There was a story in Tuesday’s newspaper which really struck me. A woman who is receiving psychiatric treatment has filed a constitutional case for access to her eight-year-old daughter, who is in foster care. Her mother and grandmother (the child’s grandmother and great-grandmother) are also parties to the suit; they too want access to the girl, who was taken into care two years ago, and then fostered.

The case is being made against the Social Policy Ministry, which is ultimately responsible for all children in care. This is the sticking-point, for it is not the ministry which has denied the mother access, but the daughter who is refusing it. She does not want to see her mother.

The woman claims that the girl is being looked after in comfortable surroundings by a family with enough money to live well. This, she argues, has detached the girl from her origins. She no longer wants contact with her mentally-ill mother, who lives in grinding poverty with her own mother and grandmother. She does not want to know.

The moral ramifications of this painful little tale are too hard to pull apart and assess in the hope of finding a solution. The child care authorities are in duty bound to act in the best interest of the child, and not in the best interest of the mother – but taken to its logical conclusion, where would this lead us?

Plenty of children live in terrible poverty with unreliable parents. Obviously, they would be better off raised in financial comfort by sensible and loving people, but this cannot possibly be interpreted to mean that the children of poor and inadequate parents should be seized by the state and handed off to foster parents, or placed in institutes, even if it is the child who might want that.

Children can be extraordinarily mercenary sometimes, choosing to live with their rich fathers rather than with their struggling mothers, even if separation from her children would destroy the mother psychologically. That is why warring, separated parents at times try to bribe their children in an attempt at securing their affections, and sometimes they succeed.

But then again, if the mother is incapable of looking after the child, if she is receiving psychiatric treatment and lives in poverty, what should the care authorities do? At face value, the answer is that the child should be taken away and placed with a foster family, for his or her own sake – but that is only at face value.

Plenty of middle-class women suffer breakdowns, acute alcoholism, severe depression, or more debilitating forms of mental illness which make it impossible for them to look after their children properly, but those children are not taken away from them. Though I knew several families of siblings whose mothers were ill in one of these ways when we were growing up, they still lived at home, they got by, they survived, and they are perfectly normal.

We knew their mothers were ‘different’, though we were not sure in what way, and it did not matter at all. There was absolutely no suggestion that they should be taken into care, and any such suggestion would have been greeted with appalled horror by relatives, neighbours and friends.

Some of my childhood street-friends had to learn how to be parents to their own mothers, and while it might have been incredibly hard on them at the time, being ripped away from their home and put into care would have been a hell of a lot harder. They have homes and families of their own now, and they are admirably well-adjusted. They never turned out to be drug-addicted car thieves who could not make a commitment or shoulder responsibility, but rather the opposite – perhaps because they learned how to shoulder responsibility so early on in their lives.

What are the deciding factors in this case? The deciding factors are poverty, lack of education and the absence of what are now known as ‘life skills’. Mothers who are prevented by mental illness or alcoholism from looking after their children are not a phenomenon of slums and back alleys.

I grew up in Sliema’s smartest neighbourhood, but in a network of just three streets there were kids with psychotic mothers, depressed mothers, and alcoholic mothers. They were in absolutely no doubt that their mothers loved them, and their home life was just that – their home life. They realised that not all the kids lived like that, but that was how they lived and they just got on with it, and this included the brave siblings who got home from school every day to cook for and clean up after their mother and grandparents, all of whom were alcoholics, but whom they adored.

Over the years, I met other people from the same social background who had grown up like that, and even one or two who were like that themselves. There was no question of state intervention at any point; everything was privately juggled and the families coped with the help of friends and relatives.

When does the state intervene – only when the mental illness of the mother is compounded by acute poverty and lack of skills? It certainly seems like it, because those added difficulties can tip the balance of a situation from ‘slightly risky’ to ‘far too risky’ for the child. Another factor, over and above mental illness of the mother, poverty and lack of skills, which seems to militate for state intervention, is the absence of the child’s father. The conclusion is that a poor, unskilled, mentally-ill mother cannot cope alone with a child, without that child coming to harm.

Here again, there are too many moral dilemmas and I would find myself unable to make a decision for or against, if I were in that position, without forever torturing myself as to whether it was the right one. Should you take the child away? Should you not take the child away? What if you do not take the child away and something happens?

Of the children I knew who grew up like this, only one set of siblings did not have a father at home, and they were the ones with the worst problems to cope with. They survived extremely well. As for the rest, the fathers generally pitched in, if not to do the laundry and cooking, then at least to mop up some of the emotional mess, but the children were still left to bear the brunt of it (they spent more time at home) and still they reached adulthood physically and psychologically intact.

Love and cruelty – those are the great deciding factors as far as a child is concerned, and those should really be the factors when deciding whether to take a child into care or not. A child will put up with all manner of discomfort if he or she is treated kindly and loved. I have no doubt that the children of cruel and abusive mothers should be taken into care if they cannot be looked after by their fathers or by other relatives or friends – but in other cases I am faced with a dilemma. Mental illness does not manifest itself in cruelty or abuse. In fact, it rarely does. Really cruel parents are most often perfectly sane, even though we find it hard to explain their cruelty except on grounds of insanity.

If that home is below the breadline, and this is considered to be the factor that tips the balance towards the decision to take the children into care, then the poverty has to be ameliorated. That is why we have social assistance. Children can and do cope with mentally-ill mothers; all they need is the support structure to do it. And sometimes, they do not even need that.

* * *

When I read about this case, all I could see was a little girl instinctively trying to protect herself. Though the mother is clearly in dire straits, curiously it is the child to whom my heart goes out. She was taken into care at six years old. Her memories before that are of living with her mentally ill mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, in poverty.

That was normal to her: the poverty, the mental illness, everything. Then she was fostered, and she discovered that there are other ways of living. Of course, she prefers the comfortable and stable environment in which she now lives. Who can blame her? Unreliable adults and poverty are very scary things for children, though they are not grounds that justify the separation of a child from its mother.

I would even say that poverty is more frightening and threatening than mental illness, which is one reason why the children of mentally-ill mothers who are financially well off are not taken away from them. It is not because they are well connected. It is because poverty makes all other problems so much worse. Those who glorify poverty (“we may have been poor, but we were happy!”) may simply have wiped this from their memory. Yet insecurity is not a justifiable reason to separate a mother from her child.

Most of us know at least one person who finds it easier to break off all contact with a much loved spouse or partner, following rejection or estrangement for whatever reason, than to suffer the emotional consequences of occasional meetings.

In a way, this little girl is wise beyond her years. She has decided to make a new life for herself by breaking off all contact with the old. Sadly, her mother is not one of those unusual women who can do the same. She does not wish to let go of her child. And so here we have it: another ordinary human tragedy.