Focus on the youth

Prime Minister of the Barbados National Youth Parliament, Pierre Cooke says greater attention should be given to how younger persons have been coping in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Cooke, who is also the Technical Advisor with Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC), told The Barbados Advocate recently this should be one of the areas of focus this month which is annually observed as Child Month.

“I think particularly for Child Month some of the things that should be considered or we should pay closer attention to is how children experience the pandemic and a lot of things came up because there were mental health concerns, nutrition concerns, education concerns and they were all in relation to the rights of the child.”

He added, “You had children who didn’t have equal access to education because they didn’t have the necessary electronics to log on. We had children who didn’t have access to healthy and nutritious food maybe because their parents couldn’t afford it at the time, maybe because it was a little difficult to get to. You also had children and young persons finding it very, very difficult to cope mentally with the online school system.”

Moreover, Cooke stated, “More and more there needs to be a conversation with children about what they need to see, what they need to make their lives a little better and happier.”

He also shared that those in authority need to have discussions with the youth about what is being done locally to protect them and where applicable implement laws to do so.

“We need to sit down have serious conversations about how we are going to protect our children and where necessary put the legislation in place to ensure that those protections are institutionalised. Again, which is why we are having those conversations about the Child Justice Reform Bill, we are having those conversations about the Juvenile Justice System and we need to move from having conversations to actually putting systems in place to protect our children.”