“From the outset, I knew I would face several challenges,” says Irene González-Pijuan. “You can’t just go into these classrooms and homes and ask 7- and 8-year-olds ‘What’s energy poverty from your point of view?’ Because they’re not going to answer.”
González-Pijuan worked closely with the educators and colleagues from the APE to encourage children to talk about their experiences.
To get children to describe their situations – and express their thoughts and feelings – González-Pijuan and her team had to get creative. Drawing inspiration from Clark and Moss’s multi-method mosaic approach to learning, they developed diverse workshops, allowing children to draw, do handcrafts, play with Playmobil or use theater and interviews.
“I wanted to provide different art space perspectives … so that they could feel comfortable in one of them and express their view,” says Gonzalez-Pijuan. Early on, she realised she would also have to adapt her own expectations “because [the children] are not going to make complicated and philosophical reflections on energy poverty.”
Simulating some of the experiences of energy poverty during workshops prompted children to speak openly.
A vital aspect of the process, says González-Pijuan, was helping children understand that it is “OK to express what’s going on in their heads – or that even when they don’t understand, they can begin to try.”
Quickly, it became clear in the workshops that the children had A LOT ‘to say’ about their individual experiences and seemed to benefit from ‘sharing’ with others. González-Pijuan and her team recognized that the stories and information they had collected were a rich resource on several levels.
Maybe, thought González-Pijuan, it could bridge a disconnect that was emerging between some children and their parents.
Interactions inspire illustrations, which inspire more interactions
Drawings by 7- and 8-year-old children living in Real Canada (Madrid, Spain), who as of October 2021 had been without electricity for more than one year.
Often, parents go to great effort to protect their children from bad news – and will sacrifice a great deal to meet their children’s basic needs. In reality, it is like not talking about ‘the elephant in the room’.
“We saw that there are many families that don’t talk about it because they want it to go away,” says González-Pijuan. “The thing is that when you don’t talk about something, it’s still there and still affecting the children.”
González-Pijuan and the APE conceived a picture book as a means to two ends. First, it would help parents to engage with their children and better understand how the situation is affecting them. In turn, as children consider and express their thoughts and feelings – and ‘see’ the stories of others from diverse backgrounds – they might feel ‘part of a community’ and less alone.
Once the decision was taken, González-Pijuan knew such a book needed to be developed in a collective way. Through the APE, she enlisted a group of mothers to help capture even more perspectives from children.
In turn, the team connected with Ivonne Navarro, a Spanish-born illustrator whose work reflected their desire to “to avoid a very childish drawing…the very round and very fairytale style.” Finding Navarro’s drawings to be sharp but also “shiny and fun,” they felt her style would balance the seriousness of the topic without losing the light-hearted nature of a child’s picture book.
‘And Then There was Light’ can help parents engage in open dialogue about how lack of energy is affecting their daily lives, including their health and well-being. Photo: People Images
Changing perceptions and promoting change
From her broader research, González-Pijuan has discovered that the early experience of energy poverty has profound impacts as children grow into adolescence.
“They [the government] don’t care about us having light or energy,” says a 16-year-old boy living in La Canada Real. “It’s like we’re not citizens. We can’t study or do normal things and they don’t care.”
Ultimately, González-Pijuan hopes the picture book will help such children begin to understand their own lives in relation to societal issues and, rather than viewing themselves only as ‘discarded victims’ of unjust systems, become advocates for change as they mature into adulthood.
The work of González-Pijuan in collecting and sharing the first-hand accounts of children in Spain provides crucial, and previously absent, perspectives on personal impacts and the ‘ripple effects’ energy poverty has on communities. It also demonstrates why children’s voices need to be taken seriously in the fight for energy justice.
The research methodology being developed by González-Pijuan will create an exceptional opportunity for other researchers to implement similar practices to investigate how children experience energy poverty in different contexts.
How electricity really can change everything
When interviewing a mother of five children, González-Pijuan gained additional insights into how different daily life is for the energy poor.
On one level, taking her family for a day of running and playing at the wide-open beach is the antithesis of the cold, dark living room they all crowd into at night. For a few hours, her children forget their nighttime fears and easily feel they are just like all the other kids.
In a seaside city like Barcelona, a day at the beach can serve as a discreet way to get kids bathed. Photo: Imgorthand
But while other women might bask in time at the beach to relax, read a book and work on a tan, this mother wracks her brain for ways to pay overdue electricity bills. At some point, she’ll join her kids in the water, making sure they all use the chance to bathe – thus avoiding disapproving stares that come from using bathroom sinks in gas stations or grocery stores.
After months of living without electricity, the APE was able to help this family get their connection restored. Again, a child’s perspective was surprising, says González-Pijuan, “Her daughter said that her mother was a hero … because she brought the beach [i.e the light and water] home.”
This article was written by Kate Denhart while doing an internship with EnAct in Summer 2022.
The research carried out by Irene González-Pijuan was funded by the Fuel Poverty Research Network, a UK-based charitable organisation for which EnAct founder, Marilyn Smith, serves on the Board of Trustees.
