Protecting Our Children
Our children are our future. When we harm or disadvantage our children, society gets weakened. What we do to our children we end up doing to all of society. So it is imperative that we treat children as best we can, and shield them from that which would harm them, abuse them, or threaten them.
And sadly, there are all sorts of things today which are working against our children. Indeed, we may live in one of the most child-unfriendly cultures there has ever been. The forces arrayed against our kids seem everywhere and overwhelming. Consider just a few of them:
-We know from many decades of social science research that children do best, all things considered, when raised in an intact two-parent family, preferably cemented by heterosexual marriage. The amount of social science research on this is now voluminous.
By every social indicator we know that in the great majority of cases, children flourish when raised in these two-parent homes. But with deliberate single-parenthood, cohabitation, blended families, step-families, and now homosexual “families,” we have more and more children who will never know what it is like to be raised by their own biological mother and father.
And this is not just the stuff of right-wing demagogues. Recall the words of Barack Obama in 2008: “We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioural problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
The rights and wellbeing of children should be at the top of the list here, but sadly this is not the case. The whims and desires of adults are trumping the needs of children, and they are paying a big price as a result. And as a consequence, society is paying a big price as well.
-Another obvious area in which our children are being assaulted prematurely by adult concerns is with comprehensive sex education courses, often starting in kindergarten. Indeed, the sexperts have long said that the more such sex ed our young children get, and at ever younger ages, the better. Never mind that such young children are not at all in a place to be able to handle such hyper-sexualised content, mentally, psychologically, physically or emotionally.
A big part of this in Australia includes the various versions of the so-called Safe Schools programs. They are supposed to be about bullying but they are nothing of the sort. They are all about pushing radical sexual ideology onto young impressionable children. The Canberra Declaration has always campaigned to put the rights of our children first and not last.
And a major push in these programs is the radical gender bender ideology. Our young children are told there is no such thing as biological reality, and that they can decide to be whatever sex or gender they want to be. And with this constant barrage of trans propaganda and indoctrination, we are seeing a sudden and massive uptake in the number of young children who want to transition out of their natal sex.
Even though all this is still fairly recent – no one was really talking about this just a decade ago – there are already some adverse reactions starting to crop up. Now a major growth area for both adults and children is sex-change regret. De-transitioning is now being all the rage, as people realise that trying to change outward physical traits does nothing to deal with the inward mental and emotional issues that really need to be addressed.
-Speaking of education, more and more parents are concerned by how the public-school system is failing our children by way of not coming through with the basics – the three Rs for example. But they seem adept at pushing every new and radical secular left agenda item onto our kids.
Children may now leave school illiterate and innumerate, but they seem to know all about the latest radical causes, be it radical sexuality, climate alarmism, anti-capitalism, pro-Islam, and general anti-Western sentiments. No wonder so many worried parents are pulling their children out of state schools and putting them in private or independent schools – or home-schooling them.
-And then we can speak of the ultimate form of child abuse: abortion. With anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 thousand abortions a year here, along with around 45 million a year globally, more and more children never even get a chance to see the light of day.
In most places in the West it is illegal to spank a child, but it is perfectly lawful to kill a child while in his or her mother’s womb. How can we as a society claim to be concerned about children when we are quite happy to kill millions of them before they are even born?
-Another obvious place in which we are letting children down big time is with the pornification of society. Porn is now ubiquitous, and it is not just freely available for adults. Children everywhere can easily get access to it – and they are. Whether on computers or smart phones of other gadgets, our children are being inundated with a flood of porn. And sadly, we hear more and more about children taking out on other children what they have seen on their screens.
In so much of this we are forcing vulnerable children to grow up way too fast. We are exposing them to all the dangers and all the risks of an adult world and expecting them to just embrace it all and become a part of it – well before they are ready to do so. We are creating a generation of “The Hurried Child” as sociologist David Elkind put it in his important 1981 book by that title.
All in all, our kids are in a bad way. And much of that is because of the deliberate actions and ideas of adults. As mentioned, if you want to bring down a society, target its children. The activists have long known this. As Vladimir Lenin once said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”
The Canberra Declaration is totally committed to seeing children protected from all the radical onslaughts they are now experiencing. We stand with children first and foremost. When it comes to adult schemes verses the wellbeing of children, we will always stand with the latter.
And there is much wisdom in this. As Frederick Douglass once put it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” For the sake of our children we must do better.