In the adult inclination to greed and power, self-interest predominates, often imposing unnecessary suffering on children, robbing them of innocence, distorting their world view. As responsible adults, we are bound to moderate the impact, fortify resilience and offer children hope in a better future.
Becoming a family
The beauty of a new baby is wondrous in its perfection, inviting parents and others to love and nurture essential to its survival. All of life for a new baby stretches out in a joyful manifestation of hope.
How well parents respond to the call to nurture depends on how mature the parents have become. One who has transitioned from a single person who has addressed the tasks of young adulthood, to become a couple who care for each other, lends better to becoming a family able to nurture a new born. As cited in my book Becoming, “mutuality in enduring relationships moves from the independent “I am” towards the mutual “we are” outwards to “we care”.
In reality the birth of a new baby, establishing a family is a period of crisis and change during which many things can, and do, go wrong. Patience and love is needed to overcome the constancy of demands, changes of image and expectation, in order to transition to mature parenthood, laying the foundation for the child’s life. Much has been said about what parents do for the child. Much less is mentioned about the level of intimacy and maturity the child evokes in the parents and those who care for the child.
Those choosing not to have children may arise to positions of power affecting family, without ever having acquired the depth of understanding of intimacy and maturity possible when one processes the reality of becoming a family. We are then poorly served.
Parents
Most parents struggle through the demands of work, family, lockdowns and education demands to do a good enough job of helping their children grow up to be productive, responsible adults by age 18, in keeping with the law. All strength to them for establishing a sound platform for the child’s life and prospects! Children so blessed should be forever grateful for the privilege.
In one way or another, many fail the maturity challenge, unable to provide the necessary level of care and support. The child and its future are betrayed by parental self-interest.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, each year, around 3% of all children aged 0–17 are assisted by Australia’s child protection systems. Some children are unable to live safely at home as they risk being abused or neglected, or their parents are unable to provide adequate care. Support services try to keep children with their families, or alternatively pursue placement in out-of-home care, such as with a relative or foster carer.
One in 32 children received child protection services in 2019-2020. 67% of children receiving child protection services were repeat clients—that is, the children had previously been involved with the child protection system. Emotional abuse (54%) was the most common type of abuse or neglect substantiated through investigations in 2019–20. This was followed by neglect (22%), physical abuse (14%), and sexual abuse (9%). The number of children in out of home care rose by 7% between 30 June 2017 and 30 June 2020 (from 43,100 to 46,000).
Statistics show the true suffering of children resulting from parental immaturity and inadequacy. Suffering compounds over time due to multiple systemic failures, not the least of which is the Family Court.
Also demonstrated by statistics is the strong cohort of parents trying to do their best, who don’t attract the attention of protection services.
Family Court
Under Family Court law, the interests of children are supposed to be paramount in deliberations. Yet destructive weaponising of children by one immature party of the broken relationship against the other for advantage, is too often compounded by processes and courtesans of the Court, whose career and financial ambitions crush children’s future social and financial prospects. Complicating, delaying and drawing out resolution consume resources that could readily be committed to support children of the fractured family. The system could be simplified, with reduced options for the recalcitrant.
Education
A sound education is commonly understood as an opportunity for disadvantaged children to overcome the hurdle of parental dysfunction, prepare for employment and avoid imprisonment. Tacit acceptance of 30% functional illiteracy and innumeracy shows limitations of the education system to service a child’s preparedness for adulthood.
Literacy involves ‘students listening to, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating oral, print, visual and digital texts, and using and modifying language for different purposes in a range of contexts’ (ACARA 2019a).
A former classmate of mine who was a State Ward at the bottom of the class, for years was able to write me a message on a card at Christmas. The hand writing might have been a bit shaky, yet the message was legible and coherent. Today, the observation a healthy, bright ten year old with loving supportive parents unable to write a proper sentence with appropriate spelling, parts of speech, capitals and punctuation written legibly, fails to motivate any correction for improvement from the teacher.
Under the current teaching it seems all that is required is for certain elements of curriculum to be presented for learning by certain stages, before moving on, without confirming uptake. Easy for children to fall through the cracks. Compulsory incorporation of environmental, gender, racial and feminist propaganda into every element of learning seems to have become more important than a child’s ability to absorb literacy and build on it to become a functioning adult.
Yet it is well known that many students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade are likely to drop out of school and end up in jail or on welfare. Girls are more likely to end up having children out of wedlock and live below the poverty line. Cost to the healthcare sector of illiteracy is immeasurable.
Never before has so much been spent on education to produce such parlous outcomes, current generations performing lower than previous generations. Blame abounds all round: poor parenting; teachers trading indoctrination for education; capture of curriculum by the Left in Education bureaucracies and Teachers’ Unions, each weaponising their power over (other people’s) vulnerable children to achieve political ends, classic Communist manifesto. All the while, the primary purpose of education goes begging, affecting us all, whether in the disempowerment by illiteracy or indoctrination on gender, climate catastrophe or diversity.
Paedophiles and Porn
Nothing destroys a child’s innocence and normal progression to productive adulthood more than sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and pornography. When perpetrated by family members or people of authority, the very sense of trust in community is destroyed as well as the child’s sense of self. Uncontrolled selfish adult sexual predation imposes a lifetime burden upon a child, beyond its capacity to bear. Often the cycle of abuse continues, as victims of sexual abuse in turn become offenders. Pure evil!
Evil thrives in company. Organisations exist whose members openly advocate adult sex with children, posing psycho-sexual arguments about ‘age of consent’ laws and prevailing social attitudes. Roeburne in Western Australia experienced a paedophile epidemic of such high incidence that child sex abuse was seen as “normal”. Police charged 36 men with over 300 offences against 184 children. Child abuse tourism to developing countries and deep web portrayal of sexual abuse of children trawls the depth of disgust. Suffer little children!
We are sexual as well as social beings. Ever there has been pornography in one form or another, to entertain, inform or excite. Yet lunch time porn on smart phones must surely distort any child’s growth to healthy sexual maturity and social relationships with peers. Craven images of sexual subjugation are not reflective of healthy relationships. Again adult greed and power imposes suffering on unwitting children, amplified by educational messages confusing gender identity, denying biology, promoting irreversible sexual change. Suffer, indeed!!
Climate Catastrophe
Encouraging children to dispose of their Macca’s wrappers properly or turn off their smart phones for a time could affect greater benefit to the environment than all the hyperventilating orchestrated upon and by children about ever-failing predictions of climate catastrophe. Longitudinally, CC is proving a great global wealth transfer, affecting de-growth of western economies in favour of (more) corrupt ‘developing’ countries to help them deal with the scam. Marx couldn’t have programmed it better – yet another form of indoctrination to capture the hearts and minds of children.
COVID-19
Just when you think it couldn’t get worse for children’s education, school was closed during COVID lockdowns. Students have been left languishing with the vagaries of online lessons, without social contact or sport, even deprived of fresh air to shoot a few hoops in the park – for almost two years in Victoria. Deference has been demanded to the might and power of people in authority rather than reliance on facts. No wonder child mental health issues have soared.
Greed and power of adults once more manifests in the mandates to mask, vaccinate children, isolate and distance, when facts show that children are less likely to contract the virus and if they do, it will be low intensity. Shutting down all the children to protect the vulnerable very elderly is very flawed policy. Failure to acknowledge natural immunity from having survived the virus is yet another nod to the greed and power of Big Pharma, already benefiting from $billions in profits, as pressure rises to vaccinate all children.
Resilience and survival
Every era has its challenges. As post-war kids roaming free-range through the bush, across local farms, swimming in the best water holes, boiling the billy and feeding off wild mangoes, guava, gooseberries and raspberries, we learned resilience and initiative that helped survival through broken relationships and poverty, though not achievement of full potential. Learning to read and write well probably saved us.
Challenges for today’s children, though manifest, will no doubt be confronted with customary youthful energy and resilience that will enable them to survive, if not thrive, fulfilling the limitless potential and hope of their birth. How they respond matters, rather than what happens.