Future + Children

It must be one of the more well-worn cliches that our children "are the future." This would seem self-evident, as without children our race would die out. Without children, there is no one to appreciate or keep alive the legacy of the parents. Without children, there are no new human eyes that still behold creation with wonder and delight and teach their parents to marvel again. And yet, as self-evident as this truth would seem to be, we as a society are shockingly negligent of "the future."



Our kids' first view of the world, as an American child, generally is the inside of a hospital, more specifically a hospital bedroom or operating room. The moment the child is born someone else takes him away to clean him, measure him, test him, and wrap an identification band around his leg to remind everyone whose baby it is. The mother is left to wait until these ministrations are complete to have her own flesh and blood back. All of these things are assuming that "the future" is actually wanted. When unwanted, that same child is injected with poison and left to writhe in agony as he slowly and painfully dies. He is then cut up into little pieces and removed one slice at a time and thrown away. So much for the future.

When that child is old enough to be away from Mommy for a couple hours, he is many times dropped off at day care to be cared for by a total stranger. When he is too old for day care, a preschool teacher will take over, and then a kindergarten teacher. The child will spend the majority of his waking hours away from both his family and his home, being taught who knows what by complete strangers.

Studies have shown childhood obesity going up in the U.S. In many cases it can be traced to a lack of attention by the parents of those children in not supervising their food intake or in giving in to every whim their child has. Then there is the Internet and the portal it provides to the outside that can, without parental supervision, become a channel for everything from porn to cyber bullying.

That child then goes through middle and high school being taught whatever the government sees fit to teach children at that age. Parents will then send him off to a college that they know little about but that has the "right credentials" to process that child into an informed, balanced, well-behaved human being.

This is all assuming, of course, that we are talking about a two-parent household. Not a household where the husband or boyfriend has enjoyed the fun part of making a child but has conveniently gotten up and left when the annoying stuff began.

Future indeed. Of course, not every situation is like this one, and not every one of these situations is necessarily bad. But it is an ever-increasing trend that we as parents physically conceive and birth the child ourselves but are ever more content to distance ourselves after the fact from the actual important part of childhood, namely the raising part.

Odd that we talk of the future of the country being our children, but when those theoretical children actually materialize we either simply kill them in the womb or hand them off to someone else to raise. Raising a child should be done by experts anyways, right?

This is a systemic failure, one that calls for systemic change. The system can only change when the people who enable the system change, namely, ourselves.

Take back the future. Be your child's parent.