The Post: The blindness and blame that make NZ a not-so-great country to raise children

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What impulse, buried deep in the New Zealand psyche, makes us treat children so badly, even as we proclaim this the best place on earth to raise a family?

When I lived in Britain, any New Zealander heading back home to have children was greeted with approving nods, even from the Brits, who would often murmur, “Wouldn’t want to try doing that in London.” Yet those Kiwis might have been better off in the sprawling metropolis.

New Zealand is, in fact, one of the worst places in the developed world to be young. Last year, a Unicef report ranked us 32nd out of 36 rich nations when it comes to children’s wellbeing: our young people experience alarming rates of bullying, obesity and suicide.

The Ministry of Social Development’s 2026 Child Poverty Report, released on Thursday, shows that 14.3% of young people – one in seven – live in material hardship. Their families cannot afford basic items like two good pairs of shoes, fresh vegetables and meat, trips to the doctor and home heating.

As well as being deeply sad, these figures are also strange, in that they aren’t true for other groups. Just 5% of our pensioners, for instance, go without the basics. In no European country, bar Sweden, are children treated so much worse than older people.

What can explain this apparent contempt for the situation of our youngest citizens? Two things, I think: blindness and blame.

Every opinion survey tells the same story: many New Zealanders blame poor children’s position on their supposedly feckless and work-shy parents. But although personal choices matter, to lay the blame so squarely on individuals is to forget about the wider forces holding them back.

Psychological research, detailed in the 2013 book Scarcity, shows that, for poor people struggling to manage their budget, the stress of an unexpected car bill has the same disastrous effect on their decision-making as going a whole night without sleep. It is less that poor choices cause poverty, in other words, and more that poverty causes poor choices.

There are so many barriers to success: lack of qualifications, lack of available jobs even if people have the right qualifications, lack of affordable transport and childcare even if there are available jobs. And as the Child Poverty Report reminds us, in one of its most devastating facts, half of the young people living in hardship have a parent in a full-time job.

Work doesn’t pay in modern-day New Zealand. In the 1980s, staff used to get 70% of their company’s revenue paid to them as wages and salaries. Now, it’s just 60%, that lost 10% going to the firm’s owners instead, in a world where trade unions have been marginalised and the typical person’s bargaining power is greatly diminished.

If staff had held onto their 70% share of company revenue, the average wage would now be around $14,000 higher, according to calculations by the economist Bill Rosenberg. No wonder so many working families struggle so badly.

That struggle, though, is often invisible to those who do not experience it. Which is where the blindness comes in.

Since the 1980s – funny how that decade of hyper-individualism keeps recurring – the disparity between rich and poor has widened alarmingly. In New Zealand, it rose more, between 1985 and 2005, than in any other developed country.

In the last 40 years, the disposable income of someone in the richest 10% has doubled, rising by an extra $75,000 or so a year, while poorer families are just $9000 a year better off than they were in 1986.

In the richer households, life is good. There, it remains true that New Zealand is one of the best places one could raise a child. A low average score for the country conceals some striking heights.

But those parents increasingly exist in splendid isolation from the country’s harsher realities. As incomes become more divided, so too do lives: rich congregate with rich, leaving poor to congregate with poor.

Last decade, a joint Kiwi-US research project found that the wealthy often oppose redistribution not just out of self-interest but also because, living surrounded by people like them, they are left with very little understanding of the depth of poverty that exists in suburbs they never visit.

And from that vast distance, it is all-too-easy to engage in the blame game. It would be much harder for people to do so face-to-face, when they’d have to confront the unforgiving reality of another’s life.

The appalling situation for Kiwi kids, in short, is less a reflection of the importance we place on childhood, and more a reflection of the views that better-off adults have about worse-off ones. That, in turn, suggests that matters are unlikely to change until the former can be made to see the struggles of the latter.