National Child Abuse Prevention Month

If National Child Abuse Prevention Month matters, we should ask the architects of our postmodern America today: How are kids doing compared to yesterday?

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, launched in 1983 by President Reagan’s Proclamation 5039. So, this April 2025, let’s ask the obvious question: How are kids in America doing? Are they better off—or worse—than before?

Culturally, the United States is more progressive than ever. Progressives dominate pop culture, entertainment, sports, health care, corporate boardrooms, universities—especially psychology, sociology, political science, and related social sciences—and K-12 schools controlled by public teachers’ unions.

Thousands of government agencies—at federal, state, county, and municipal levels—are now staffed with millions of unelected bureaucrats charged with solving virtually every social problem, including the welfare of children.

For many Americans today, “helping” children means nothing more than voting for empty political slogans and more government boondoggle programs.

We now have more pediatricians, therapists, counselors, social workers, education bureaucrats, after-school programs, safety officers, anti-bullying campaigns, free breakfast, lunch, and other subsidy programs, than ever—plus laws banning child labor, leaving kids with no shortage of screen time.

Teens under 16? Good luck finding a job, even if they want one, or need one.

With all this progressive influence—more experts, more regulations, spending more of other people’s money—kids should be thriving. Healthier, happier, smarter, right?

They’re not.

The Good News

We are surrounded by moral emptiness, lack of moral purpose, and a culture of moral relativism. That’s why the rhetorical question—Who’s to say what’s right or wrong?—is so popular: Postmodern progressives woo and wow each other be denying the existence of objective morality.

Yet, Americans still call child abuse wrong, even shameful. No one dares defend it publicly, including those who boast that there’s no right or wrong. Even abusers decry it, their hypocrisy a backhanded nod to virtue. Postmodern nihilism hasn’t fully won. At least not yet. That’s a good thing.

The Bad News

Kids are in trouble. Infant mortality stalled at 5.61 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2023 (CDC), ending decades of decline. Abortion still dwarfs all other causes of death for young Americans—over a million in 2023 versus ~4,000 car deaths, ~1,800 gun deaths, and ~1,000 drownings for kids under 12 (CDC).

More unborn infants are being aborted after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs opinion than before. Who needs Roe?

For children who escape the womb alive, life in our progressive United States is no picnic. From 2022 to 2024, homelessness jumped 18%. Three-quarters of a million Americans are homeless—with 1 in 5 minors. Homeless kids face triple the abuse risk (NCTSN). Encampments now sprawl beyond downtowns into suburbs.

Teen drug use? All-time highs—25% of 12th-graders vaped nicotine in 2024, up from 11% in 2017 (Monitoring the Future); opioid overdoses killed 1,500 kids in 2022 (CDC). Everyone has stories about kids taking recreational drugs laced with fentanyl and the tragic results.

Education is a washout. Spending has soared to an all-time high, nearly $16k per pupil (NCES, 2023), while reading comprehension and proficiency have dropped. More kids in school understand the preferred pronouns of “transexual” 13-year-olds and the sexual turn-ons of adult men who dress like women than what a paragraph is.

Rates of depression continue to climb—17% of teens report major episodes (NIMH, 2023), double 2009’s rate; 1 in 5 get help, leaving millions adrift. Loneliness stings—12% of kids report having not one friend (APA, 2024). Neglect—physical and emotional—rises as average screen time hits 7 hours daily.

Worst: teen suicides. Rates tripled since 2007—14 per 100,000 for ages 15–19 (CDC, 2023). Kids as young as 12 and 13 end their own lives, seeing no point in living. Meanwhile, mass shootings by hopeless, purposeless teens—like Uvalde (2022)—are becoming more common, even as rates of overall murder dip (FBI, 2023).

As a postmodern progressive culture, we continue to mock virtue and preach nihilism; and we continue to be shocked when young nihilists gun down random strangers. We have mobs of vandals painting swastikas everywhere, and then we’re surprised when neighborhood children act like members of Hitler Youth.

Fatherlessness drives many of the problems plaguing American children. Moynihan’s famed 1965 report flagged single-parent harm—25% of black kids then; today, 72% of black children in the United States are born to unwed mothers (Census, 2023). Americans of all colors, shades, and tints now hit 28%, almost triple what the numbers were in 1960.

We didn’t heed the warning—we spread it. The sexual revolution of the 1960s dissolved the connections between sex, marriage, responsibility, and child-rearing, gutting the core purpose of the natural family. If that wasn’t enough, progressive social engineers created government programs that incentivized women to have children without being married to the father of the children.

The cultural cess pool we have today didn’t happen by accident.

We have free love in the form of hook-ups. We have more vented feelings than ever. We have feminists insisting that men should knock women out of contests and honors reserved for women. We have more books about sex in the children’s sections of public school libraries than ever.

But we cannot say honestly or accurately that Americans today are good at parenting.

The results simply don’t bear out such an assertion. It’s likely that too many in our progressive postmodern America are too self-absorbed, too selfish, and too narcissistic to be good parents. And, try as we do, experience has shown that social workers, therapists, and child-development bureaucrats are no replacements for good parents.

Do No Harm?

Kids used to face different kinds of challenges—hard work, scant schooling, not many luxuries. But pitching in to help parents run a business or even do chores and learning basic virtues didn’t spawn despair. Suicides and random murderous rampages were rare, despite easy access to guns and ropes and other tools that can be used as instruments of death.

If National Child Abuse Prevention Month matters, we should ask the progressive architects of our postmodern America today: How are kids doing compared to yesterday? The numbers say worse—stagnant gains, surging pathologies. We seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Perhaps it is time to question what “progress” means? Progress for whom? And what kind of progress? Progress toward what end or goal? Rather than simply assuming that what we’re doing is right and good, perhaps we should ask the hard, zetetic question: Are we actually helping kids? Or are we harming them?