On Lying to Children

We teach children not to lie. We teach them that lying is an act of cowardice and an affront to the dignity and respect that others deserve, so of course we feel comfortable lying to children. We actually seem to enjoy holding the truth over them, just out of reach. We invest energy and years into feeding their delusions only because they are willing to accept what is being told to them. This is their nature, as is human nature when sources beyond our direct involvement or understanding (the media, government, laws...etc.) dictate how we are to think. But how much more human potential could be unlocked if we valued the truth as much as we value maintaining a child's delusions?

The child molester lies to his victim to gain access to their trust, but just imagine what that child would do in that situation if the child molester had told the kid the truth upfront. Image if what society told our trusting children was the truth also, and what kind of change that next generation could bring about in the world as a result of knowing the truth. If the truth could save a child from trusting a child molester, then truth could save a child from trusting our kindly police, teachers, parents, and society in general as immediately. Imagine for a second how many children would be saved. Imagine how many could be saved from committing the hypocrisies of adulthood if they were told as children to loathe corporate and political hypocrites as much as they are told to fear "strangers." 

The next time someone respects a child's dignity, it will be because they will be telling them the truth. And while it's true that "the truth hurts," how much pleasure do lies, sarcasm, and delusions bring? How much disillusionment and disengagement could be spared in our young adults if as children they were reared from the start to know how the world is and what it will take to change it? Imagine how many children could be saved from learning the lies of our fast-money, sex-obsessed, violent, materialist, culture of selfishness and sin from all those back-window sources, if we as adults could be there at the front door to greet them with the truth when they asked for it? How many could be spared the draconian sentences of the law for naively exposing themselves to each other if they could be told upfront how the law does more to punish them than it does to protect them? 

Empowerment is the enemy of ignorance, and it is given with the truth. It does no child any good to have the truths of life withheld from them, even the most unfriendly truths. For instance, everyone says "death is a part of life," but no one wants to accept that a child of theirs is ever going to die. People either deny to themselves the fact that children are living entities capable of death, or they deny to themselves and to their children the fact that living things have to die, in order to keep their emotions on the issue intact. They have to lie to themselves to justify stripping the humanity away from a child in the process of protecting that child's delusions. Delusions that keep the child a corporate slave, for instance, do little to nothing to empower them, no matter how much "girl power" or "guns and ammo" you get them drunk on, but the truth will always set them free. 

Every lie to a child is also a lie to the one perpetuating the lie. The one confusing the maintenance of ignorance for the "safeguarding of innocence" is lying to herself. The liar is only safeguarding themselves from their own anxiety. The liar is only safeguarding their authority and control over a child's will born out of their fear of the world. Conversely, the one telling the truth to the child is the only one doing everything the liar has convinced herself she is doing. The one telling the truth is actually the one doing the protecting, respecting, and sparing of the child from grief. If a child is capable of asking a question, they are capable of hearing the truth as assuredly as they are capable of hearing a lie. The air does not discriminate one from another. 

The Kids are Alright

The kids are alright. The only threat to children, if one can even call it that, is too much fretting about threats. Most parents understand that there are two directions we can thrust our concern at as to what is harming kids--the immanent (actual) and the potential (possible). When a child is drowning--that is to say, when a child is facing an immanent threat to their state of being--it seems asinine to direct our attention instead toward the potential hazard of them scuffing their foot on a rock at the bottom of the pond. For instance, no one says when a child is drowning, "Save that child, he might scuff his foot on a rock underwater!" That would be misdirected priorities.

That is clearly the case when the immanent threat outweighs the potential threat. One might excuse such misdirected fretting if the immanent harm and potential threat are of equal magnitude of danger though (if that's possible), but not when the child is experiencing no threat outside the imagination of his onlooker. These are not equal terms though. It is clearly unconscionable to think the potential for harm is more deserving of our attention than direct endangerment in here and now. That is to say, the potential for harm does not always necessitate an impulsive response from the adult or peer, but on the other hand, that immanent harm always does. Direct endangerment of a child, be it physical abuse or otherwise, is nearly always more deserving of our attention than potential, social and culturally-based perceived "threats" we have to be reminded to worry about.

This is all very well and good to say, but sometimes it is understandable that deciphering immanent hazards to children from potential ones is difficult and subjective. What is an immanent harm and a potential threat? Ultimately, potential threats are just that, potential, in it either hasn't happened yet, is happening and may just not be causing any damage to the child, or is happening whether we know its effects or not. Chances are, if our children are being bombarded with so-called destructive media messages for example (a potential threat to them), beyond our knowledge as adults, our reserve for panic isn't going to do a bit of difference in assisting us to save them from harm's way--not as it would if the threat was immediate. Children are going to be receiving these messages invariably, whether we remain ignorant of them or are running around trying to sanitize all that their eyes rest on.

The issue is, if a potential harm is causing some so-called threat so minor that parents, even with all their so-lauded "intuition," don't even notice it without having to be reminded to pay attention to it via the news media, then it by no means deserves the shock and worry that we ought to be reserving for actual immanent harms that children, and adults, can find themselves in the middle of, where the effects can be anything but minor. For example, childhood obesity is a much more hazardous threat, and an immediate one in many cases, than the potential for that obese child to be abducted--but which do parents and the media fret over more? Which inspires more legislation, despite fewer deaths? Abduction is sexier than obesity, when it comes to the mainstream culture, evidently.

One of the main differences between potential threats and immanent harms is that specific steps can be taken to respond to immanent harms in a practical, reasoned way. You can take your time with it and find a solution to the issue (proper diet and exercise, in the case of obesity). With "potential hazards," there is only so much preparation one can do because half the damage is manufactured in our minds. The only steps we can take to reduce the potential damage are whatever our minds can dream up ("stranger danger" survival strategies, for instance). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy though. We might say, "thanks to our best efforts to keep children indoors, we have reduced sun burn--and because it has worked, we can be proud of ourselves," even when other solutions could have been less restrictive (sunblock for instance). Now that example is a bit sarcastic, but it shows exactly the kind of misdirection and self-delusion that preventionists often engage in.

Children are either being harmed or they are not. If they are not suffering in some way emotionally or physically, then they are probably not being threatened by whatever our guilty personal demons can dream up to haunt their developmental trajectories. This is true whether it be violence in video games or satanism in daycares. Often is the question asked "what is X doing to our children", but I want to know, what is X doing to parents? Is your child X's concern or is she yours?

The issue isn't so much about protecting children's innocence, because they won't be innocent forever anyways, no matter what you do to protect that artificial edifice built around them. The issue is about making that inevitable transition from one point of relative ignorance to another go as smoothly as possible in light of learning and exposure. With a potential threat, one has time to sort out solutions in working around it, and children will grow up healthier for having learned how to do that. It's not X that harm's children, it's the lack of an authoritative adult or peer presence there to give X appropriate context. If you want healthy, strong, independent human beings from your children, show them what sex is. Rather than focus on tying up the so-called "profanity apologizers" like perpetrators, we should be focusing on the kid's perception of what the they have set into the world. There are those who take responsibility, and those who assign responsibility, and only the former parenting style produces a strong human being.

When you say that children don't have a right to be harmed by something (something minor that is), you're saying they don't have a right to learn about how to deal with minor threats. Children should be free to learn about anything and everything in the world in all his beauty and ugliness, so long as it is presented to them in a way their ability to reason about it will be able to work around. Most kids grow up alright despite a whole slew of threats both real and imaginary throughout their developing years. This is true for life in general. The only ones who don't probably had no role models, or had their rumps cushioned on every fall.

A Risky World

Human beings are terrible risk assessors, but parents are the worst at it. Sooner or later if you challenge them on their ability to judge the risks they subject their kids to, you will hear the retort that they are entitled to their instincts, whether correct or incorrect, because evolution created them. They are just carrying out nature's will by expressing righteous indignation against society's usual suspects, and you are in the wrong for even questioning them. Their imperfections are untouchable.

With shrugging shoulders they grudgingly accept the faultiness of their instincts, because every action one can do with a child entails some risk, not just "the usual suspects." Those "usual suspects"--kidnapping for instance--are one in a million occurrences. The silent killers--automobile accidents for instance--happen every day a million times over. Parents who sweat with anxiety over the exceptionally rare ignore the mundane, regardless of the risk. This is not just a parental problem, it's a human problem, and that negligence costs lives. When superstition takes over critical thinking, parental reasoning is no better off than the child's, and both are at its mercy.

For instance, parents have a right to be concerned about their children's access to guns, and whether or not to allow their child entrance to a house where it is known a gun is kept. This is a matter of evolutionary insight. They have a right to be concerned especially if any unsupervised time could result in a bullet wound for their child or someone else's, even despite their best efforts to preach on gun safety. It is a real concern, but to outright bar access to the house for their child on those grounds alone, is more of an expression of anxiety than it is a reasoned approach to a palpable concern.

Assume there's a swimming pool at this aforementioned house. Statistically, the child is many times more likely to drown in that swimming pool than to accidentally shoot himself (988 drownings to 134 firearm fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 19 in 2010, according to the US CDC). So to bar attendance at the home due to the proximity of a relatively minor risk, at the ignorance of a much more substantial risk, seems foolish, even by these typical "evolutionary/instinct" parental arguments. If one is looking to bar access due to the presence of a risk, it would make more sense to do so because greater risks are involved--the greater the risk, statistically, the more we ought to be concerned. This just goes to show that what gives parents a break in their anxiety has less to do with what is safe, and more to do with what is common--the bottom line being, not every house owns a gun, but swimming pools are everywhere. That which is ubiquitous, gets ignored. That which is rarer, absorbs more attention.

Kids are being barred from walking to school on the fear that they will be kidnapped off the side of the road. It's a rare occurrence that is indeed regrettable, but one wonders if these same districts and parents concern themselves at all with the more present risk of driving a child to school. Once the child enters a moving vehicle, the risk of them becoming injured multiplies significantly (4,044 motor vehicle fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 9 in 2010, the most prevalent form of unintentional death in children according to the US CDC). Just because the parent or the district is in control of the vehicle and is physically present does not mean risk has been averted. More automobile accidents happen in the 7am rush hour on the way to school than kidnappings. So if we are of the "evolutionary/instinct" parental mindset, that even statistically minute risks should lead to such large-scale sweeping legislation, should we not counter even greater threats (such as children even being allowed to enter vehicles) with even more unbearable legislation?

If not, then we may just have to conclude that every action we take in the world is hazardous, and that we all have lives to live as human beings in a risky world, even kids. If they aren't able to live a respectable life as a human being--a child--then there will be unintended consequences no parent wants. Any parent who prophesies the death of their child every day (who does not have immediate reason to do so) would do well to stop investing in redundant safety mechanisms and instead invest in some therapy to rid them of their anxiety disorder before it does any harm.

Father's Day

Being a father or father figure, and being there for and taking care of a child, is the most important thing a man can do of his own free will. Absolutely nothing else comes close. Children need guidance and care, and they need men to provide this for them. In exchange, men need justification and purpose, to give of themselves for the benefit of our collective destiny, and children provide this for them. Paternal resolve is trivialized where maternal instinct is celebrated, but as with instinct comes mere biological necessity, with resolve comes human vindication.

Thus, we celebrate the strength of that personal resolve where it is most needed and cherished, in the form of fatherly love, in the will of the male role model, as do the children themselves.

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.

Hate-Fear-Love

It has been argued that the most primitive emotion is fear. This is because fear is what alerts our senses to danger in the environment and gives us the energy and impulse to react in ways that could potentially assist in our individual survival. In this basic schematic, we could understand love and hate as primal orientations to and away from that which is being feared. What is loved is that which we perceive as ensuring survival, and what is hated is that which we perceive as endangering us, and by framing this simple analogy out, we have a basic mechanism for the motivation behind every human activity. What is pleasing is assumed better for our survival, and what is hated is assumed hazardous to our survival.

It is then no question that these three fundamental starting points play into how society manages to raise its children. What is deemed hazardous is hated, and what is deemed helpful is loved. What is better for the child's survival is loved and what is aversive to it is feared. This would be all well and good if human nature were as binary as a computer, incapable of seeing a hazard where none exist and inflicting harm on the child in the process, or failing to see a hazard where there is one, also allowing harm onto the child. Because we are as children and fail in our reasoning, we cushion our lapses in judgment with punitive laws set to eliminate the need for reason. These are called "line in the sand" laws, because a line can be drawn at any point along a beach and these determinations are arbitrary, yet just as definitive. The age of consent, for instance, is designed to eliminate the need to reason about whether a child is ready for sex, because they are when the law says they are.

This protects the adult from having to worry about a child having sex when they are not ready--a potential hazard. It justifies the hatred of those who would cross the boundary even on the youth's request, and the love of those who would enforce this law. The one thing it doesn't do is protect the child. Because such line in the sand judgments are built on assumptions, it is the assumption itself that inflicts the most harm on the child--the assumption that they are all equally incapable until the law deems them ready. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to educate the child to reach "readiness" by the time the law would determine them to be legally ready, they see this line in the sand as the essence of "readiness" in and of itself.

The youth's questions go unanswered because they have not reached the line yet, they "aren't old enough." Everything is done to make sure the youth is not ready by the time they are supposed to be ready. Readiness is essential for survival though. Would the parent of any mammal species that nurtures its young to adulthood as humans do be wise to withhold information from its young about how to find food, or how to avoid detection? What if such a law were established, on the basis of misguided fear, that established no bird could fly until a certain number of weeks had passed, irregardless of capability, and upon which date would be then expected to fly with ease? How long would they survive in the wild?

The bottom line is, there is the world governed by fear and hate, and then there is the world governed by common sense, which is ultimately a world governed by love. By showing respect for the growing capacities of youth and just a mindful observance toward potential hazards, we are showing them the greatest love because we are not being governed by fear.

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.

The Village

Had we all been raised as children by one another, our society would be healthier. For what moral person, having taken part in raising children would want to send a child of their own out into a harsh world also of their creation? Wouldn’t everyone work harder to improve the world on a global scale in which they hope to send their young friends off to, the ones they gave their lives to nourish? Does the farmer taint the soil he wants his seeds to grow in?

Sadly, that question will go unanswered for now, because society still derives benefit from the abuse of children. It is an industry after all. Those who were once trusted with guiding a child down the path to maturation and happiness have been cast in the social role of the fiend and the rapist and been done away with--disposed of to make room for the corporations, governments and other impersonal entities to wield undue influence over the personal child, indeed, the new caretakers.

Though buried in endless platitudes, it is all too easy to see how the statement that it takes a village to raise a child has been misapplied. That village constitutes more than the legal guardians of the child, but includes all of society, even as the parent should always remain the child's central peg upon which the rest of society intermittently revolves. This concept is no more relevant in the modern age than it was in the dawn of civilization. When the child becomes everyone's responsibility, the child becomes no one's responsibility.

The parents are legally bound to their relationship, but the child is inevitably shaped by numerous other social entities. Once this is accepted as an inevitability in a world that preaches "the village" and legally enforces much less, therein lies the promise for altering what is a cultural fear of forces "contaminating" the child. Despite how a child is influenced by "the village," none have a larger impact on the child than the individuals for which the child is securely attached to--that is, so long as they are still given a chance to be attached to an individual person.

The CL relationship is essentially that primordial art of loving a child for the preservation of our collective destiny. The love we speak of is that same ancient non-parental method of child rearing reflected into an unreceptive modern world. It is demonized because the village takes no responsibility for the mistakes that necessitate CL. The system wants one thing, to continue being the system, and therefore, individuals are blamed for the mistakes of the village.

What Love We Speak Of (Cont.)

Within all historic civilizations there existed a transmission of the present culture invested toward the youth generation and the potential in them they had to continue to live as a community. This is biological. It is an evolutionary investment in civilization we inevitably bestow onto our youngest, and it occurred as a deeply social ritual. Little of this exists today in western culture that has not been demonized and vilified by complexity--having turned into an impersonal industry or qualified service delivery. Where people have been replaced by paper, and love replaced by industry, we have gone astray.

In past history, the former generation entrusted the future survival of the race onto the boy, as he left the realm of the home, dominated by the female, and came onto the realm of the hunt, the realm of the protector. It was at this stage alone that the boy was taught and trained to be a future hunter or scribe, whether it was studying war, or interpreting sacred texts, or the arts, the occupation itself differing according to talent and proficiency. More importantly, it was the place in which he became a man. It was a place in which he was allowed to be human, to learn and develop his natural aggression in ways he could use it to be useful. All through this process into healthy adulthood, his own talents were guided and observed by non-parental men who taught and helped the boy discover himself. It was the men of the society who made the decision that a boy had achieved the honorable title of being a contributing member of society--not an artificial line in the sand age limit.

There are many similarities within the home. An extended kinship-based network of older women taught girls. They were taught all the inner necessities of preparation for the hearth, maintenance of the living space, the garden, the nursery, and the proper raising of the young. Modern society has made very little honor out of such important tasks as these, by a period of male chauvinism, ultimately dismissing them as menial or unimportant, followed by a more feminist inspired detestation toward these important tasks, and an understandable eventual break from them all together. These days, and rightly, boys and girls are free to explore paths to adulthood that don't hinge on biological assignment.

However, due to this, political correctness has raised few with a healthy interest in the positive upbringing of children, so that the desire to do so overwhelms their life by that same evolutionary force that summoned non-parents to guide children. No doubt adults who are already parents feel this. Nonetheless, how many have an inherent interest in the benefit of children as a purpose to live before they personally bring the child into the world? Is it no wonder so many parents abort, neglect, abandon, orphan, or abuse their child in some way due to this obvious disinterest in raising one in the modern world? Child abuse has always existed and will always exist, it is the glue that holds society together, but never was it done as much out of disinterest as it was out of necessity. The modern world no longer finds it necessary to abuse children for their own good, it simply continues to do so out of a disinterest in the so-called menial task of raising them.

There are a group of people, who may or may not have children of their own, but have a continued a healthy interest in befriending and helping a child grow in a world were raising a child is considered the most demeaning responsibility a person can commit themselves to. Perhaps this could serve as a testament to the overall degradation of youth that occurs within the modern society, destroying the optimism that once was so prevalent in the adolescence of that primordial past.

What Love We Speak Of

We advocate the love of children. Simply, that answer is correct. Yet, there is little simplicity in human beings, and the resolve prompted by love can easily turn from advocating alongside youth to arguing on their behalf, especially among the establishment and parents, who have already claimed the child realm. Humans by nature designate simple thoughts such as affection with complex social attitudes and procedures, thus de-emphasizing the natural relationship. This relationship is the essential socially complex organism that we want to work to simplify for them.

Any complication is avoided when children are on the table, and thoughts as well as insights are portrayed with such conviction and certainty that it produces a tangle of beliefs so knotted that the children are practically left hanging on the end of the advocate's rope by the head. The more grand the explanation, however, the more vivid the picture becomes, and the greater our understanding. So somehow we have to strike the balance between appreciating human relationships as the complex things they are, and not bog it down with unnecessary complications born out of our media-fed preconceptions.

CL is the ultimate emancipation of children from forces that seek to control or minimize their human rights, that among them are the central human liberties extended to all human beings. It is a break from the world of the material and the possessive and a replacement into the world of charity, love, and humility. All of them are traits that define the higher and more beautiful and optimistic aspects of human life. It is necessitated in the modern world, as the caring adult in effect assists in raising that which the parent put into the world. It is a personal choice to help in the raising of the child, out of love and not reward or biological requirement.

This "natural non-parent method" of raising children was nowhere near as complicated or demonized in our collective past. The allowances of general historical templates on which the ideologies are derived from are necessary to understand. They present the modern human being with the destiny of continual change, by representing that most basic principle in the form of what had come before to create the present (that ruled by paper), in order to shape the future (that ruled by love). CL is demonized because it no longer fits in the modern world that has eclipsed its charismatic elements with cold-hearted bureaucracy. It has its roots in the infinite past, and has not been crushed under the bureaucratic rubber stamp--quite the contrary--CL has continued to evolve since the earliest days in human history.

To be continued.

The Sudden Rise of ADHD

It was the first day on a new unit for my abnormal psychology class in the fall of 2007. The topic: childhood psychopathology. My professor, who was also a child psychologist, prefaced with a question: "let's see a show of hands, how many of you think ADHD is a real disorder?" Everyone of course raised their hands. Then he asked, "how many of you think it's over-diagnosed?" Once again, everyone raised their hands, including the child psychologist.

The rise of ADHD has been well documented in the research for decades, (with a 700% increase from a decade ago based psychostimulant use) and most findings seem to pinpoint the cause as being genetic or otherwise outside of any sociological phenomena. So far, our best research has concluded that the child isn't reared this way by an unhealthy culture, but that he or she is born this way. It's no surprise either that the age bracket has grown down toward the cradle. Research has determined that behavioral interventions pose no significant advantage without medicinal treatments, and that different strategies of intervention pose no real conclusive difference in effectiveness after one year of implementation. So while no one in the field openly advocates medication-only treatment plans for children, that is often all the smallest children end up receiving.

It makes sense considering that if such a syndrome were found to be environmentally caused, at least partially, the use of medication wouldn't seem as necessary. No doubt, the blatant capitalism that is procured under the name of scientific rationality--as researchers are desperate for funding and parents are made helpless to its effects--would have no fuel on which to run its engine. After all, if such a supposed generational genetic shift were found to be more environmentally caused, the weight would fall more on parents to govern that child's behavior--the same parents who would otherwise be willing to foot the bill to welcome this medicinal treatment into the house. The word about the industry has always been "don't insult your customers." That is not to say I'm throwing out vague conspiracies here, but just adding a dose of simple skepticism to this nefarious science-practice-commerce connection at the heart of all this lazy diagnosing.

There's no doubt though that the research on ADHD itself is "objective," for the studies that have been done are usually done under skepticism, scrutiny, controversy, and heavy analysis. The problem with this research is not so much the methodology--which is usually procedurally valid--but rather, the questions that are being asked to begin with. They tend to be questions proctored by drug companies about the efficacy of their treatments (at least the great majority of them), with very little into the causes of the symptoms. The designs themselves tend to focus on the genetic links rather than the effects the behavior has on the environmental realities. True objectivity can be called into question when the research that does exist is by in large the result of patronage--even if the findings themselves are valid.

Whatever the case may be, ADHD has been diagnosed to a point where one has to call into question the extent to which a supposed "genetic malignancy" can conceivably inflict a group of people. Disorders, after all, are supposed to be anomalies, not tendencies. One could be easily lead to theorize that the rise of ADHD might be corresponding to a decrease of social behavioral interventions for behavior, as professionals seem to be racing to diagnose younger and younger age groups instead. Also fueling this apparent medical industrial complex is the suspicious discovery of more and more mental diseases to diagnose. For example, certain forms of childhood temperament (a natural genetic variation) have been seemingly upgraded and retermed "[childhood onset] Bipolar Disorder" in recent years, for which children as young as two have been suspect. At least ADHD has the benefit of being proven to exist in childhood. The various lithium experiments of children "diagnosed" with Bipolar Disorder (one not proven to exist in childhood yet) have left developing children scarred for life with tics and other neurological side effects.

In any case, over and over again we see parents rendered arbitrary and helpless to stop the escalation of these disorders. Over and over we see parents, who are obviously not deaf to the salesmen-lingo of the professionals, feeling pressured into action at the behest of desperation. That reasoning does not proceed inevitably to the conclusion that the cure for their child's behavior comes in the form of a morning pill, but what other option is there? Parents don't want to become little but prescription trees for which the child can pick from, but when preyed upon by practitioners at the behest of drug companies and perhaps even scared into action by schools threatening to take the issue to the state, they're caught having to choose the lesser of two evils--much to the industry's unabashed gain.

Often the diagnoses of these otherwise rare disorders are made at such a young age that conventional therapy becomes useless because the child hasn't even reached the developmental milestones to be order to gain from it. Sometimes the child can't even talk yet. That is a prime time for medication-only treatments to be handed out with a built-in justification. Sure children can always be disciplined at any age--to have good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished--but if they can't sit still to enjoy the rewards, constant punishment is only going to get them so far. And at that young of an age, the benefits of "talk therapy" would be expected negligible at best. What's a parent to do? The answer lies in multi-modal therapy (MMT), the most effective intervention in the long term, and conspicuously the only treatment you never see "advertised."

The incidence of childhood disorders is at such an alarming rate, it has no doubt provoked the scientific community itself to theorize about its possible cause, with everything from diet to technology getting another look, as well as the increased awareness of the disorder and the sensitivity of the measurements now, and even evolutionary reasons for the increase from one generation to another have been suggested. The only question not being asked seriously within the research (though professionals throughout academia have been suggesting it off the record for decades), is if the rapid increase in diagnosis is simply by in large an over-reaction on to part of a paranoid society to naturally occurring and totally manageable behavioral phenomena.

Due to this scientific oversight, much criticism has circulated regarding this trend, to the point where individuals with no industry ties have pointed out these flaws to the external validity of the research. Still, medicinal treatment for behavior concerns is often seen as the only effective way simply because it's the most advertised way and the most effective in the short term. Parents see the sedative effects in their own children, that is, and they convince themselves these treatments are absolutely fundamental or have even "cured" the child. They no longer have to consider other treatment options because relief is in the bag already. In this way, the parent and society become medicated--as divorced from their own reality as the child is from his or her own affective responses. Society becomes medicated when it paints over its social ills with such broad brushstrokes in desperation. Symptoms will come back in the long term, even if they disappear now.

But who can be blamed? Everyone's doing their part in the web to keep this structure supported, even those speaking out against it--and especially those who seem to believe categorically that no child should ever need to take a psychoactive medication. It's no sin to medicinally sedate an unruly child, but doing so without behavioral interventions is. The inclusion of any behavior modifying medicine in the household should call on parents to increase their efforts to reward and punish behavior as necessary, not take a backseat at the first sign of "relief." Luckily, many parents already do this despite what the field routinely lacks insisting, but many also fall into this trap by accident. Research itself has been suggesting that medicine alone can not parent. The only question is, who are the practitioners listening to?

I'll leave you with this quote from such research:

"Multimodal approaches to intervention have been found to be most effective in terms of lasting change...treament with psychostimulants has beneficial effects, provided that it is accompanied by remedial tuition, counselling, and behavior management by parents/teachers as required (van Kraayenoord, Rice, Carroll, Fritz, Dillon, & Hill. 2001, p. 7)."