What does it mean when you neglect your child/baby??

Neglect to me is the child isn’t having it’s basic needs met (not being fed/changed/washed/shown love). Choosing to put your child into family care is different to me because the parent is choosing to prioritise their health and knowing they can’t meet babies needs and don’t want to neglect 🤷‍♀️

@Emma thank you! Good way to explaining it. 🙂

I work in child health and neglect is more about parents unwillingness or inability to provide for the basic needs of the child. So examples would be really poor housing situations (I’ve seen dog poo in kids bedrooms not cleaned up for days), not responding to the child’s health and medical needs, not feeding the child appropriately etc. if someone is putting the child into the care of a family member then this is showing they don’t want to neglect the child and they want to do the best for the child

@Louise I hear what you say. So knowing if the mother, needs to prioritse her health/needs it wouldn’t mean they are neglecting a child?

@Lorraine absolutely not if they are ensuring the child is with a safe caregiver and the health needs require some time away then if it means you come back much stronger than that’s going to be better than potentially staying and making things worse. The key element is making sure the child is in a safe environment and with someone who is going to keep them safe physically and emotionally as well as feed them and be caring and kind and take them school or activities etc. also there is rules around it so depending on who the family member is you may need to tell social services it’s known as private fostering and it’s just so they know where the child is if you google private fostering it will tell you when you need to declare it

@Louise Thank you for clearing that up. Being restricted on caring for a child is wrong and if the mother has no say whatsoever what would it mean? 🙂