Children Are Our Most Precious Resource, Don't Waste Them
Of all the things a society can spend itself on, children come first, and that is a point I don't mind making more than once. They grow when they are loved and shown affection. They do better when they carry a solid sense of their own worth. They should never be left without someone standing behind them.
Then there is the plain matter of food and drink. A child who is hungry cannot grow well, and a child who is hungry cannot learn well either. Weekends and summer months are when that need quietly goes unmet for a lot of kids, because for some of them the only reliable meal they get comes from school. Ask yourself how a hungry child is supposed to sit still and study.
Safety belongs on the same list. No child should live in fear, and none should end up as the innocent casualty of someone else's crime. A decent place to live helps with that. So do decent schools.
Beyond the basics, children need to be taught the rights that people hold, the rules that let a group of strangers share a street without tearing each other apart, and an inner compass for right and wrong that they can carry on their own. History has to be part of that teaching, both so we stop repeating old errors and so we can copy what actually worked. They also deserve protection from being used for purposes that serve adults rather than the children themselves.
And there is creativity, which I put last only because I want it to stay in mind. Every child arrives with some particular gift the rest of us could use, and that gift is worth finding and growing. No child is disposable. No child is scrap to be spent and tossed. The casual acceptance of abortion feeds the opposite idea.
Parents, and the people who step into a parent's place, can be some of the most useful members of a culture we have. They take on the daily work of meeting a child's needs, their own child's or someone else's. Oddly, we often pour help toward parents who are failing at it while leaving the ones who are trying to succeed with little. Laws about children, and the way courts apply them, should start from the fact that a child has rights.
A child is not a piece of property. A child is a person, with rights that were there from birth, and custody fights routinely lose sight of that. I once heard of a county court that disciplines its weakest judges by assigning them the custody docket. That tells you something, and none of it is good.
When a child has bonded with a suitable parental figure, that bond should hold unless abuse enters the picture. A biological parent who drifts in and out as the mood strikes damages the child's footing and the child's ability to trust anyone. Children left without a steady attachment will sometimes latch onto almost any adult who comes near, simply because the hunger for it runs so deep.