Children’s Asylum Centre ‘too welcoming’ 😢

Being shorter is often linked to mothers who smoke during pregnancy, apart from genetics that is.

This is the article

www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/a44340862/british-children-shorter-european-peers/#:~:text=Last%20week%2C%20a%20study%20revealed,NHS%20funding%2C%20reports%20the%20Guardian.

Golly Oreo ( drifting off the OP ) - smoking mothers are very rare these days. I've spent a fair amount of time around antenatal departments with pregnant daughters and the folk gathered outside smoking are not the mothers to be. Lots of us (I'm 71) and lots of our children ( mine between 34 and 46) were born to mothers who smoked and drank alcohol: milk stout being especially beneficial apparently!

Exactly Cochlovingran, many of us were born to smoking mothers . The research is clear, our children are falling behind in height, their mental health is worse than those in other comparable European children
Offpiste but we are dying younger as well

We seem to be slipping further and further back in the provision and quality of life for children and young people. There is considerable research in the US linking low body weight in infants and brain development. This lack of proper growth must impact on that as well. Significantly of course schools were closed and children were not getting the healthy meals they are given there. Many would have survived on crisps and snacks and little else. It is time we started supporting children properly, but there's little hope of that just now.

I have no idea how cuts in the NHS has any baring on children’s height. Poor diet certainly has a baring on children’s growth. And in the years since the 1980s what has happened to food in the UK? A proliferation of fast food outlets, mainly imported from America. McDonald, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the list goes on. All food from these places is c…p. No vegetables, no salad, no fruit, few vitamins, but high in salts, sugars, and fats. This is what is causing children not to grow as tall as they once did. Many parents can’t or won’t cook, or because they’re working, have little time to cook. Children are given what they will eat with little preparation. Frozen pizza, frozen chips, ready meals etc. Nothing to do with the NHS and everything to do with poor diet.
Add to that Dutch and Scandinavian children have always been bigger than British children, whilst Italian and Greek children have always been smaller.
Add that poor diet of pregnant mothers and smoking of pregnant mothers and children will be smaller. Not that I think being a centimetre and a half is much to worry about. So long as the children are not fat. That is certainly something to worry about.

Glorrianny
You think school meals are healthy? You clearly didn’t work in the area I worked in. Those meals were anything but healthy!

Chocolatelovinggran

Golly Oreo ( drifting off the OP ) - smoking mothers are very rare these days. I've spent a fair amount of time around antenatal departments with pregnant daughters and the folk gathered outside smoking are not the mothers to be. Lots of us (I'm 71) and lots of our children ( mine between 34 and 46) were born to mothers who smoked and drank alcohol: milk stout being especially beneficial apparently!

Where I live it seems that most people smoke, teenagers, pregnant women, mothers with young kids, fathers with young kids, middle aged and old people.
The poorer in society still smoke.

Which is is sort of surprising given the price of fags these days.

maddyone

Glorrianny
You think school meals are healthy? You clearly didn’t work in the area I worked in. Those meals were anything but healthy!

Same here. And pathetically tiny portions.
The parents were led to believe that their children had had a healthy, generous hot meal, but that really wasn’t the case at all.
I worried that they’d go home and be given just a snack for their tea.
Ditto breakfast club - it was usually cheap white toast

And the atmosphere in the dining hall was really noisy and chaotic, not conducive to enjoying eating in company.
The children just wanted to go back outside and play.
There was a lot of waste, hence the small portions.
It was a sort of Catch 22 situation

Remember Jamie Oliver's attempt at healthy school dinners?
And parents protesting because their kids wanted Twizzlers & chips.

Yes. Parents were stuffing bags of chips through the railings (if the MSM is to be believed)

Well many of the schools I worked in offered healthy meals to children and my GCs have healthy school meals. But really it isn't that important, for some of the children I encountered breakfast club and their school dinner were the only proper food they would get. Before breakfast clubs I met children whose breakfast had been a couple of biscuits they had found. Milk was sometimes given out first thing before assembly because of that.
Most breakfast clubs give cereal and toast.
Purely on spec I googled Cumbrian primary school lunch menu. I rejected a church school because it might be untypical but found Norman Street.
They look fine to me
www.normanst.cumbria.sch.uk/school-life/school-lunches/

Yes, Glorianny But what you see on the published menu does not correlate with the actual meal given to the children.
That’s why I mentioned ‘parents being misled’.
For over 10 years I was in the dining hall every day and saw exactly what happened

Looking at photos in school brochures is almost like looking at propaganda! (I jest, sort of…)
But, in my experience, the kids really don’t get the meals the parents are paying for

the question that always stays in my head is just where is everyone going to live?
It doesn't matter what skin colour. we have a housing shortage and that needs looking at.
Some counties eg Cornwall are already short of housing for ordinary people. Due to holiday lets becoming the main industry there.

What does Jenrick think will happen to these unaccompained children?
Do we have places for them?
Who paid for their travel.
So much we don't know.

But over painting a mural is a depth to be ashamed of.
that he is connected to people who went through the holocaust just makes him worse.

FannyCornforth

Yes, Glorianny But what you see on the published menu does not correlate with the actual meal given to the children.
That’s why I mentioned ‘parents being misled’.
For over 10 years I was in the dining hall every day and saw exactly what happened

Well I was in many different school dining rooms for over 30 years and the majority of those schools offered decent meals to the children. Had they not provided what was on the menu the PTA would have asked questions. Didn't your school have one?

Let's hope the staff somehow manage to get nice stuff up to cheer the kids up. That Minister can only be the furthest of the furthest of the Right to bash little distressed children. Why didn't anyone stand up to him? This is a free link : www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66132158

I might be wrong but I think the children, who are mostly teenagers, only stay in these reception centres for a short time as I think they are usually moved to foster homes as soon as possible.

maddyone

I might be wrong but I think the children, who are mostly teenagers, only stay in these reception centres for a short time as I think they are usually moved to foster homes as soon as possible.

www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/12/Kent-detention-facilities-web-2021.pdf
Most recent published report.

JaneJudge

This is the article

www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/a44340862/british-children-shorter-european-peers/#:~:text=Last%20week%2C%20a%20study%20revealed,NHS%20funding%2C%20reports%20the%20Guardian.

This has absolutely nothing to do this inhumane Minister wanting a reception Centre for kids to be unwelcoming. (or did I muss a bit?)

Oreo

Being shorter is often linked to mothers who smoke during pregnancy, apart from genetics that is.

Hello ! I think you are on the wrong thread.

Baggs

Galaxy

What difference does it make if there are 16 year olds there as well.

Possibly none. But that's well above the Mickey Mouse appreciation age, I think, which makes the painting over malarky not such a big deal.

I'd also want to know exactly how many unaccompanied children are in asylum centres. Surely it can't be many? How on earth would they get here completely unaccompanied?

www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/information/refugee-asylum-facts/separated-children-facts/

In the year ending September 2022, the UK received 5,152 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Many of them come from Sudan, a country facing political instability following years of civil war, children, in particular, are at risk. That is 25% of the asylum seekers for that year.

Really management by local Councils who are given the responsibility for minors without the finances they need often has disastrous results : .https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63231470

JaneJudge

Do you think immigration centres for unaccompanied children shouldn't have toys in either? How can having a sterile environment be in vulnerable children's best interests? and if we bring tax into the scenario, how does it cost any more tax to have a painted mural on the wall.

There is a psychology between art and trauma, it's why they paint children's hospitals with scenes and murals and why there is art in hospital. People going through trauma benefit from it

You are so right! We all know that art soothes the soul. Even if Germanshepherdsmum begrudges a little comfort to children (no idea what % turn out to be over 18) who have often travelled for months and been subjected to physical or mental abuse, The fact that they dared to come into our country at the expense of our taxpayer without the requisite bit of paper doesn't seem look like a crime to me.