My life changed when we internationally adopted two children. Along with the children, we, my wife and I also received a new set of eyes in which we can view the world with. Before, we knew the best places to eat but would not have known where all the parks in Jyväskylä were, and more importantly, which ones had toilets! And neither did we know about the desperate struggles faced by many families all around us.
No child is placed in the protective care of the system when everything is just fine and dandy. No, this is why most internationally adopted children are considered as having special needs and so we knew to start looking for help really early on. This is where our newfound eyes were really opened to the situation in the city. While the city was processing the breath-taking amount a paperwork, we went to the forums to get support and information.
…Regular staff in schools can only do so much…
Once online, we were immediately bombarded by pleas for advice and cries for help. Forum after forum, webpage after webpage. I have never come across so many desperate families compressed into one area. Among the many issues found in the forums, a common experience shared, was of children literally forced to wait for years for the simple initial tests for ADHD. Years of needless struggling and falling behind in school. Sometimes with no route to catch up again. Regular staff in schools can only do so much, they do an amazing job with the meagre resources that are available to them. But only a medical professional can actually make diagnosis and chart a route forward.
As time went on, we understood that there is not even close to enough child therapists, psychologists, and school support staff to cope with the workload in the Jyväskylä area.
This is a crisis.
I know now that child’s development is extremely time sensitive. Issues that are not addressed in a timely manner are exceedingly difficult and resource consuming to correct later on. The problems snowballs on and on until perhaps they fall too far behind in their learning programme, suffer depression or behavioral problems or full-on psychological issue that require intervention.
Like a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, it only takes a push of a couple of degrees of push at the start to send that ship to either Canada or to Brazil. The amount of effort at the start to put that ship on a correct is tiny compared to the forcing it to steeply swerve against its own inertia in a new direction much later in it journey.
It makes no sense whatsoever to starve the small resources at the start of a child’s journey in life only to pay ridiculous amounts of money needed to deal with bigger problems years later.
None of this is new to anyone. The data has long been in on this. I can only conclude that the city needs more people that can see past the next budget negotiation and think about what our society should ideally look like, perhaps long after they have retired, or out of office.