Wasting Some of Our Most Valuable Resources: Children

Before I get into this, let me be upfront about where I stand. I am Pro-Life, and anyone who has read my earlier writing probably already guessed that. A child exists in the womb. By the eighth week after conception every organ the child needs is already there, and the remaining months are about growth and reaching the point of surviving on its own. Over the course of my life, science has kept finding new ways to detect life before birth and to keep that life going, whether inside the womb or outside it. So the real question becomes this: at what point do we decide that a human being has no right to exist? Nobody gets that judgment right every time.

Perhaps the honest label for how we treat the young is the throw-away generation. Most of us would concede that plenty of children never receive the training, the experience, or the resources they would need to become responsible adults. We leave the next generation stranded in places that function like war zones, surrounded by adults who are not up to the job, and then we turn around and penalize the people who do give up their resources, their time, and sometimes their careers to raise kids into safe, responsible citizens. That includes parents, teachers, and volunteers who open doors for children.

Let me give one example of how clumsily even a supposedly responsible part of our government handles this, at least in one corner of my state. Custody determinations, which often come up when a divorce is finalized, frequently land on the judges regarded as the least capable and the least trained for that kind of work. That leaves them free to improvise, or to lean on so-called experts who get wheeled in by the competing attorneys, each side pushing its own version of qualification, along with agencies that approach these cases carrying their own biases toward parental rights (and not, as a rule, the children's rights). All of this happens even though the same court system runs well-regarded, highly committed diversion programs for domestic violence, drug addiction, and mental illness.

A poor custody ruling can hand a child something close to a life sentence. The child never asked for it and did nothing to deserve it. In cases like these, early and sensible intervention is what you want, and the people assigned to carry it out ought to be thoroughly trained and answerable for their decisions. Is there anything casual about deciding who raises a child? The most capable, best-trained judges should be the ones doing this. And the right person for that role is someone who already understands child-rearing, or genuinely wants to learn it.

What a child needs shifts as the child grows. Early on the priority is keeping the body going: food, clothing, a roof, and physical care that is gentle and loving, delivered by someone who actually cares whether the child is safe and well. The manner in which a caregiving task gets done sends a message. A child reads it and knows whether he or she is secure and genuinely wanted.

A later and necessary piece of a child's development is that whoever cares for and teaches that child recognizes children are not all alike, and that difference is not a flaw. Nature runs on diversity. So the people doing the nurturing have to be able to provide, or go find, whatever each particular child needs for education, training, and the achievements that child is capable of reaching.

Kids also absorb things at their own pace and in their own styles. I have eight young grandchildren, and the differences are obvious to me. A child may move quickly in one area and slowly in another, which does not mean the child is backward. Often the slower area catches up later, once the child's attention turns that way.

As the years pass, children have to take on responsibilities and gather certain experiences. You would not, for instance, teach a kid about dating by keeping them away from the opposite sex until they turn twenty-one and then expecting them to sort it out alone. Children need to practice making some of their own choices and living with the consequences that follow. Learning happens in stages. Some ideas have to be grasped and rehearsed before a child can move on to the harder ones.

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