Children Are Our Most Precious Resource! Why Do We Waste Them?

Why do we pay so little attention to how our children develop? From conception onward, choices get made that set a child up for harm, and other kinds of neglect pile on later. Then one day we stand around baffled, asking what happened to turn a child into someone capable of causing damage that can never be undone. By the time a teenager has shot ten people in a hallway, the window for prevention closed years earlier. Neglect that stretches across a childhood cannot simply be unwound.

Love, support, and respect are what babies need, and the groundwork for that is laid before birth. Do we tell people hoping to become parents that bringing a child into the world is an enormous obligation? Usually we do not. A pregnancy often gets framed as a burden, a lapse in planning, a contraception that failed, something reckoned with after the fact. And the parents doing that reckoning may have been treated as burdens themselves when they were conceived.

Unplug the refrigerator by accident, let the food spoil, and there is nothing to be done except throw it out. A teenage shooter is the same kind of irreversible. The children who lived through it are wounded or scarred for good, and we are left with the question of what can even be done now. Look at how severe post-traumatic stress runs through soldiers who have witnessed and committed terrible things in combat; the comparison is not a stretch.

A regard for life gets taught early, through how the child is treated and through the words and actions of whoever is caring for them. You cannot begin that teaching too soon. The trouble is finding anyone willing to do it, and finding anyone who was ever shown how, who received that kind of care and attention back when they were small themselves.

School may already be too late. Other kids spot the ones in trouble without any effort. If you doubt that, ask a first grader to name the problem children in the room, assuming they are not on the list themselves. Hours spent early on providing this kind of guidance and support are not wasted hours. The teachable moments are everywhere, and children frequently raise these subjects on their own. Tailor the learning where you can, because no two children match, and the child in front of you may be nothing like the adult trying to do the teaching.

Reading a book to a toddler, or to a few of them, I adjust to whoever is there and watch how long their attention holds. A small child is not a miniature adult and should not be asked to behave like one right away. Squabbles will break out over who gets to do what, and one of the earliest lessons an adult can offer is how to take turns and share. Do not be thrown if the book never gets finished or a child wanders off before the last page. Limits and rules come in over time, though not so heavily that the whole thing turns into a chore.

"Go away kid, you bother me" is no way to raise anyone. That is part of why both parents, along with aunts, uncles, and grandparents, ought to be present in a child's life. A child is not property that belongs to a parent. A child is an obligation to the wider society that parents accept the moment they think about conceiving one.

Things go sideways when adults try to work out these problems strictly through adult eyes. Children do not reason like adults, especially while they are very young or have not yet been taught what adults take for granted. Consider that infants often pee or poop into a clean diaper the moment the dirty one comes off. An adult who does not know this is coming can find it maddening.

Small surprise that wealthy families in the Victorian era kept nurseries and hired nannies, meeting their children only once the kids had been fed, washed, dressed nicely, and put down for a nap. Mothers back then often brought in wet nurses, women with infants of their own, so they would not have to nurse their babies themselves.

If a thing does not begin the right way, what grounds are there to expect it to finish the right way?

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