Jayne Dowle: In our lives of privilege, let's remember the Kabul children

As Sedwill, a former British ambassador to Afghanistan, is now very keen to point out, what he was actually trying to say was that being born into such a conservative society, with strong family and community ties, is better for children than trying to grow up safely in some of our inner cities, with their high crime rates and gang culture.

Ironic, I thought, that I had this very debate with myself about eight years ago. After our son was born, we took the decision to move back to Barnsley from London. To, you've guessed it, a relatively conservative society with strong family and community ties.

You can see how Sedwill has got himself into trouble, though. Insurgency is on the rise in Afghanistan. A child in Kabul is probably more like to witness a suicide attack or come across an unexploded bomb than a child anywhere else in the world.

Last year was the deadliest for children since 2001 – more than a thousand were killed because of the conflict, according to Save the Children. Then there are the 850 children believed to die every single day, many from poverty and preventable diseases such as diarrhoea or pneumonia. Indeed, one in four Afghan children perish before the age of five.

Somehow it puts getting your mobile nicked on the way home from school into perspective.

If you live in London, or Glasgow, you might not like having your city compared unfavourably to Kabul, but it certainly makes you think about how privileged – or not – our own children really are. Residents of these cities have sprung inevitably to the defence, but this dilutes the challenging message that Sedwill was trying to get across.

It wasn't originally intended to be about Glasgow or London, but about children in Kabul, and these comparisons do nothing to help their daily battle for survival.

However, they do make us all think about how important it is for our own children to consider how their lives compare with children in other countries. I'm not saying that you sit down your under-10s and show them The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning film about the Iraqi conflict with the most harrowing scene of a young football-mad boy being turned into a human bomb, but it is vital that they comprehend, from an early age, that they aren't the only children in the world who matter.

It's not always easy though. My two – Jack, eight and Lizzie, five – came home from school with letters the other week. Could they each decorate a Christmas shoebox and fill it with items suitable for a boy or girl in a foreign country? There was a long list of destinations, including Pakistan, Haiti and Russia, all of them suffering from war, conflict, poverty, serious political upheaval or religious strife.

Lizzie ran upstairs as fast as her little legs could carry her, dragging out the empty shoeboxes I hoard for such occasions, gathering wrapping paper and pulling out treasured things she wanted to send, until I told her it was new things they were hoping for, not a crop-headed Barbie with a scribbled-on face.

I asked Jack if he wanted to do a shoe-box too. His response was a disdainful shrug of the shoulders, and a "What's the point?" When I asked him to elaborate, he said that it wouldn't make any difference what these children got for Christmas – their lives would still be rubbish.

Jack is an avid watcher of news reports. Perhaps that's why, for one so young, he has such a cynical attitude. And in a way I have to admire him for it. But it needs tempering.

So when I had finished telling him exactly what the point was, and explaining in no uncertain terms exactly how lucky he was to have all those PS3 games, a bike, and at the last count, 14 footballs in the back garden, he looked a bit shame-faced and together we raided the present cupboard for some good stuff to send.

It is clear that I have a bit more work to do on making Jack understand and appreciate how different life can be for lads like him around the world. But how to do it without evoking the idea that somehow everything we have in the West is better?

That, I think, is the biggest challenge we parents face in this kind of debate. In our global society, we should never assume moral superiority just because we have a roof over our head and shoes on our feet. Although Sedwill's comments were clumsy, it is right that he has brought his contentious opinions into the open.

For too long, we have accepted the lazy assurances that all in the West is well, while the rest of the world has nothing to teach us. Whether you agree with him or not, we all, adults and children, have a lot yet to learn.