Loving Children

There is nothing wrong with loving a child. Children deserve love because they exist, from anyone willing to give it, and they deserve to be allowed to show love to anyone who will receive it. It is only wrong to deny them love and attention, and only right to give it to them. It is wrong to spurn their attempts to show love, and only right to receive them warmly. Society is wrong when it works to separate adults and children on a pretense of fear, and only right when it allows them to coexist in peace and harmony, guided by pure love and care. Children deserve love even when their parents are unwilling or unable to give it, just as those who give it are deserving of receiving it. Their love is human love, and humans need love like they need air, water, and food. Children are no different from human.

Love doesn't have to be unrealistically selfless and overly simplistic, for discipline, when authoritatively enforced, is a function of love (whether adults are disciplining children or children disciplining adults), it just needs to be felt that way. To deprive someone discipline is to be depriving them of love, just as to neglect is to deprive, and to abuse is to keep depraved--none of these are expressions of love. Children deserve to be loved by society as much as they need to be cared for by it. When a child is loved by an adult, and it is purely expressed, the child will love back. To gain the child's love in return for love: this is the only legitimately hallowed co-relation between adult and child that can exist, and the most noble arrangement a man, woman, boy, or girl can be blessed with. The truth is often plain and usually simple.

There's nothing wrong with a child loving an adult. Adult-to-child love and child-to-adult love is human love, and human love expressed tenderly in private and charitably in public is an expression of God's love. Children are not only capable of receiving their parents' love or solely capable of showing love toward their parents, but are capable of accepting kindness from anyone, young and old, who is willing to give it, and giving it to whoever is willing, young and old, to accept it. This is the meaning of "good will toward all."

The parental responsibility over their children is only there to be the gatekeeper deciding who may enter and who can not, as is their right to keep their child safe, but children deserve love even from their gatekeepers, and even from those incapable of keeping the gate and are still tasked to do so. If they are unable to receive it from their primary gatekeepers (their parents), then they both need someone else to fill that responsibility and extend to them the warm embrace of love and guidance. Parents love their children because they have to, by nature. Childlovers love children because they want to, by choice. True childlovers are never out to replace parents, but to supplement them. They are not there to strip a child off their family, but to be an extension of child's family. They are not there to further suppress the child, or to spoil them into subservience, but to act as role models working through legitimate channels of outreach acceptable to all capable of accepting love.

Childlovers love children as an adult lover might for their own lover, but the love of the childlover is purer, because it is felt almost exclusively out of interpersonal connection, selflessness, and devotion to allowing the child complete freedom. Adult love relationships, by contrast, are often compounded with expectations of monogamy and sex, but such things would be unthinkably selfish, and potentally hazardous, in a childlove relationship. The childlover never seeks to gain the child solely for themselves for "all eternity" as the primarily self-motivated adult relationships often do as an institution (marriage). The childlover instead only seeks to impart to a child the kindness and charity they are deserving of as human beings, and lets the child alone to live their own lives and pay that love forward to whoever they wish. That is the difference that makes all the difference!

The adult should only be someone the child knows personally for one reason or another, someone his or her parents know and trust, and someone from whom the relationship develops naturally and gradually out of friendship and trust. And because true love is never forced, coerced, or manipulated out of someone, whether adult or child, that which is isn't love and doesn't have any legitimate reason for existing. This is as much true for a child's non-parental lovers as it is for their legal guardians. Anyone who can not love a child genuinely (selflessly, harmlessly, charitably) has no business around them. Those who can will prove themselves worthy if their heart is pure. Psalms were written to celebrate such a love as that!

Trauma by the CPS

There are two kinds of people who have the gall to forcefully take a child out of their home: kidnappers, and CPS workers. In order to do the job, the caseworker has to harness the same guiltless energy that a kidnapper does in order to enter a home and tear a child off their parents. The only difference for the adults is the rationale. The only difference for the child is that the kidnapper does it behind the the parents' back, while the CPS worker does it right in front of their faces.

Kidnappers remove children for personal, selfish reasons, for the worse, while CPS workers remove children in an attempt to provide for their welfare and well-being in ways that aren't properly being served--for better or worse. We shouldn't forget that the primary motivating factor for the kidnapper is kidnapper-focused, while it is child-focused for the CPS worker, but our attention to the "motivations" and "intentions" for the perpetrator or the public servant ought to be secondary to our concern for the child's actual welfare. However, in justifying the knee-jerk removal of a child from an otherwise loving home, for ill-defined reasons, often the caseworker's "motivation" to remove takes precedence in our minds over the child's actual well-being.

When a small child is ripped from their parent's arms by a stranger, does the child care what the "intentions" of the person doing the ripping are? Of course not. It is a traumatic event for a child to be removed from a loving home. This is not to say that such interventions don't have their place--in cases involving extreme abuse and neglect--but perhaps worse than good people failing to do the right thing is good people thinking they are doing the right thing as they do the wrong thing. This happens when children are removed from homes where no abuse or neglect is happening.

The state is slow to reverse their mistakes because admitting to a mistake jeopardizes their public legitimacy. The agency tasked to judge the legitimacy of parents, does not not like to be judged itself. Legitimacy is always more important to the state than the child's welfare. Any parent who has caused the amount of trauma that even the most "well-meaning" caseworker and court is capable of inflicting on children in a single night, wouldn't be allowed to keep the child, even by the state's own standards.

The issue is, are we more concerned about the trauma children in that situation are facing, or are we more concerned for the ill-conceived "good intentions" of the person who has caused that trauma? If we were child-focused, whether they are removed by a kidnapper or removed by a well-meaning but equally traumatic CPS worker, we'd recognize the trauma for the child either way. Instead though, we put the "well-meaning" part ahead of the trauma in the case of the CPS removal, because the caseworker carries with her the cold calculation of unquestionable authority, and the kidnapper carries the absolute opposite. We then regard what the child is feeling there, no matter how traumatic, to be a "necessary" part of their well-being. Trauma is  never necessary though, regardless of who is inflicting it.

The CPS ought to remain in operation, only so long as it can admit to its screw ups in a timely manner.

What Is So Hard?

What is so hard about deposing sexism? Why can't we come to a point where men are given the same say and rights and privileges with children as women? Why can't we congratulate the men who bend over backwards for their children, who spend time with them, read to them, help them with their homework, and play catch with them, with the same unconditional devotion we reserve for "moms?" Why can't single fathers get so much as an acknowledgement rather than a lecture on statistics? What is so hard about that?

What is so hard about ending this generational program to make our sons pay the price for the sexism of their great-grandfathers? If it is justifiable that we devalue boys today as retribution for the patriarchy of yesterday, does that mean it will be justifiable to devalue the girls of the future as retribution for this current strain of sexism? Why must we ridicule those hungering for sexual equality for being whiny, petty, or egotistical, only so long as they are male? Can we not accept the sexism of the past for what it was without trying to "make up for it" by turning one against the other in the present?

Why must we let a few bad men dictate how we see all men? Why must our children go devoid of positive male role models because we fear the child molesters in our heads? Doesn't that make as much sense as never going in the water for fear of a shark attack when so few happen to begin with? If statistical outliers like single dads cause us to withhold our sympathy for them, why must other statistical outliers like child molesters cause us to assume so much derision? Is sympathy a harder emotion to feel than derision? What is so hard with praising the men who deserve praise instead of only demonizing those who do wrong? 

Why can't we just treat our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers (single or coupled), as if their biological sex was not a determinant of whether they deserve praise or derision? Why can't we just treat everyone doing well by children with respect and dignity without regard to sex, race, age, or any other permanent or impermanent characteristic? What is so hard about that? 

Rub Their Noses in It

Child welfare can either be designed to provide for the common good, or for the individual child's good. Rarely can it do both. One might get away with arguing that the very need for a Child Protective Services proves that parents are unable to manage their families one hundred percent of the time without intervention by the state, but who gets to hold the state accountable when a kid is abused in foster care, or aged out of the system? Indeed, some parents are abusive either because of their emotional temperament, their frustration due to lack of experience, or stress due to circumstance, but what is often forgotten is that the same is also true about state care.

The very need for there to be such a thing as a family proves that the invisible "state" is unable to manage its wards one hundred percent of the time without intervention by families. The state needs families to provide the actual parenting. So while everyone is expected to be clamoring toward the state to be the arbiters of good parenting on behalf of inexperienced mothers and fathers--as the common citizen under investigation is expected to bend over backwards to appease what the state has considered to be a breech of parenting duties--the state on its own is the least capable parent of all. It is nothing more than a set of decrees, lawbooks, and assorted professionals disassociated from the child. It can not do the direct work of parenting a child, but it believes itself to be morally and systematically superior to all those who would try.

It would dictate terms that it itself could not follow to the letter. If you dropped a child off at the doorstep of this invisible authority, "the state," do you think those pretty columnated buildings, stacks of forms, and hives of representatives in large varnished courts could even be able to hold the child's spoon, much less teach her right from wrong? Of course not, and for this reason, the state has decided that human beings are necessary to at least do the direct care work for the child on behalf of the state, to be the arms and legs of the state--to be there to hold the spoon and teach right from wrong. And seeing as human beings generally see the value of consistency in a child's development, the state prefers the child's biological parents over just anyone to do the work it can't do. When it determines that the parents are ill-equipped or unable to do this work, it will find what it determines to be suitable replacements--in this day in age, another family.

The state therefore relies on the family to do the essential work of raising children, and families rely on the state to provide their children with education and securities, for instance. One may be tempted to believe this is a holy symbiosis, but is it truly a viable social contract? The state grants itself powers to judge parent and child relationships according to its internal calculus, but what mechanism allows the family to judge the state when it fails to meet its obligations to the children in the realm of education and securities? While parents face court removal of their children when they are deemed incapable, what does the state face when it could be deemed incapable of holding up its end of this so-called social contract?

Do we get revolution when that happens? Do we get people suing the state? Do the people rise up and take their children out of the public school for a year's time while the state is forced to work out its issues and show its constituents mandatory improvements? The rush to place children in private and charter schools may be indicative of what we could term a slow "termination of state custodial right" if the same charge were being leveled at a family. Do non-abusive parents effectively get to assume custody of foster children when the state fails to protect them? Of course not, the state retains its wards even when it fails to be a proper parent to them--and it's the equivalent of allowing abusive parents to retain custody of their children.

Maybe it's in unknowingly ignoring a child who is being abused in their foster home; maybe it's in aging a child out of a foster home without nurturing them into adulthood; or maybe it's in over-medicating a child who acts out because he misses home--however the abuse and neglect manifests itself, the state is able to get away with retaining custody over wards it has failed to adequately parent because it is working under the pretense of the common good. So long as cases of maltreatment within the system are in the minority, the idea of serving the common good is preserved, and therefore, it becomes easier to overlook the individual cases. Serving the interests of the common good does little to suit the needs of individual children, but serving the dignity and needs of individual children is always in the interests of the common good.

To this end, we should incite the charge that one case of maltreatment while a child is in the custody of the state is one case too many. No majority is large enough that we should ignore the injustice served to the minority.

Just as parents though, the state can not be expected to have a clean record when it comes to its own duties over the education and protection of children it has been entrusted with. This is understandable, seeing as it takes adequate care of the majority of its wards, but though understandable, we can't be lulled to sympathy for it. It expresses no sympathy toward parents who fumble the responsibility, even as the majority of them are also capable. What we should expect from the state is accountability and honesty for when it fails in its task of raising children in its custody, just as it expects from families. They may have the power to be dishonest, and paint a rosy image with the broad strokes of "common good," using statistics to show how much good they are doing, but nothing ought to allow them to hide away each and every case where they have been the ones to drop the ball.

Glory only their successes, but hold their feet to the fire for their failures. It's our duty to rub their noses in it.

Affectionate Men

This is a culture that honors work over family, so it is no surprise that the struggle to gain women equal standing with men in the workplace and therefore in society in general, has been generally promoted. It is also no surprise that the struggle to gain men equal standing with woman over the family, the children, has never taken root. This work based culture seems to want nothing to do with raising its own children. The majority of men are pushed away from the care of children, and just as many seem more preoccupied with the workforce, with careers. With the arrival of feminism, it was finally declared that women sought the same. For both, having and raising children has become just a side project on a path toward personal fulfillment within the work place--something you have to do just to stay in keeping with social expectations.

These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.

Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.

The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.

Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.

Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.

Who's Providing Services?

The "it takes a village" mentality is simply that, a mentality, rather than a viable alternative. In many ways, children are raised by the village. They spend far more time interacting with teachers, peers, and social media (internet, television...etc) than they do by their parents. Acknowledging the fact that parents only play a small part in the raising of their children doesn't diminish the fact that for institutional purposes, the child requires someone to claim responsibility for them. This purely legal responsibility is then magnified and made sacred by that so-called "hallowed co-relation" (as Marx described it) attributed to parents by our culture, and outside influences such as non-parent mentors and lovers, though numerous, are seen as dangerous to that socially contrived relationship between parent and child.

Responsibility breeds possessive contempt. Being responsible for an object or a human being, makes the person called upon suspicious of outside contamination. If we view "the village" as a collection of individuals for which a child can develop meaningful relationships within society, rather than a faceless "everywhere" ghost parent that can't assume responsibility for its mistakes (as is seen in the case of state care), the village concept lends justification to the ambitions of those with a desire to give of themselves for the benefit of their young friends.

As a concept, rather than a contrived social institution, the village concept for child raising lends justification to CLs to pick up and nurture the children fallen through its own cracks as just one of the collection of individuals. These cracks are formed when that which is invested in an institution "responsible" for raising children does not meet what is demanded of it. Because nobody demands anything of a CL, they are poised to befriend the children dropped by the system that couldn't live up to its expectations.

The village concept works even when it doesn't.

There's obviously a distinction here between providing a service for a child on that contractual, legal, professional basis and providing a service on the basis of pure devotion and charity. Both are required to enhance a child's life for different reasons and an overabundance of one over the other is bound to run a child's developmental trajectory in less appealing ways. Those who are responsible are providing a service, parents are providing a service for society--they are essentially entrusted to be to human beings what farmers are to crops. Farmers do not have control over the rain or the sunlight, but the work to ensure their crops get plenty of both and fill in the gaps when nature fails them. The family is a unit specialized into generating product for society in the form of a fully capable individual ready to perform all essential social functions for itself at its 18th birthday. To assist in doing this, governments have established their own water and sun in the form of compulsory schooling, state care, and other services.

But that's all that is involved in providing a service on the basis of legal requirement. A child who is nurtured in such an environment will not necessarily grow healthy, even if they are provided with schooling or adequate child care. A child is not a sedentary plant that just absorbs whatever goes into it, but an entity capable of making its own impact on its environment. What a child is capable of doing is superfluous to the society providing a contractual service, because to them, all that they require the child to be is something which can sit and receive the service. Thus children are grown like plants, absorbing water and sunlight, when in reality, their mobility alone produces a whole new dimension of care that society simply can not provide. In a system that necessitates their passivity, their activity can not be provided for no matter how much it necessitates it. So there is an impasse between what a child needs and what society needs, and it begins and ends with the child being a human being.

CLs provide a non-contractual service principally invested in allowing for a child's human qualities to expand once their basic legal requirements are provided for by responsible entities. Together, these two sides work together to satisfy a child's needs both as a social being and as a repository for services.

It's Johnny's Birthday!

Child worship expresses itself in probably it's most overt ways within the modern family. In a classic framing exercise, we could easily picture mother and father as the child's clergy, busying themselves maintaining their idol, singing its praises, and saluting it on the yearly anniversary of it's birth with a grand festival, where "it" refers to inhuman nature of the thing being worshiped--something indeed quite beyond the physical organism that a child really is.

To be clear, celebrating birthdays is not wrong minded, but it could be argued that the degree of lavishness they assume (usually at the behest of parents more than anything else) is only a depiction of the modern fascination and obsession with blowing children up to twice their normal size. It's only amazing they can manage to keep their feet on the ground.

At one time only the wealthy sons and daughters of self-important dignitaries and noblemen celebrated something as mundane as the yearly milestone known as a birthday with lavish parties. In the modern world, that distinction is reserved for every child. It seems the younger and less aware the child is, the more lavish the festival commemorating their birth has to be. We give them Jumperoos on their second birthday and yet still don't allow them to vote by their 16th. We're very good at blowing children up to be demi-gods alright, we're just not very good at deflating them back down to our size.

And then we expect our adolescents to begin coming down from Olympus on their own, to live like people for the first time after being restricted within the socially constructed walls of heaven all their lives. Suffice it to say, when their eyes finally shoot open at first to the world made not of dreams but out of the fear and desperation surrounding them, only one reaction seems appropriate at first--disillusionment. Some get over it. Some don't.

And then for the sciences to suggest that such a reaction is biochemically induced in its entirety, rather than the inevitable result of a demigod stepping down from his golden throne, it only reeks of same preferential prejudice that failed to let him be human in his first 13 years of life. The fact of the matter is, as far as the perspective from which research on the maturation of teens is conducted (one of squinted-eye observation), the child is no longer a child, and therefore in no more need to be worshiped. Is it no coincidence that once "playtime is over," the demonization of young people begins?

(A tip to George Harrison in the title.)

Parent State

This is going to be the beginning of a multi-part post regarding the disintegration of the power of parents in society, what I term "passive" dealings with children, and how they do more harm than good.

There are two societies we are forced to consider. The one that governs its interactions with children passively and the one that governs its interactions with children actively. The passive society governs with a divestment of personal responsibility but not the point of inflicting physical neglect. The basic needs of the child are met but not by the primary caregiver, rather, the community of experts and society at large step in to fill that role. This practice of Parens Patriae was preached, infamously, by sociologist Arthur W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family--a critical corpus that students have been drawing lessons from for the last century:

"The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."

The society he praised is also that advanced by Engels and Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where the family is abolished and the state assumes its essential functions. It is one that could be considered passive because of its shared divested interest, in that it remains a collectively active in caring for children, but on an individual level--the level for which a child is going to be aware and relating with--is a more passive and uninvolved authority. In this way, individuals for which the child is in developmental proximity with can neglect them but still maintain that the child's care is satisfactory provided for on a social level. The society assumes responsibility for the parenting, for which the child can't relate or feel obligated or responsible to, and the parents and other individuals for which the child can naturally relate to divest their personal responsibility to some other invisible entity or device.

Children can not feel responsible to a ghost, a non-physical entity--an idea or conception--whether they be a network of professionals, experts, or state employees working in unison for their support, any more than an idea can be responsible for a child, which IS an entity, a dynamic being. No child under the custody of a state, or sitting in a doctor's office, relates themselves as socialized and attached to this abstract notion of the "State," as such a thing is a non-entity, a conception. It is made up of networked social structures and organizations that have no contact with the child directly but can assume the very direct task of parenthood.

This is the essence of the passive society. A child under the custody of the state, for instance, or in the supervision of an expert, relates themselves socially to their immediate caregivers--who only serve as a representative face for the abstract notion of the state, the corporation, or the daycare, and it is these individuals--the direct caregivers---that the child is natively wired to model, to learn and socialize themselves. This is that natural instinct of childhood, and yet these caregivers don't assume this direct role. They do not participate or feel obligated to take a participatory role in modeling behavior, because that responsibility belongs to the invisible organization or the state.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that since the direct caregivers, for which children are wired to respond to, can not have personal responsibility on an individual level for the children they are assigned to, that neither should the child feel responsible for him or herself and for society to which they are assigned. This is what makes the passive society passive, and ultimately ineffective in nurturing positive development in children. Thus the individual children it raises can not be effective in nurturing the positive development of a responsible society in return.

Obviously our society is not a completely passive one, as Engels and Marx may have desired, and the demonstration of this extreme was only intended to provoke the reader's imagination as to why we shouldn't be allowing passivity to overtake action when it comes to raising children. It is true though, that our society has many passive institutions within it--the Medical Industrial Complex, for example, whereby parental regard and discretion is disengaged by the push to diagnose and intervene in the behavior of children only so far as the transgressions can be medicated, not reinforced. Parents surrender their right to parent by dropping their children a pill.

Other passive institutions are the existence of youth curfews, where society relegates the behavior of children to bedroom confinement for their own protection or the supposed good of society. The existence of child leashes, satellite locating devices, and any device that promises to regulate children's behavior by relieving the parent of their often difficult parental duties are all passive practices that are in common use. A child who dangles on the end of a leash is being forcefully controlled, and the parent has no part in enforcing the control other than the light action of holding the strap. In this, behaviors are not being reinforced by the parent, rather, they are being reinforced by the parent surrogate--the harness! And as such, the parent takes a passive role in the raising of their child.

The Family Farm

Every aspect of a parent's perception of its relationship with its offspring revolves around the position of total authoritative control. Parents need not prove themselves worthy of their children's affection. It is taken for granted prior to age 5 and demanded without explanation thereafter. Neither stage allows the child any self-actualized participation. Parenting is being plotted along an evolutionary course that has legitimized it's adaptation of some extremely ill-conceived idealizations more reflective of capitalism than paternalism. These things called children hold far more value as possessions than as emerging individuals.

"The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour." --Karl Marx (1884)

Children do not work as they did in Marx's day, nor was the concept of childhood as important then. These days, children are not considered candidates for "physical" work, but they have assumed a new social utility, as has the family unit. They are both consumers and marketable, and they work very hard perpetuating the regime that spends millions to molest their wills and change their sense of self to one that best perpetuates the economic engine. Under this current western regime, the supposed sanctity of the family holds no meaning outside of the social regulations keeping it on life support.

It has long been known that, all things being equal, a birthparent is no more beneficial or harmful than any attachment a child makes with an adult--so long as the attachment is a secure and loving one, a child will find a "parent" in anyone. The role of the parent is no longer reserved for birthparents, but in western materialist culture, that which proceeds or emanates from it's creator inevitably carries with it a right of sole ownership. The child as an individual is a piece of property governed by the rights of attainment by those who have procured it--it can be transferred, it can be repossessed into the invisible care of the invisible state when it's care can not be assured it--but it always remains intact as a thing owned. If the child is the piece of property, the livestock, the cattle, in this formulation, then the modern family is little more than a farm for cultivating human product to serve the social engine that went into creating it.

Modern families are thus alienated from themselves in the midst of this property exchange. Parents alienated from their children, children from their parents and society, and family units are forced to compete with each other over the social ladder, pit their children against other children by means of social comparison, and find validity in their unit functionality by amassing what it can produce for society. And yet, despite all this, it somehow manages to hold onto its sacred place at the heart of civilization--which no doubt has more to do with maintaining its productive output than any of the sentimental "bourgeois claptrap" normally ascribed to it by the indentured denizens of culture.

Procreation is if anything the antithesis of a 'profound achievement', yet it grants by default, ownership, an alleged necessity due to the 'heavy degree of responsibility inerrant in raising children'. This is also referred to as 'personal sacrifice'. These are the self-described traits of a species that is the most heavily personified example of intra-species aggression in it's biosphere. What then is the logical process that validates hanging all the blame for all conceivable acts of evil upon children around the necks of solitary rogues (non-parents) of either species who unwittingly acknowledge love, in defiance of free will, for a child owned by someone else?

Such a person (a person who's love for a child is not taken for granted and demanded without explanation) is undoubtedly a wolf--stalking the flock. Or is it?