How to listen to children living in poverty? What can be learned from listening to them? How can these lessons be translated in recommendations

1. What Can Be Gained from
Listening to Children Living in
Poverty?
And How to Achieve it?
Observatoire de l’Enfance, de la Jeunesse et de l’Aide à la
Jeunesse

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Listening to children: how and what next?
• Preamble
 Listening: easier said than done (we, adults, know better!)
 What next? Trying to be policy oriented
• Plan
 How to listen to children living in poverty?
 What can be learned from listening to them?
 How to translate these lessons in recommendations

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How to listen to children living in poverty? (1)
Methodology: setting the right conditions
Four distinctive features
1. Meet the children:
 in a setting familiar to them
 in the presence of other children they know
 in a context which is not stigmatising
2. Meet the children twice in order to neutralise
whatever limitation is attached to a first and once
encounter

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How to listen to children living in poverty (2)
3. Make sure your understanding of what they say is the
same as their understanding
4. Give priority to what best suits the children you meet
 be ready to listen individually to a child if he is not
comfortable with the group
 use different channels of expressions (conversations but
also photographs, drawings, games, and so on)
 try to make it all as fun as possible

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How to listen to children living in poverty (3)
• Example: what would you take with you to stay on a
desert island for one week? You have three suitcases:
 one for happiness: symbolised by a heart
 one for dreams: symbolised by a cloud
 one for things to forget: symbolised by a stop sign
• 6 groups of ± 5 children aged 6 to 12 in different
settings
• Plus: 3 comparison groups: children from affluent
families

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What we have learned?
• Organising framework: children subjective and
psychological well-being
 Relationships with themselves
 Relationships with others
 Relationships with the environment
• Strategies to cope with the impact of poverty

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Relationships with themselves
• Sharing responsibility for dealing with shortages (a
common motto is: don't waste food)
• Taking their share in making ends meet
• Feeling responsible
• Having to act as support for their parents
• The meaning of “struggle for life” : lucidity and maturity

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Relationships with others
• Mobile phone, console game, computer, internet
 = essential belongings to belong to
 = open playgrounds for children of today
• Acute sensitivity to unfairness, inequality of treatment,
breaking one’s promise + intense emotional reactions

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Relationships with their environment
• Access to extracurricular activities:
 Huge potential of opportunities: to socialise outside school,
to engage in rewarding activities, to be recognised for
unique competencies, …
 Great expectations
 Disappointments: financial and socio-cultural barriers

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Strategies to cope with the impact of poverty?
• How their actively deal with it?
 Consented segregation: minimising the risks of being
rejected or stigmatised -> finding one’s place, the place
where I feel at ease ->withdrawal into oneself
 Solidarity between peers: sort of
 There is a link between us. If anyone fight, I will go directly
on him, sure. You don’t touch one of us in our tower block
without having the rest of us coming to rescue
 Pets and transitionnal objects

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Recommendations (1)
1. Transfer of knowledge: tools and tricks from research
methodology as communications skills for
professionnals
• Ensure all those working with and for children
understand the impact of poverty and social
exclusion and the need to listen and to take account
of the views of children
2. Paying due attention to everything that links and
connect these children to others and to their
environment

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Recommendations (2)
• "the hardest thing is not living with nothing but to be
considered as nothing"
3. First of all, do no harm (Don’t be evil, Primum non
nocere)
• An oath of Hippocrates for social workers, teachers,
care givers …

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Credits
• Elsa Albarello and Muriel Williquet from Sonecom,
authors of the study
• Christine Mahy and Pierre Doyen, Walloon Network for
Fighting Poverty for their precious contribution at
different stages of this study
• Full report (soon) available on the Internet site of the
Observatory for Childhood, Youth and Youth Care of
the French community Ministry
www.oejaj.cfwb.be

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Observatoire de l’Enfance,
de la jeunesse et de l’Aide à la Jeunesse
www.oejaj.cfwb.be