Making children safe and happy for the future

Children are precious beings wherever and whenever. Adults must take responsibility for their dreams and hopes from now, as the future of the country rests on them.

“We have only one hope. That is to raise our children well. Let’s do a couple of things to make our future bright.” That is part of the Declaration of Rights of Children announced by Bhang Jeong-hwan — a pioneer of Korean juvenile literature and the legendary activist for children’s rights — in May 1923. The passage, dating back over a century, strikes a chord even today.

The declaration came a year before the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924 in the General Assembly of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the current United Nations. Bhang had declared the children’s day in 1922 even during the dark days of Japan’s colonial rule of the country. Today marks the 101st anniversary of the declaration of Children’s Day.

In the farsighted declaration, Bhang, the pioneer, pleaded with the Korean people to make children’s life happy. More than 100 years have passed since. But reality shows otherwise. Our children’s subjective feeling of happiness is still low. After conducting a survey on 2,231 students from the fifth grade to the 11th grade for two months from November to December last year, the ChildFund Korea, one of the largest children’s advocacy groups in Korea, found that a whopping 87 percent of our children are not happy with their daily lives crammed with tight after-school programs at private academies. The survey also showed that primary school students spent more time at private after-school academies than their counterparts in middle or high school. That’s probably due to a lack of the after-school care which has been funded by municipal governments.

Children’s safety is being threatened everywhere, even including the school zone designed to protect them from car accidents. For instance, a nine-year-old elementary student was killed by a drunk driver in a school zone in Daejeon on April 8 and another child killed in Busan just three weeks later by a heavy freight that suddenly fell off from a cargo truck. In the accident in Busan, three other children were seriously injured. Even cases of parents who kill their children before killing themselves are increasing. Because children are not a possession of their parents, taking away their life together cannot be justified no matter what.

Korea’s total fertility rate was 0.78 last year, the lowest among 38 OECD member countries. The number of newborns per year dropped to 250,000 in 2022 after the peak of 1 million in the 1970s. Children are precious beings wherever and whenever. Adults must take responsibility for their dreams and hopes from now, as the future of the country rests on them.