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!

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. 

To Love Children

It has become more profitable to hate children than it is to love them, at least in the immediate material sense. How often are those who hate children given a carte blanche to spread vitriol by society as those who love children are lumped in with criminals, creeps, and people who want to harm them?

Those who practice love arouse everyone's suspicions as those who practice hate are given the shoulder. Those who practice harm are simply carrying out the deepest fantasies of those who harbor hate without resolve to act on it (which society tolerates), but hate when put into action is criminal. By contrast, those who practice harm are carrying out the antithesis of those who harbor love, whether the lovers are acting on their resolve or not (which society can not tolerate), but love when put into action is called charity.

In short, everyone is suspicious of love by itself--in this case, the love of a child, but when acted upon, only then it becomes divine. By contrast, no one is suspicious of hate by itself--the hate of children, but when acted upon, only then does it become harmful. People who hate children almost seem to have a protective barrier built around themselves that shields them from the suspicion of society. For surely, someone who hates children can not harm children, right?

Someone who loves children can not be given the same vote of confidence, as his mere interest in the benefit of children places him somewhere in the vicinity of the adult's piece of property (the child). And so long as the child remains property, all those who value it's worth can not be trusted even so much as a breathing on it, lest they snatch it up for themselves. Those who hate it, it's obvious, would never want to have it in the first place.

Comparing children to valued goods or pieces of property seems appropriate when attempting to comprehend the reasoning of why our society tolerates the hate of children before the love of children. Those who are not the owners of the property or granted temporary responsibility of it by it's owners--who find themselves simply sharing a view about the property's value with it's owners--simply can never be trustworthy. Those who own gold in their homes would be wise (at least according to popular thinking) to not keep company with strangers who also place a high value on that same gold. Those who detest gold (let's say it is possible) would be expected to be more trustworthy. Of course neither of these perspectives are true, deception is a powerful tool people will not think twice about to get what they want.

It is a function of a child's value as a living commodity for society that trust be assigned on those who should cross paths with it based entirely on how much they value the object. And in the minds of a possessive society, someone's evaluation (love or hate) of the object is inversely proportional to their degree of trustworthiness. In the minds of a paranoid society, those who profess love are only doing so because they are covering up for harmful desire. It doesn't cross anyone's mind that those who profess disinterest or hate could be on to their prejudices, playing their trust, in order to accomplish the same devious ends.

The result is the denial of non-parental love to children.

A Parent's Fickle Trust

Parents can't be blamed. If children can get away with dragging others down by their ignorance, then parents should be afforded the same for doing the same. They're just as destructive a force in society as their kids and twice as easy to manipulate. If it is reasonable that children be taught not to talk to strangers, than it should also be reasonable that parents be taught not to listen to them.

As easy as it is for a parent to see their children manipulated by some predator, it is nearly impossible for them to see themselves manipulated by five o' clock predator scare on the news. And just as blind as they accuse children of being to the consequences of letting that stranger lead them into the backseat, parents are completely blind to the consequences of letting that stranger on TV take them by the hand through the land of paranoia. The consequences of which are the poison that never fails to trickle down to the child's level.

Of course parents don't have as much influence as they think, having surrendered a lot of that direct influence over to other entities--to strangers no less. Trust is a funny thing, because sometimes the only thing that separates a potential predator from a trusted caretaker is a piece of paper--most of the time it's nothing but the judgments in a parent's head. When the protections for children are not strong enough, parents will cut in line to defend a law that makes it illegal for any adult to be within 50 feet of a child, and they will cheer its success, but will they too take that 50 foot step back from their own? If not, then they have to decide, who should be taking that step and who should not?

Just as parents can be manipulated into trusting no one, they can also be manipulated into trusting people who may actually pose a threat. This is because every parent mind comes with a schema of trustworthiness they use to judge an individual. If the individual comes with paperwork, they are trustworthy. If the individual is clean, they are trustworthy. If the individual is friendly, they are trustworthy. However, if an individual breaks any of these criteria, and others like them, then there's no way the kids are safe around them. It's important to note that these judgments are often irrespective of harm. A person who meets the criteria and yet still manages to harm a child is always held in higher esteem than a person who doesn't meet the criteria and yet causes the child no harm.

This is not to say a parent will allow the molestation of their child if the perpetrator is, for instance, young and good looking--just that they'll never see it coming. Sad, but that's the folly of human nature.