Unicef said a few months ago that Spain is one of the countries with more child poverty, with one in four children at risk of poverty. Not everyone will have trouble eating, because now they are considered "at risk of ...", but surely many do have deficits, because I have seen it.
I do not know all the realities nor can I quantify them, but in some schools in my city they prepared breakfast and every morning they invited some children to leave class to have breakfast at home, due to lack of means, they had not been able to eat.
From the government, on the other hand, they must believe that the citizens of the country have no problem and that we complain about vice, because in addition to saying that the problems of malnutrition are very punctual, they claim that cases of malnutrition are the fault of the parents.
Words of the Popular Party spokesman
The statements were made by Rafael Hernando, deputy spokesman of the Popular Party in Congress, who in an interview in La Sexta (which you can see in the video) lamented the statements of Rafael Ribó, defender of the Catalan people, when he reported that approximately 50,000 children in Catalonia they have an inadequate diet.
Obviously it is a figure that could be qualified, because improper feeding is carried by many children without the need for financial problems. It is enough to have an unbalanced diet full of deficiencies so that, even with normal weight or overweight, they have an inadequate diet.
However, I think everyone here is referring to poor diet due to lack of food. We are in crisis, there are more than six million unemployed and there are families where the tragedy has been chewing for a long time and where the little ones are eating, surely, less than they need.
I already say that in my city there are children who go to school every day without breakfast and not because of bad habits, that there are also, but because they do not have breakfast. And I say about bad habits because many children go without eating anything to school, but then they do it there. Of which I speak, do not have breakfast, or carry anything in the backpack.
However, what it says is (more or less) true
Article 110 of the Civil Code reads as follows:
The father and the mother, although they do not have parental rights, are obliged to watch over the minor children and provide them with food.
And in article 142 of the Civil Code we can read this:
Food is understood as everything that is essential for sustenance, room, clothing and medical assistance. Food also includes the education and instruction of the dietitian as long as he is a minor and even later when he has not finished his training due to a cause that is not attributable to him.
Come on, Hernando is right, parents are the ones who have the obligation to feed their children, so if your children are malnourished, the fault lies with the parents. Now, whose fault is it if parents want to feed their children but can't do it because they have no means?
The Spanish state has planned aid for when that happens, with dining scholarships, with social dining rooms, etc. If this is not enough, I doubt it is, it has Social Services, which takes care of the guardianship of children to provide care and food, as long as the parents give up parental rights. That is to say, that from Hernando's words the following could be deduced: "feed them, that is your obligation, and if you do not do it and your children are malnourished, your fault, that you could have given them to Social Services."
I don't want anyone to take care of my children
But I am a father and I would never want my children to be taken care of by anyone other than me and my wife. There are parents who disregard their children and prefer to spend their money on things more superfluous than feeding their children. In these cases I can understand that Social Services take letters, because minors are at risk because of irresponsible parents.
But if my children went hungry because I don't get food for them and the Social Services offered me their help, staying with my children, my anger would be monumental. We are in the 21st century, we are human beings, and that means that we are rational beings and that we have a characteristic that defines us called "humanity", which in the SAR they say is "Sensitivity, compassion of the misfortunes of our fellow men", and another that is the capacity to love, and to love above all our children.
If I went out of my way to feed my children and did not succeed, the last thing I would ask the State is to stay with my children. First, that will help me feed them. It cannot be that they ask us to increase the birth rate because Spain has a ridiculous birth rate of 1.32 children per woman and to see how pensions are going to be paid in the future, that they do not give even a damn help to raise them, and Then, when things go wrong because society is so badly mounted (and because the government does not seem to have clear priorities), they tell you that if your child goes hungry, it is your fault.
The civil code also says ...
Well no sir, there are whole families on the street who have not been able to pay their mortgages, whole families living in the grandparents' house, who do magic with their pension to ensure that everyone, more or less, can eat something and families that do not they get, and the blame for all this cannot be blamed on each one, because the fault of the economy being as it is I do not think it is the parents who care every day to get the money needed to keep our home and our sons.
In fact, the civil code also says, in its article 152, that the obligation to provide food ceases:
When the fortune of the obliged to give them has been reduced to the point of not being able to satisfy them without neglecting their own needs and those of their family.
From what I understand that at the moment a father wants, but cannot because he has no means, He is no longer obliged to feed his children (It is morally, but not judicially), and in this case I do believe that it should be the State who interceded for the children to have food, but for God's sake, without taking them away from the parents, which is already the only thing they need to lose all hope in the human race.
Video | YouTube On Babies and more | Families with young or large children cannot be evicted (at the moment), "It should not happen here": Save the Children campaign against child poverty in the United Kingdom, is it too alarmist ?, Spain, of the European countries with more child poverty In The Blog Salmon | Rafael Hernando, the civil code and the right to food
