Abu Dhabi: While the UAE has revelled in its econ-omic growth and the abundance of wealth, the structure of the family is being attacked and experts say that unless immediate action is taken children will bear the brunt of this success-driven culture.
The Fun City playground in Abu Dhabi's Marina Mall is a child's paradise: arcade games, bumper cars, electronic animal rides, all kinds of candy and a caged maze. On any given day, Fun City is a perfect picture of a not-so perfect pattern that is silently being ignored.
Children are playing, bouncing up and down while their parents talk on the phone. Nannies, mostly Filipina, roll down the slide with children so young they need to be carried. Other nannies are trying to tame the children shouting in Arabic.
"Every single day, parents drop their children here and just leave them while they go shopping, eating or meeting with their friends. They are as young as three-years-old. Most of them come with their nannies. We get the occasional few who get dropped off alone," says Ahmad Abdul Azim who has been working at Fun City for the past two years.
This trend has become such common practice that the option exists to just put the children in this ball/maze cage, leave them running and just give one of the workers your phone number in case anything goes wrong. But this issue is not just at Fun City, Azim adds.
"The sad part is that this is how things are here in the whole country," Azim says as he points to several children being lugged around by two Filipina nannies. "This is just a reflection of what's going on in the whole country." According to the workers, the children often have as much as Dh300 to use around the playground. So shortage of money is not the issue, says Azim.
For Mohammad Al Saeedi, an Emirati, having a maid to look after his children makes sense. "My wife and I are too busy to care after every child. I am not proud of that but that's the truth. It would be a very rare occurrence to find a national family today without domestic workers who care for their children," Saeedi says. His four children, each with their own maid, have even learned the language of their maids. "That's because they spend so much time with them," says Saeedi.
A recent study released by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry noted that the UAE has 268,000 foreigners here on domestic worker visas. That is approximately five per cent of the national population. Abu Dhabi is the largest recipient of these housemaids, the study says.
