Power of pen pals

Contact with sponsored children good for emotional health

Josh Dye
Public relations editorial intern
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

Regular contact with their sponsor is good for the emotional health of children in developing countries, doctoral research by an Avondale academic shows.

Brad Watson discovered the importance of establishing and maintaining a relationship with sponsored children, during a trip to India over the semester recess. Brad visited children sponsored by the not-for-profit Christian organisation Asian Aid for more than three years. He found the children who had regular contact with their sponsor “seemed to have higher self-esteem [and] . . . a stronger sense somebody cared for them.” For some children, according to teachers with whom Brad spoke, the relationship with their sponsor also helped improve academic performance.

The level of the need for children to know something about their sponsor surprised Brad. “I underestimated the importance of that sense of relationship,” he says.

Asian Aid’s customer relations officer Kerryn Patrick says children “need a response to feel they are writing to somebody real.” Asian Aid stipulates children write to their sponsors twice a year, but according to Brad, “few sponsors would communicate with their children more than once a year.”

Reflecting on his research, Brad, a senior lecturer in international poverty and development studies at Avondale College of Higher Education, says regular contact would give children a confidence boost. Even one letter over 10 years “at least gives that child a sense of who is helping them.”

Children could become confused by a lack of communication from their sponsors, says Kerryn, “particularly when the children see others in their class getting letters. They could think, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

Melbourne-based mother Bek Ross has sponsored seven-year-old Priyanka for almost a year. She has not yet responded to Priyanka’s letters but plans to do so. Bek will also encourage her children to write to, she says, raise awareness of the plight of other children.

However, both Kerryn and Brad caution about what information—discrepancy in wealth, for example—sponsors share with their children. “You don’t want to establish an unequal relationship,” says Brad. It is a personal relationship, says Kerryn, so “focus on similarities and talk about families.”

Brad encourages sponsors to respond to their children “in meaningful ways” so the correspondence does not become simply like a transaction. “Otherwise the relationship is at risk of becoming superficial and one-sided—they get the money, you get the letters.”