Youth council children want a role in state projects

Air Force unit in Pattani's Nongchik district demonstrates aircrafts to celebrate the Children's Day. /Charoon Thongnual

Children's Day

Children and youths want government agencies to take action to boost their quality of life. But they also want to help run all parts of projects set up for their benefit, rather than just helping with ideas at the start of projects, child representatives said yesterday.

Aek Wonganant, president of Children and Youth Council of Thailand, said: "We've found that although projects were ini¬tiated for children and youths, relevant government officials only started action and projects were not completed.

"Some provincial governors, for example, haven't even held a meeting with relevant organ¬isations to run child and youth projects although provinces were described as liveable areas for children and youths."

Council vice president Siripong Ariyasuntorn said he wanted the officials and teachers from the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security to undertake projects together with children and youths onsite rather than offering them money and wait¬ing for a report on the project.

"Paper reports can be made to show only positive things, but practising together with us they will know good and bad things that happen in the projects and can then suggest better solu¬tions," Siripong said.

"We can only take part in projects by voicing our ideas, but later in the planning and practical procedures we hardly have a chance to join in.

"Further, we never have any chance to evaluate the projects authorities provide for us, but, we are always evaluated by society on whether we do good or bad things," Aek said.

"I also want local administrative organisations do more to develop children and youths."

However, funding is a big problem, as the national council got only Bt200,000 last year and 870 councils in each districts received only Bt5,000 each.

"The national board could only give those in local councils advice, due to small budget. It was a shame that we couldn't visit them to help run activities onsite," Aek said.

Children's Day is celebrated tomorrow. And Aek and Siripong both called on the government to continue proposals made to past governments, because little has been done to date.

The priorities include promoting lifelong learning, occupational training and giving children and youths a chance to stop their rights being violated.

Aek and Siripong want the government to encourage morality and good consciousness as they feel children and youths are becoming more violent.

"I believe people personally know what is good and bad and have good consciousness. But they have very little opportunity to use good consciousness by providing creative activities for them to do this. And there are lots of improper outside stimuli and there is no role model [for good]," Aek said.

Aek felt people should not blame families for children's problems, saying "every parent always prohibits their children from doing bad things, but some business owners who make use of children improperly should take responsibility for the problems."

Both youth representatives wanted adults of different occupations to be good role models for children.