Children’s Rights
The Next Step in Social Evolution
Could we talk about something really sensitive and personal for most people? Children’s rights.
I know they don’t have any — rights, that is, but don’t you think it’s time we acknowledge that and then rethink our approach to how we treat children?
Hang in there a minute. Let me explain.
There are a lot of people who glamorize giving birth but lose interest in babies after they’re born. Thus, lots of children suffer. They suffer in ways that most adults wouldn’t tolerate for themselves. There are laws in place to protect adults from being treated the way we treat children without giving it a second thought. In fact, in America alone at LEAST one in seven children have been abused in the last year. One in seven!
This is likely an underestimate as child abuse is highly underreported.
I was an abused child. Not once in all my years growing up did one person intervene on my behalf. They didn’t even ask me if I was ok. Not one relative on either side of the family. Not one friend of the family. Not the clergy nor a schoolteacher. No one. I was forced to suffer until I could leave home.
Granted that was a long time ago.
There were few agencies in place investigating child abuse reports. There was also a social contract between parents and law enforcement at the time. The sanctity of the home was to be honored no matter what. Dads were considered the head of the house and to interfere with how any man chose to run his kingdom was un-American.
Did you know that the ASPCA was established before there was an agency for the protection of children?
Bizarre, right? Except that to this day, we still are more appalled when animals are mistreated. Hit your dog and people will go stark raving mad but hit your kid and people will defend your rights to do so. It’s worse than that. I’ve heard many people reference the hitting of a child with cheers, referring to their asses as something intended for a good beating. They promote the use of foreign objects to hit kids with as well. Belts, hairbrushes, boards, hands, fists, you name it.
Whatever is handy and will get the job done, grab it and start swinging.
Now if that were my beagle or my pony, my Siamese cat or my husband, people would be ready to string me up and leave me for the birds to pick my bones clean, but a five-year-old child that weighs less than a beagle is fair game.
I don’t get it!
The above link provides access to the story of Mary Ellen Wilson, an abused child living in NYC who might have gone unnoticed and continue to suffer at the hands of her parents had not a neighbor taken matters into her own hands. That neighbor soon discovered that there were no agencies for the protection of children.
She had to turn to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) for help instead.
I stumbled across the article completely by accident. Most people have never heard of Mary Ellen Wilson. I happen to be an advocate for children’s rights, however. Most of my life, I’ve been appalled at how children are treated. Unlike many grownups who were mistreated as children only to grow up to mistreat their own offspring, I wanted to see good old American childrearing practices overhauled and redesigned in order to catch up with the findings of neuroscience and psychology.
How best to raise children without scarring them for life seems like an honorable question to ask ourselves.
I can’t begin to tell you how many friends and acquaintances during moments of deep conversation have revealed to me the horrors of growing up with the two parents they were gifted at birth. We don’t get to pick our parents, unfortunately.
Neglect, mental abuse, sexual abuse, and physical abuse are all common occurrences in the lives of many children.
Of course, nature didn’t design a world where it’s easy to thrive. There is someone or something eating somebody else at every given moment of the day — just to survive. Also, procreation has little to do with quality of life. Procreation is a thoughtless instinct. There’s little to no self-awareness nor deep thinking behind this primordial drive. And, once we’re here, there’s often few well laid plans to ensure that the supposed gift of life will be even remotely worthwhile. We’re basically focused on our own survival from the day we draw our first breath until the day we die.
That’s the law of nature and humans aren’t exempt from the consequences of this rather harsh approach to life itself.
A hawk thinks nothing of robbing the rabbit’s nest of babies. Nor does a rabbit think anything of eating a clover blossom. That’s life. We may be surrounded by an almost unfathomable number of species and life forms, but we don’t really give it much thought.
We’re mostly focused on our own lives and a handful of other humans who move within our orbit.
I contend that our desire to elevate ourselves as the superior species comes with responsibilities, however. Responsibilities that the rest of the animal kingdom isn’t expected to accept.
Lucky us!
Yet, it’s been a slow process of evolution for humans as well. History proves that we’ve certainly not experienced an overnight transformation into well adjusted, intentional beings. In fact, we’re always teetering on the edge of barbarism. One more step backwards and we become the hawk or the rabbit in a world that merely focuses its attention on procreation not creation of a better world.
Instead, we give birth to more life merely to keep from going extinct. Mission accomplished.
Yet, through the development of the sciences like biology, neurology, and psychology, we have a better understanding of the human brain. The limitations and potential of the brain are beginning to influence personal practices and expectations.
For example, we now know that a child’s brain is not fully developed until about age twenty-five.
Until then they’re not just small adults with the same abilities to control their behaviors as their parents. Beating a child, traumatic life events, cultural expectations, interpersonal relationships, and a host of other experiences determine the eventual wiring of a child’s brain, often for the rest of their lives. Once damaged, it’s very difficult if not impossible to correct.
Wow! What an imperfect way to produce the next generation of humans who will eventually be expected to run society.
I’ve published numerous articles about children’s rights. Not just on the Medium platform, but for other websites as well. I’ve been tackling this difficult topic for decades and encountered a lot of angry people along the way. Parents don’t want to hear my message because they are uncomfortable with having a finger pointed at their own childrearing practices or resent coming to terms with the way they were raised.
We gather to protect what is and then resist change even if the old ways have harmed us.
In the meantime, fear not. We aren’t in danger of becoming an endangered species. We have procreation down pat. We can procreate with our eyes closed and our hands tied behind out backs. It’s that easy.
And why not?
We’re just another animal in the animal kingdom. Maybe there’s nothing special about us after all. Being special is an earned title. It takes a lot of work, an open mind, a desire to correct past mistakes, and a will to progress to the next level of evolution. Until we get this right — the raising of our children as autonomous beings with rights of their own — we’re stuck in an endless loop of generational pain and damaged wiring in our big brains.
The path ahead is a challenging one, indeed.
It’s taken us centuries and centuries to get to where we are now. There’s no guarantee that we’ll take the next steps required to move us beyond instinctual procreation to the higher form of the creator.
The only way to create a better society is to produce fewer damaged citizens. That’s the dream! And it starts with our children, the day they’re born, as their brains develop under our care.
It’s that easy and that hard.
Teresa is an author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
