On Wednesday 15 November Patrizio Paoletti, as President of the Foundation that bears his name, took part in the conference “Italy: poor children. For a definition of need that rewrites the rules of aid” at the Chamber of Deputies.
The conference reflected on how this poverty can be tackled: on the needs of childhood, on the priorities, and on the range of measures that protect children in conditions of deprivation. Many people spoke, among them the Parliamentary Vice-President for Childhood and Adolescence, Hon. Sandra Zampa, and the National Guarantor Authority for Children, Filomena Albano.
Paoletti contributed a talk titled “Poverty as a habit of the mind”: “It is not possible to respond to poverty with a single action. We need an integrated approach, because poverty brings with it a wider problem, involves many parties and calls for a joint response that makes a difference.”
“Our true ambition must become giving people a happy life, much more than just helping them survive. A happy life is a rewarding, rich life. We can do this by working on the environment. Environments dominate a child’s growth: children learn where they live. So we must turn our attention to the habits and manifestations in which growth takes place. We must encourage excellence and certify the stages of a child’s development through a behavioural system that is not a reactive Stimulus-Response, but one that preserves the time for understanding: Stimulus-Understanding-Response. We will give children the ability to choose if they have learned, together with us, to imagine themselves changing in a changing future.”
Paoletti stressed that today, thanks also to neuroscience, we have the extraordinary opportunity to study our inner processes, which drive our capacity to prefigure the future. “Rita Levi Montalcini left us urging us to devote ourselves to growing the evaluative area of our brain, the only one capable of healing us and improving our society. The prefrontal lobes are the seat of our capacity for prefiguration, for changing in a world that changes. If today we learn to prefigure what might happen tomorrow, we will be ready to give more effective answers, even to macro-problems such as poverty.”
In this work of planning a response, Paoletti said, emotions play a very important role. Only through commitment and continuity can we reduce our emotional swings, which bring frustration, anger, violence and the break with the other. We must train ourselves to manage our emotions, and to express fully the 5 characteristics of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-mastery, motivation, empathy and social skills.
The event was promoted by “L’Albero della Vita” together with “Human Foundation”, the National Council of the Order of Social Workers, the “Alliance against Poverty in Italy” and in collaboration with the Parliamentary Commission for Childhood and Adolescence.
According to Istat data for 2016, in Italy 1 million 292 thousand children live in absolute poverty, or 12.5% (compared with 10.9% of under-18s in 2015 and 3.9% in 2005), while 26.8% of families with three or more children find themselves in this condition (up from 18.3% in 2015).
