisis that we need to identify by its holistic impact on our youth, rather than the current silos of specific structural or health issues. As community members and practitioners who make decisions shaping children’s lives, we must develop responses to the current childhood health crisis that support their transitions to healthy adulthood. Our Growing Up in Crisis report put the child to old age health trajectory into the context of planetary dysregulation and its secondary effects.
A small group of practitioners and parents gathered with members from the Centric Lab team for a roundtable to discuss the definition, identification, and cause of this acute childhood crisis as well as how we respond to the crisis through the informal care of communities and the formal care of healthcare systems.
In this recording, Araceli, Amit, and Daniel from the Centric Lab team revisit how this acute childhood crisis was framed before sharing their reactions and learnings from the round table discussion to inform future formal and informal responses.
Key Quotes
What defines a crisis?
“What is the driving force of this crisis? Where are exactly the nodes that we need to move in order to provide better healing practices and better healing strategies for the next generations.”
- Araceli Camargo
Identifying a crisis?
“I think to give a good example, we’ll bring three of the factors up, which are food, insecurity, pollution and force displacement. The overlapping traits between these three are that they basically lack the consent of the children because they’re systemic. And so, none of these are to do with children's behaviour or it's nothing to do with how they are inherently, but it has to do with the systems in which they live.”
- Daniel Akinola-Odusola
Causing a crisis
“While there are benefits to identifying factors as individual pathways, they overlap on the same people. There isn't an explicit side of the country or city that deals with air pollution, where another side deals with food scarcity. Most of the time they do end up happening in the same population.”
- Daniel Akinola-Odusola
What does a response to the phenomena look like?
“Each young person's experience is uniquely shaped by their individual circumstances, interests. A successful response requires listening to their voices, understanding their perspectives, and tailoring interventions to suit specific situations.”
- Amiteshwar Singh
Roundtable reactions and learnings
“Those of us within the medical community and care systems must move beyond Allyship and instead focus on kinship, The foundations of this are rooted in understanding and reconceptualizing how we define caregiving.”
- Amiteshwar Singh
