Child Abuse Prevention Month
The United States has changed much in recent decades. No one disputes that fact. Perhaps the most important question to ask is whether those changes have been good for children or not.
April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, established in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan’s Proclamation 5039.
It is fitting, therefore, in this month of April, 2024, to ask some zetetic questions: How are children doing in the United States today? Are things becoming better or worse for the children of America?
The United States is now a more progressive regime than ever before. Progressives now control virtually every institution of influence and power.
The worlds of popular culture, the entertainment industry, and professional sports, are worlds of progressivism.
Health care professionals are overwhelmingly progressive.
The culture within most corporate board rooms has been shaped by progressives.
Progressives dominate the institutions of higher education, especially the social sciences, including disciples directed explicitly toward improving human well-being, such as sociology, psychology, political science, and the many “studies” programs that have been created in recent decades.
The vast majority of K-12 schools are now venues for marketing progressive fads and propaganda, all designed and managed by progressive public teachers unions.
Progressives control American foreign policies and most American domestic policies.
There are now thousands of government bureaus staffed by many millions of government employees and experts for the purpose of mitigating or solving virtually all personal, social, and economic problems, including the challenges of making sure children are safe, healthy, and happy. Those bureaus are thoroughly progressive.
We have now more physicians who specialize in children’s medicine, more therapists, more counselors, more social workers, more after-school programs, more school safety officers, more anti-bullying programs, more subsidies, and more resources for children-in-need and their parents, than ever before in American history.
We have more laws and regulations against child abuse and more laws and regulations that prevent children, even teenagers, from working or doing anything productive. Children in America now have more time to spend on electronic screens or other forms of entertainment than ever before. For most teenagers, especially those younger than 16, it is almost impossible to get a job, even for those who desperately want one.
I mention these rather obvious facts because any question regarding children in the United States should, on its face, be easy to answer. In our Age of Progress, children should be doing very well, right? They should be happier and healthier and smarter than ever before, yes? Children should be thriving right now.
Well, they’re not.
First, the good news: Empty doctrines of moral relativism and philosophic nihilism have become increasing popular. These doctrines are encapsulated by the rhetorical question—Who’s to say what is right or wrong?—which those who ask almost never have the patience to wait for an answer. Yet, despite the growing popularity of relativism and nihilism, ordinary Americans still think child abuse is objectively wrong and morally shameful.
We know this because no one—or virtually no one—is willing to say in public that child abuse is a good thing of which we should have more. Even those who abuse children will, when speaking with others, condemn child abuse as a cruel injustice. Their hypocrisy is the tribute vice always pays to virtue.
The effort to transform Americans into postmodern nihilists has not been successful—at least, not yet. That’s good. Still, for those who care about children, there are reasons for concern.
Child mortality rates are actually creeping up in the United States, in recent years, rather than going down.
For infants, a mother’s womb remains the most dangerous place to be in the United States. Far more healthy unborn infants are destroyed through abortion than by all other causes of children’s death up to the age of 12—including car accidents, gun violence, and drownings—combined. The numbers are not even close.
For those who survive prenatal development, life in the modern United States is not easy.
Rates and raw numbers of homeless people in America are going up. Where there are growing numbers of homeless people, one finds growing numbers of homeless children. Homeless children are among the most vulnerable and abused children. It is a serious problem today as numerous cities now have sprawling homeless encampments no longer confined to downtown districts, but extending into suburbs, too.
Substance abuse and addiction among children, especially teenagers, is at an all-time high in the United States. This, after more than five decades and trillions of dollars spent on a War on Drugs.
Academically, after decades of historically-unprecedented high levels of spending taxpayers’ dollars to educate other people’s children, they don’t seem to be learning much. Despite the increased spending—more likely, because of increased spending—many test scores have remained flat, for years, while key indicators such as reading ability and comprehension have declined.
It is likely that more public school students today know about pronoun preferences, cross-dressers, and alternative sexual lifestyles than can read at grade level.
More kids in America, now, are depressed. More kids are being treated with drugs and counseling for depression. At the same time, more kids are depressed and not receiving treatment.
More children than ever before, including teenagers, report they do not have a single friend. More children are neglected, including both physical and emotional neglect. More kids spend more time alone.
Perhaps the most alarming of all social science statistics are the skyrocketing rates of teenage suicides. Something is deeply, woefully wrong in a society in which 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds hang or shoot themselves because they can find no reason to continue living.
This is likely connected to other alarming numbers. While overall murder rates have been going down in the United States, the numbers of children who commit mass murders of random strangers has been going up. These young mass murderers are typically the same children who report feeling hopeless and seem to find no meaning or purpose in life.
We noted above that the effort to transform Americans into postmodern nihilists has not been entirely successful. We should add: It has been dangerously successful among the young in America.
Rates of fatherlessness have been going up for many decades. This is not new. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous study—The Negro Family: The Case For National Action—in the mid-1960s. His great concern, then, was that the high rate of black families headed by single mothers was causing great harm for black children and young black adults.
Since then, it’s not as if rates of fatherlessness among black Americans went down. Americans seemed to have responded to Dr. Moynihan’s report not as a warning, but as a blueprint. Rates of fatherlessness among black Americans have gone up, significantly. So, too, rates of fatherlessness among all Americans of all racial and demographic groups have gone up, significantly.
At some point, Americans just stopped talking about this subject because they stopped caring. To discuss fatherlessness is to be reminded of the natural obligations parents have for their own children, and the intrinsic connection between sex and babies. The central purpose of the sexual revolution and the “sexual liberation” movement was to disconnect sexual activities from any semblance of natural obligations or responsibilities.
For that movement to be successful, the meaning and purpose of family, sex, marriage, relationships, love, and related subjects had to be changed. And they were. We now see all around us the results.
None of this is to say or even suggest that life for children in earlier periods of American history was easy. It wasn’t. Perhaps in another edition of Liberty Lyceum, we will explore the problems kids had in earlier American times.
Still, the way children used to live and the way they were educated—often helping their parents with work while learning the core virtues through rigorous classical education—brought problems that were quite different and arguably easier to mitigate than the problems children struggle with today.
Whatever those problems were, back then, they did not result in large numbers of children committing suicide or murdering strangers, even though the means to do both were always readily available, likely more available then than now for most kids.
If we are to be serious about our National Child Abuse Prevention Month—actually raising awareness of the serious problem of child abuse among and with our fellow citizens—then we should turn to those who have decisively shaped the postmodern, progressive regime in which we now live and ask the zetetic question: How are children in the United States doing today compared to yesterday?