One hour a day of quality family time

BarcelonaDuring the nineties, Iceland had very worrying figures for substance use among adolescents. According to national surveys, more than 40% of young people aged between 15 and 16 had been drunk in the previous month, nearly a quarter smoked every day and a significant portion had used cannabis.

The response of the Icelandic state, which still remains an international benchmark in prevention today, achieved one of the most significant reductions in adolescent consumption in the world and represented a paradigm shift. Instead of focusing on questions like "Why do young people use?" they asked a very different question: "What protects adolescents so that they do not need to use?". They paid attention to the context in which consumption appeared and tried to modify it: not consumption, but the context.

Iceland implemented a public health strategy, called Youth in Iceland, which was based, among other measures, on three basic pillars: the involvement of families, the strengthening of the community and an extensive range of cultural, sports and leisure alternatives, subsidized by the state, in order to offer adolescents healthy alternatives to drug use.

Within this strategy, Iceland launched a clear message to families that, using current terminology, became viral: "Spend at least one hour a day with your child". It is one of the most paradoxically innovative proposals of this strategy. The paradox lies in the fact that the innovation seems almost an obviousness: spending more time as a family. However, this seemingly banal idea hides a truly transformative intuition.

The Icelandic model did not put the main focus on substances, but on relationships. It understood that adolescents, like children, need present adults, stable bonds, cohesive communities and opportunities to build a sense of belonging. In short, it decided to invest less in controlling young people and more in strengthening their support networks. This is the key to the matter: not trying to change adolescents but trying to change the environment in which they grow up.

Today, thirty years later, the message remains just as valid, or perhaps even more so. The second edition of the Children's Agenda –the document prepared by the Institute for Childhood and Adolescence that gathers the demands and proposals of children to improve their well-being– once again puts on the table a demand from girls and boys that has no expiration date: they ask us to spend more time with the family and for that time to be of quality.

Their demand is clear, but our response as adults remains to be seen. Over the last few decades, we have been witnessing a process that combines the professionalization of care and support for childhood with the dismantling of support networks. It is a process that is understandable and, to a certain extent, inevitable. The increase in knowledge about child development, the massive incorporation of women into the labor market, the transformation of family models, and the growing complexity of daily life are pushing hard towards this professionalization. But, in exchange, children are entering nursery schools earlier and earlier; we ask educational centers to assume functions that were previously carried out mainly in the family or community sphere (from emotional education to the accompaniment of daily conflicts) and families consult with specialists on issues that were often previously resolved by talking with grandparents, neighbors, or other families, within the immediate community.

On the other hand, unfortunately, another example of this displacement, which often goes unnoticed, is the so-called work-life balance. We talk about it a lot, but unfortunately, despite the advances, even today too often work-life balance does not consist of adapting adults' time to children's needs, but just the opposite: adapting children to adults' schedules. Many boys and girls chain together very long days between morning care, school, the canteen, and extracurricular activities, among others. It is not about blaming families, quite the contrary. Many have no other alternative, or the alternative is to delegate care to something worse than a professional: a flat screen (in every sense of the term). This is, therefore, a collective issue that must be resolved structurally.

Children call upon us for shared time, available people, spaces of trust, meaningful relationships, and a community life that makes them feel part of something. This, therefore, is one of the great challenges of our time: not to continue professionalizing all dimensions of parenting, but to return to families and communities the confidence, conditions, and capacity to care that they should never have lost. Because, although in many aspects professionalization has represented an indisputable advance (more knowledge, better services, and highly qualified professionals), this evolution also poses a real risk of replacing bonds with services.

Professionals are essential when there are specific needs. But their function should not consist of replacing the family or the community, but rather of reinforcing them. No specialist can take the place that belongs to daily bonds, because caring is not just intervening when a problem appears; it is building a reciprocal and sustained relationship over time.

In short, the great challenge of 21st-century childhood policies is not to create more resources to care for children, but to create the conditions so that the adults who are part of their lives, especially their families, can care for them.

One hour a day, the Icelanders used to say. It may seem like a short time to us, but I invite families to reflect for a moment on how much quality time, full attention, reciprocal conversation, or effective play we dedicate each day to our sons and daughters. Perhaps we will realize that one hour a day becomes a major challenge in these times.