Decision Making, Level of Attachment, Circumstances at Conception and Environment in Healthy Child Development

Jacob Waiswa
Situation Health Analyst
Dishma-Inc.
P.O. Box 8885,
Kampala-Uganda
Tel. +256392614655/+256752542504
dishma.imhs@gmail.com
www.situationhealthanalysis.blogspot.com

Decision making is a choice reached after verifying available options, consequences, and resources to pursue a specific cause. It is as a result of a cost-benefit analysis of having children that a prospecting parent made decisions, rather than on the basis of urges or feelings. This was so simply because urges or feelings did not think apart from causing excitement.

Attachment denotes the nature of the bond between the mother and the child while level of attachment implies the degree of the existing bond between the mother and the baby or child.

Children in Uganda have been most marginalized –with children-friendly health services only limited to referral hospitals. Elsewhere in the country, children share facilities and health care services with adults –an indiscriminate administration of health –yet special care for them is paramount.

Direct, structural and institutionalized violence too claims the lives and right morals of children. Domestic violence does not only take the life of one of the parents, but also is psychological violence –moreover the worst a human being can experience. That, now, becomes a children affair to deal with, or a shared experience upon observing parents fight.

Cultural environment –which is discriminative according to gender; never recognizes the rights of children and the reproductive health rights of women –and those have turned out to be a huge and overwhelming social cost –including HIV spread and under-development. Cultural provides a way of life that suffocates the rights of women and children as men behaved immorally –supported by it.

The economic environment disables parent’s ability to sustain children education, or not even at all afford it –yet it is through child education that the future a community is secured –given the highly productive citizenry.

The cycle continues from children dropping out of school and opting to marry or succumbing to wrong and untimely choices to conceive –when pressured by the economy; then there the burden becomes a product to be handed over from one generation to another –rendering the talk of children rights only a dream.

Now, that the parent unhealthy lifestyle dictates the quality of life of a children, level of attachment –a level where insecurities and future behavioral problems begin; irresponsible parenthood, reckless and risky behaviors of a parents as children observe, low or no health seeking ensues –as there will be no money and, ultimately, lack of motivation to adopt a healthy lifestyle –even when health guidelines are issued (which in turn affects children health), leads to broken family situations, or broken marriage relationships. And as the saying goes, “if elephants fight it is the grass that suffers,” the consequences accruing from broken-family situation hit children hardest –as all the anger gets projected to them in form of abuse and neglect.

It is from such grounds that families and communities face accountability for in the child’s teen or youthful years. No shall we have a moral fabric in society, violent free generations, because society simply ignores the root causes of structural violence –whose origin is quality of care of children right from conception. And who should save the children of Uganda?

Parenting is thus a responsibility one finds himself or herself under voluntarily or involuntary. During adolescence, gradual changes that may be cognitive, emotional, biological, physical and social or environment occur.

The qualities of changes are influenced by how well decisions are made at different levels of interaction (cognition, instinct or biology, emotional, social and/or natural environment) in relation to one’s sexuality. It all begins at conception –through important stages of birth, special care of newborns, weaning, and child in playful stage, socialization and learning, gender roles or interests, young stardom, youthful period and adulthood.

It is important explore parents’ basis of taking on responsibilities over children, quality and level of attachment, parent’s ability and circumstances under which she or he conceived, and the parent’s nature of the environment and lifestyle.

However, equal treatment among children (boys and girls) must be emphasized as it was told by children (4 boys and 4 girls) and adults (6 males and 6 females) such that they both benefit from existing development opportunities –of education (both formal and informal) and employment.

Friendliness between parents and children was highlighted (4:4) –with correction behavior attributed to light beating -with strongest emphasis put on friendly conversations with children (6:6). However, to parents, family planning was still a big challenge –as hardly at all did men approve of it (regarding condom use).

On the other hand, women complained of hemorrhage and delayed resumption of pregnancy as most negative (2 of 6 mothers).

Condom use was out of every parent’s mind –given the fact that they were married (6:6). 1 of 6 mothers said that she privately sought family planning services, because her husband did not care about it vital role. 2 of 6 women nurtured a norm that alcohol eased delivery and was associated to healthy and pretty babies.

Becoming a parent was not only an urge or a status reached by accident as some young women say, but an issue –not even pressure from elders or traditions could determine. It was important to look at children as human capital of the future –through integrating health care, nutrition, and early child care services for young children in developing countries.

It did not matter what age of pregnancy, but from the time of conception. But for the purposes of this submission, care had to start from the time one started developing feeling to become mother or father because, ultimately, the quality of decisions made counted in determination child health.

Child care was a cost the prospecting parents needed to think about long before deciding to conceive. In fact, child care began at conception. Successful child care ought to put that into consideration, otherwise the psychological implications of neglect and abuse potentially turned out to be the most damaging to the child or baby.

Failure of parents to ensure child health growth and development is by and large a result of poverty. This greatly hampered decision making. In rural and semi-urban areas it is only mainly men who went to work while women stayed home to cook and bare children.

In the same way, the nature of jobs determined by their level of education do not at the same time help meet children development needs as women complained of men’s negligence. There is thus a need to start life skills education, poverty alleviation program and reproductive health (or health education) programs to help better family-life situation.

Broken-family events are a result of extended family system failing to stand the test of time (twentieth and twenty first century new world order). As the urge to have children arose as traditionally demanded from the ages of 18 and above or less, the new order, instead, required productivity of prospecting parents before, at all, they decided to have children.

Others –even when economically liberated will tell you that things are not really. The confidence is only left to the possibility that God will provide for them. For some reason, the question of sustainability of care and love within the family set-up is ignored –yet critical.

Policy makers should embark on massive gender-conscious literacy or education programs intertwined with aspects that address reproductive health concerns, impart life skills, or vocational skills –all of which empower communities with tools of rightful decision making that go as far as influencing health children development, or for that make transform children rights talk from theory to practice.