21/03/2023

Elena Boira: “To be effective, child policies must be linked to family policies”

Elena Boria Orantes, director of Child Services and Care, Recovery and Shelter Service (SARA) of the Barcelona City Council was at our university as speaker at the Molins Chair breakfast, organised by the Institute of Advanced Family Studies (IESF).

In her speech, the director of Child Care Services of the Barcelona City Council answered questions such as academic failure, intensive use of social networks, child poverty and violence. Boira stressed the importance of “being with families, caring for them and supporting them in their real and daily needs as the best preventive factor of future problems. “To this end, better coordination is needed in the education and social services system, which is where alarms often go off,” she said.

For the Director of Child Services, prevention is training parents in parenting skills. “For this reason, childhood policies should go hand-in-hand with other measures that work in the family context, which is where a safe bond is created, necessary for child development and future personality,” she explained.

In this regard, the speaker stated that “we are talking more and more about mental health or violence, but we must start talking about good treatment, not only about mistreatment. Neuroscience insists that the development of a safe bond in early childhood (0-3 years) is a protective factor. Supporting families is helping them develop that positive parenthood so necessary for successful education and parenting.”

At the breakfast, experiences such as the recent International Workshop on Family Support organised by the Institute of Advanced Family Studies were shared, in a discussion on the conclusions with the Family Support and Guidance Service, promoted under the Boira’s leadership, first in the Generalitat and currently in the City Council.

Attending the breakfast were Montserrat Gas, director of the IESF; Esperanza Molins, director of the Molins Figueras Foundation; Marc Grau, lecturer, Faculty of Education Sciences; Maria Fernandez Arrojo and Carmen M. Lazaro, lecturers, Faculty of Law; and Consuelo Leon, director of the Family Policies Observatory.

Elena Boira has previously visited UIC Barcelona as a speaker at several conferences organised by the IESF Child Care and Family Policies Chair. This chair receives its support from the Molins Figueras Foundation and has a journal, Quaderns de Politiques familiars [Family Policies Notebooks]; its last issue is a monograph dedicated to family support.