'i know kids with fillings who have extremely loving home lives so I wouldn't use that as a yardstick'
I agree, a lot of the children I taught were loved. Their parents didn't feed them adequately, wash them, clothe them properly, give them toys or books but they did love them.
When we started a toy library up, we had sessions for the parents first to teach them how to play. I had playmobil taken from class, when I went on a homevisit they were on display as ornaments on the mantelpiece.
One child proudly showed me the roses he'd got for his mum for her birthday,
a tub with three bushes he'd dug up and nicked from the park. The same child was 8 and had half his teeth due to a diet of coke and no toothbrush, like several others in the class. Lots of love.
When you walk into an infant class and it stinks like skid row, then you really can't pretend to yourself that it isn't real. When they get changed for PE and take off five layers of clothing so soiled it keeps their body shape.
But yes, keep saying to yourselves that it's all fibs and then you don't need to think about this happening in your own country.
We're having a Dickensfest here at the moment, aren't we?
Remember Bleak House? Remember Joe?
'Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article.
Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen.
Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours!
From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee.