What is it about?
Children growing up in poverty can miss out on everyday opportunities that are important for their development — opportunities to learn, play, build relationships, and take part in community life. This article draws on a ten-year community-based child protection programme in Northern Greece that supported children and families during the country’s economic crisis. Rather than focusing only on emergency aid or treating families as problems to be managed, the programme worked alongside them, building trust, maintaining stable relationships, and helping children access meaningful opportunities in their everyday lives. The experience shows that protecting children during times of crisis requires more than meeting basic needs. It also means creating real opportunities for children to participate, learn, play, belong, and thrive. These lessons can help us rethink how child protection and social services support children and families facing poverty and social exclusion.
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Why is it important?
Child protection often focuses on immediate risks and basic needs, but children can also be harmed when poverty limits their opportunities to learn, play, develop relationships, and participate in community life. This article shows why these everyday opportunities should be seen as an important part of protecting children, not as optional extras. The ten-year experience from Northern Greece also highlights the value of long-term, trusting relationships with families and community-based support rather than short-term responses to crisis. These lessons are relevant beyond Greece and can help practitioners, services, and policymakers think differently about how they support children and families experiencing poverty, exclusion, or prolonged social crisis.
Perspectives
Working alongside children and families over many years changed the way we understood child protection. We saw that poverty does not only affect what children have; it can also affect what they are able to do, experience, and become. A child may have food and shelter and still be excluded from opportunities to learn, play, form friendships, explore interests, and feel part of a community. This experience led us to view child protection not simply as preventing harm, but also as creating the conditions in which children can participate, belong, and develop. Perhaps the most important lesson was that meaningful support begins with relationships: listening to families, working with them rather than for them, and staying present long enough for trust and change to develop.
Argiris Alexiadis
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Community-based child protection as occupational justice practice: a critical relational analysis from the Greek economic crisis, A Life in the Day, September 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/mhsi-03-2026-0097.
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