If I could start this over, I'd add some discussion about forcing young children to get mRNA injections on the supposed premise that their risk was about protecting adults.
In the very early days of the pandemic it was forgivable, but months and months into it, seeing outdoor play parks taped up like crime scenes as the liquor stores stayed open, knowing the sham of "distance learning" was depriving kids of a chance to socialize and be normal, all while the risk to them was infinitessimal, all while the teachers' unions (NEVER let them forget this) screamed and mewled about how they were on the front lines facing death itself if they ever had to go into a classroom again... it said a lot about how society regarded its vulnerable young, and it wasn't good.
For some odd reason (maybe) that whole shtick put me in mind of fat mustachioed WWI generals sending young men (boys too) to their certain pointless agonizing deaths while slurping port, admiring themselves in the mirror and dreaming of getting one over on their (equally disgusting) opposite number.
Yes! For some over a year+ of their childhood social development and education were taken away and replaced with the anxiety of passing on a virus that will kill grandma. Beyond evil! And I'd like to add all generations of old people previously engaged with children without laying that whopper on them!
I’ve said this a billion times over the past 2+ years; if I have the unspeakable great good fortune to make it to my 80’s, just effing shoot me already if I start yammering on about how children should be making all sorts of damaging (or even life-threatening!) sacrifices to protect me from the (entirely natural) risk of my inevitable mortality. Sincerely.
In fairness to the oldies, it wasn't them who was demanding that they be protected.
It was their middle-aged daughters - easily the most gullible demographic apart from 'tween' girls.
That's not to say that every middle-aged woman is gullible - in the same way not every Afro-American is σ dumber than the average white person, and not every Pakistani in Rotherham is part of a grooming gang.
Worse still, the gullible ones are also
• the loudest;
• the most strident; and
• the most status-obsessed;
• the most-drugged up with psychactive 'mood stabilisers' [etc]...
- and their 'side' had the bullhorn.
And the most worser thing: they're also the core demographic in Child Warehouse Wardens (who unironically still refer to what they do as "school teacher" despite having thrown in that towel in the 1990s).
I'm so glad I don't have kids and I don't care about anyone else's kids (not even my sibspring - i.e., siblings' offspring).
While this is the worst example, I felt similarly during the shutdowns. We knew very early on that the hyped up cold affected mostly the very old and very sick. The obvious answer would be to inform people on how to calculate their risk factor, and encourage the high risk to self quarantine.
Instead, the young suffered for the old. Not just kids, but also the parents of young kids. The kids weren’t even allowed to go to outdoor playgrounds, while their parents lost their jobs. A good illustration of the backward priorities were the “senior hours” at grocery stores, where a bunch of boomers (this was not the 85+ crowd taking advantage) cleared the place like a swarm of locusts, piling their carts high, while mothers with small kids watched on, knowing they wouldn’t be getting any of their basic necessities that day.
Contrast this to the elderly in Japan. They volunteered to clean up the Fukushima reactor so younger people wouldn’t be saddled with the side effects of radiation. They came out of retirement for a suicide job to protect their children and grandchildren. While this is an extreme example, it would seem to me that literally every generation worked on the basic premise of sacrificing the old for the sake of the young, if the situation arose, and in premodern times it did often, rather than the other way around. If people didn’t think this way, the species wouldn’t have lasted.
Which brings me back to the boomers. Unless you were unfortunate enough not to be able to dodge the Vietnam draft (how messed up was the college deferment?), chances are, you never really struggled in your entire life. So it’s sort of understandable that they’d view themselves in this way. I’m not saying no boomers ever struggled (I even made a large exception), but the social conditions were such that many never had to. This isn’t even totally their own fault when viewed that way.
The boomers would go onto coddle their own kids. Where their parents at least had the excuse of waiting to shield their offspring from such tragedies as world war and depression, the boomers didn’t even know hardship and as a result viewed things like “not winning a sports match” as a hazard to be avoided.
Tldr - Yes, coddled lives are what got us here. Weak men -> hard times, and such. We’re dealing with weak men on a scale never known to man.
i disagree about boomers, as a gen-xer i was far from coddled, and neither were my friends. Coming of age in the early 80's us kids were pretty much on our own figuring stuff out. Parents were not involved in any sort of play time. We got on our bikes, met up with friends and did whatever. Some kids hung out at convenience stores and parks smoking cigarettes, others played sports, or went fishing. Both parents were working so many kids, including myself biked to elementary school and back, latch key kids they called us. Came home, ate a sleeve of oreos and a bag of chips, washed it down with a 2 liter of coke. Soon as mom got home, off on our bikes we went until dark or dinner time. Fist fights were an right of passage for boys at that age. You either fought back or got picked on until you did. It was a glorious way to grow up. It was us gen-xers that somehow coddled our kids to death. Itried with my 2 boys, but it was tough. My wife wouldnt let them walk 2 blocks to school alone. Hardly any parents allowed kids to be unsupervised at parks or fields. I gave them as much freedom as i could, but it wasnt alot. I cant for the life of me understand how this happened to people from my generation. Only thing I can figure is that we were given so much freedom, and were ignored for the most part by our parents that there was resentment. That and the fear porn that erupted about a pedophile or a kidnapper lurking around every corner. We are now paying the price.
If you go back further, there was no difference between a child and an adult. Adults had children to *work* or to marry off, send to the military, or send to the church to further their goals. Children were assets (or burdens). But the point you make here is revealing. Children are once again assets only, at least to a particular segment of our population, and they are just little adults (or adults are just bit children), but there is no compunction to think through what might actually be in their best interests.
This is one of your best that I’ve read since joining the site. The infantilization of Western adult societies is congruous with the decline of the nuclear family, and the ascendancy of “lifestyle” and material comfort as the greatest goals for our people in our hyper-materialistic culture. Human children, as opposed to say your labradoodle, who is the surrogate child for those who don’t want to commit all the way to a bipedal organism that talks back, require decades of nurturing and development to reach a fully formed state. BTW Have you noticed there are now more per commercials than child product commercials? We are totally helpless when born and stay that way longer than any other critter. Our psychological development is a highly intricate, multidimensional lengthy process that can be disrupted at critical junctures by any number of factors, leading to problems of all sorts. Much of it depends upon a stable family unit with a man daddy and a woman mommy. Radical, no? But validated repeatedly in the scientific literature and empiric observation. The targeted, intentional, cynically depraved dismantling of family roles, parental authority, and social norms by people who frankly know better has caused much of the mess we find ourselves in today. Drag queen story hour for 5 year olds? What is that really about? It’s not about kids missing out on tranny culture, because after all is that something that most of us require in order to thrive? No, it’s not.It’s about confusing and erasing identity at impressionable ages. It’s about taking advantage of cortical malleability in the child brain. The development of therapeutic culture and the widespread dispensation of antidepressants isn’t just because we are more sophisticated in our understanding of psychology. It’s also about inducing dependency and doubt, and casting blame. Toxic masculinity? Systemic racism? Other imaginary shit all from the same psychoanalytic- political wellspring. The good news is that people( kids too) are resilient, much more than we realize. And they can overcome obstacles if they can see the path beyond. And parents are waking up and fighting back. That lady from Encinitas rocks. I’m especially glad to see her because I love that little town and the current municipal wokester administration is a frigging train wreck. The Left is made up of childish weirdos, who luxuriate in their misery, who are envidious and utopian and attract same. This explains their totalitarian tendencies. Emotionally arrested, like a four year old, they seek world domination. The solution is the same as with a four year old. We should have said no to the Leftist temper tantrum a long time ago, before Junior trashed the place.
2.) Kids are resilient, but I REALLY wonder how many will be resilient enough to overcome the baggage of these years. Children who get hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery, especially, are in deep, deep, deep trouble. There is pain ahead.
3.) Talking to young adults, I'm disturbed by the frequency and automaticity of the statement, "Oh, we don't ever want to have children." Pray for our future.
A note to number 3: My 30 year old daughter lives in VA. Lots of her friends are now getting married and trying to have children. I say trying because three of the vaccinated couples are having trouble conceiving (gee, the three doctors are mystified). It seems like, at least in her circle, the attitudes are changing. BTW most of her friends are Democrats (she is not) and they all voted for Youngkin. I am cautiously optimistic that change is in the wind!!
No labradoodles we’re harmed in the writing of this comment. Yeah, once they’ve gone from stupid conversations to hormonal manipulation and surgery, that’s a next level event. There is a legitimate role for treatment of gender dysphoria, but not for its politicization, and the cynical manipulation and mutilation of kids who frankly have no clue what they are signing up for. Many young people no longer see the virtue of having a family, because they see pop culture and the intelligentsia devaluing the family. Kids want to be cool, and teens are rebellious. Nature of the beast. But kids are super easy to emotionally manipulate and that’s what this part of the color revolution psyop is about. It’s not about helping. It’s about control.
My 24-year old son just told me the same thing. He mentioned how it’s a bit of a cliché (“who would want to bring a child into a world like this”), but that he really is starting to feel that way. You can homeschool for a while, he says, but at some point you need to allow kids to socialize more broadly and how do you protect them from what they’re exposed to in school these days? The gender mess and the CRT etc? (And btw he is of part AA ancestry.) I 100% understand and agree with the sentiment, but it is so incredibly sad to see your child in this situation.
I’m sorry to hear that your son feels this way. I would like to tell him that it is within his power to take control. Have those kids, speak up at school board meetings, perhaps move to a district that does not teach this rot. There are choices for parents. And the more the parents take control the better things will be. We are seeing something of a revolution going on with parents fed up with this evil agenda. He should not give up. I wish him, and you, the best.
Thank you for the encouraging words. We live in a very democrat-dominant area, so speaking up may be of limited value. But thanks for the reminder to point out to him that the culture varies from one state to another!
What a fascinating and tragic trajectory mirroring the rise and fall of civilization. Seems the children suffer no matter the era, from whipping to coddling to grooming.
I've thought about the decline of childhood a lot.
At first, people were making me angry: I had my son and decided I'd stay home with him, and it turns out that, for one, this is a luxury, and for another, almost no one I knew felt comfortable doing it whether they wanted to or not (motherhood has been so devalued). Then the worries to find and pay for "care", which grows this sense that children are costs, not investments. And so on.
I read about antinatalists and young people sterilizing themselves and a sort of morally superior tone in all this.. it made me angry...
But think: what is the image, the ideal, of parenthood now? Of motherhood, say?
The memory of one's mother is not that of a gentle, firm, loving person who made you cookies and kissed your knee better. Of someone who let you live your early life entirely selfishly, as you needed, and who was entirely unselfish meanwhile so that you could grown your own personality before being influenced by the needs and demands of others.
Instead, for a few generations now, the mother is increasingly not being unselfish while the child is selfish but is asking, insisting, that the child put their needs to the side so that mother can work, etc. Daycare babies are babies who had to give up their mothers - they had no choice - when their biology screams to them that their mothers are who they must be near. Their budding personality is sacrificing to others before it is formed, why they do not know. Childhood is traumatic, full of rooms of children marshaled by strangers.
The image many now have of a mother is that of a tired, harried, distant woman who despite her innate desires resents the time her children take from other demands, who puts them in the care of others almost from the get-go, who doesn’t spend time alone with them but schleps them from play date to play date, who has a career to focus on too whether she likes it or not. The child is so socialized when very young that social bonds are shallow because there are too many; only the fundamental one is missing.
Is it any wonder then that as soon as the baby is an adult, they seek only to gratify their as yet unmet need to be selfish? Yet this is happening precisely when they should become unselfish adults and parents. If they do become parents, they take baby to day care even earlier now than when they attended. Or they decide not to be parents at all and live for themselves for ever, thus disconnected from values beyond materialism and consumerism.
I advocate mothers and fathers find a way to return to their homes, to find the way to do so that works for them, but the world is anti-family in this sense, that is separates parents from children across many fronts. A battle worth fighting!
Excellent comment. Erica Komisar wrote a book about this very thing: "Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters." It was of course ignored by the mainstream media.
Wait. Wasn’t there a time when ‘children’ were ADULTS and they were separating and taking on adult responsibilities at a reasonable age, like say, 16 or 17 or 18?
Yes there was. Only since the passage of Obamacare—complete with insurability of the "children" to age 26, and the "full-time" work threshold requiring full employer paid benefits being reduced to anything over 29 hours—more adults have to work multiple part-time jobs to replace income they lost from being full-time (with or without benefits). Plus they work longer weeks to try to earn more to pay the far higher costs of "affordable" care. Fewer jobs for teens. Even harder, the younger workers who actually do get jobs don't stay long or care much about responsibility. They want the income all right, but they get mad when you tell them to stop looking at their phone and pay attention to the job they're hired to do. And, I have lost count of how many times I've gotten the text 5 minutes after they were supposed to clock in: "Can't work today. Sick." They're too chicken to call and tell you that in person—and they won't return a call or text to discuss that it's the 3rd time in 2 weeks they've texted in "sick." No matter how calm or conversational a boss who challenges them, they whine "he yells at me." Never would I have imagined it, but I've had to fire 3 people in the past 2 years via text: "OK, that's fine. Since this is becoming fairly regular, we've removed you from the schedule. You don't have to worry about coming back. Hope you feel better soon."
Then there's people like me, women over 60 but too young to retire, who want a decent job but can only find McDonald's, housecleaning companies willing to pay $16/hr, and plenty of minimum-wage shit jobs, and in this state, can't work for any govt. positions unless I'm jabbed, and once people google me, they find out I'm a SS writer and I get no response... Nearly all the more reasonably-paying jobs, like in supermarkets or such, demand masks and maybe also jabs. I, and the others like me, are just EFT, if you speak phonetics. And there's STILL the same stigma as before, being unemployed, having trouble paying the rent, and people look at me like I'm a loser and a drag on society. And somehow I just barely manage to keep my self-esteem...
Me as well. Have never stopped working and hired hundreds of young people for their first jobs over the years. But things have distinctly changed in the work ethic of not just the younger ones, but most part time workers, over the past decade.
The past five years has been a horrifying cascade of “Nope, that’s not happening that’s a conspiracy.” Quickly followed by “Okay, it’s happening, but it’s GOOD it’s happening.” Apply this to child sexualization, child “gender transitioning”, CRT, ESG....so many sane people watched passively chalking this all up to a “passing trend” that would blow over. You are 100% correct Chris. “Adults” can’t delineate the line between childhood and adulthood because for an alarming number of them, they never made the jump. It’s the one “transition” they refused to make. Our family runs a small business. A guy approaching 30 paid this morning with a Pokémon credit card. Surprisingly the transaction was approved. How do we come back from this level of dysfunction?
What a fine and insightful article and from my standpoint, the best that Chris has written since I began subscribing. There is another element in what I will call "despoliation of childhood innocence." We live in an age of ugliness where the grotesque is celebrated, and the pursuit of beauty everywhere is looked down upon. What has remained unchanged? The innocent gaze of the infant, the wonder in a child's eyes that causes even crabby people to smile. There is a tremendous perversity in wanting the little ones to "wake up" from their innocence and embrace sexuality before its time. It goes deep in these practitioners' souls - the urge to destroy that lovely quality of the very young and we have to combat it.
Oct 15, 2022·edited Oct 15, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
I sometimes think about what these children will be like if they live to be old. Surely some of them will escape the seemingly inevitable suicidal depression and drug addiction that awaits them once they’ve mutilated their bodies based on the naïve belief that merely thinking you’re another gender makes it so. What will these girls, the ones with hideous transverse incisions instead of breasts, be like when they’re 60 or 80, with no biological children or grandchildren, the physical and psychological sequelae of decades of exogenous hormones, and a lifetime of wrestling with the fallout of choices made when they were just children and someone who loved them should’ve told them no? I don’t ever wish life away, but I’m glad I won’t be around for that. Talk about dystopia.
This is mental illness, all of it. Not sure who’s crazier—the kids or the parents and doctors who co-sign their ruin.
I have no idea where you get your ideas, nor the significance of this clip you're posting for some reason unknown, but I don't agree with you. The off-handed "they made the mothers that act that way," is absurd on its face. It's almost as if you think ALL offspring think and behave like their parents! It's almost as if you haven't noticed a psy-op going on for nearly three years... It's almost as if you haven't had enough life experience to understand that not everything about human behavior is simple...
I've lived the psy-op my entire life. My parents were not like most "parents" when i was growing up. We were never worried about being "popular" and one of my dads favorite sayings when i was complaining because my friends were doing something that he wouldn't let me was "if everyone else jumped off a bridge would you?"
The clip is about human nature, and the only way to change it is to be aware of your failings with regards to it. How many people do you think are actually conscious of that these days? We live in an abstract economy where quite a few jobs actually provide nothing of value, that will change, is changing currently. So people won't change, but circumstances will.
I've read through the comments. Children are what their parents and the culture make them. Time is cyclic, not linear. "We've" given this generation an easy life, which has made them soft, which will result it hard times, which will make them strong again. They'll go on to create good times again, and the cycle will repeat. I highly recommend the book; "The Forth Turning". Winter is coming...
Are you familiar with the book I mentioned? Frankly, it was a somewhat difficult read for me, simply because the authors' knowledge of the subject was so extensive, but the Truths therein we're impossible to miss.
I agree with that idea, to a point. But it seems to imply that children (grown children) have nothing to do, of their own volition and thinking, with what "makes" them. As if there is no self-direction, self-determination, or even self-awareness... I strongly disagree with that idea, if that's what you're saying. I am the living evidence of the contrary. I don't mean to say that there is NO influence. Just sayin'.
I do think you raise some interesting points and ideas, and I don't necessarily disagree with the "easy life" part of it.
That said, I DO think there is evolution... We are not just running in a big circle, really-- I'd say more like a spiraling evolution of consciousness... In some ways we seem to be more or less psychologically very similar to what we were, as human critters, as thousands of years ago, but that said, I also think we have evolved, we have learned and changed, as a group; and there is a plethora of evidence of that change, socially, politically, even if our basic emotional functioning is similar, or the same, as it ever was...
Wouldn't you agree? I do think there has been progress in the human realm, in some ways. But I'm not sure we are INCAPABLE of breaking a cycle, if we are able to AFFECT the cycle proactively. I think we are heavily influenced by subliminal ideology, which could change, and that change could affect what we think of as a "given." What I'm saying is, I believe there is room for progress, that we humans are not static, we can evolve, which is evidenced by individuals and smaller groups of people, if not the entire race all at once...
A very thoughtful piece that puts into words things that have been bothering me, like the paradox that out of the mouths of the left, for lack of a better term, children must both be protected (often from their own parents) but also have an inordinate amount of responsibility placed on them to "choose their gender" or take care of the adults around them (the mRNA vaccine in your comment is a good example of this). Like everything, there's no consistency.
Left unsaid is whether either Puritan or Victorian conceptions of a fallen or edenic childhood are ideal. I'd suggest it's a false dichotomy, and that there are far more options - as indicated by the degraded and degenerate way in which children are groomed in the modern age.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we'd be better looking at how children were raised in Greek society: not as criminals to be broken or innocents whose naivety should be endlessly extended, nor as at present, consumers requiring only that their hedonic and sexual palates be conditioned, but as pups of the wolf pack in whom virtue must be trained such that they may grow in to their full powers.
This is always a tough issue. Rearing children gently yet giving them strong morals; a good grounding in the history of their country and why we are who we are; some grounding in spirituality; and the role-modeling by adults that set those things in place. Children by and large learn by watching them emulating vs reading or via the spoken word - especially where the text and or verbal instruction run counter to what they see around them and experience in their homes by the adults therein. And I have to say it hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Children are abused and yet are required to behave in a “civilized” manner when they grow up. If they have an indulgent rearing as has been the practice among recent generations, they think they are entitled to getting “stuff” vs the idea of working for it. And they still see the adults in their world behaving wrongly so they do, too. If you want a healthy, happy, independent-minded, knows right-from-wrong, hard working child you are going to have to be those things as an adult. To show the child what you want. It doesn’t take me long to figure out what is going on at home when I see a child for the first time. Their behavior pretty much says it all. The bottom line is we must be the adults we want our children to be and to not expect our children to be any different.
Spoiled secular adults with unearned wealth might not know how to be adults or raise children, but religious adults undoubtedly do a better job. Self-respect is inherent in religious observance and absent in those who sexualize everything.
Yes, and no. I've seen countless religious adults who are unbending, narrow-minded, judgmental and sometimes downright cruel. I don't think religion is the key to understanding people, it seems almost an arbitrary side issue.
If I could start this over, I'd add some discussion about forcing young children to get mRNA injections on the supposed premise that their risk was about protecting adults.
In the very early days of the pandemic it was forgivable, but months and months into it, seeing outdoor play parks taped up like crime scenes as the liquor stores stayed open, knowing the sham of "distance learning" was depriving kids of a chance to socialize and be normal, all while the risk to them was infinitessimal, all while the teachers' unions (NEVER let them forget this) screamed and mewled about how they were on the front lines facing death itself if they ever had to go into a classroom again... it said a lot about how society regarded its vulnerable young, and it wasn't good.
One requirement of adulthood is to make decisions under uncertainty and manage risks. The past two years shows we have many permanent children.
Great observation.
For some odd reason (maybe) that whole shtick put me in mind of fat mustachioed WWI generals sending young men (boys too) to their certain pointless agonizing deaths while slurping port, admiring themselves in the mirror and dreaming of getting one over on their (equally disgusting) opposite number.
Yes! For some over a year+ of their childhood social development and education were taken away and replaced with the anxiety of passing on a virus that will kill grandma. Beyond evil! And I'd like to add all generations of old people previously engaged with children without laying that whopper on them!
I’ve said this a billion times over the past 2+ years; if I have the unspeakable great good fortune to make it to my 80’s, just effing shoot me already if I start yammering on about how children should be making all sorts of damaging (or even life-threatening!) sacrifices to protect me from the (entirely natural) risk of my inevitable mortality. Sincerely.
In fairness to the oldies, it wasn't them who was demanding that they be protected.
It was their middle-aged daughters - easily the most gullible demographic apart from 'tween' girls.
That's not to say that every middle-aged woman is gullible - in the same way not every Afro-American is σ dumber than the average white person, and not every Pakistani in Rotherham is part of a grooming gang.
Worse still, the gullible ones are also
• the loudest;
• the most strident; and
• the most status-obsessed;
• the most-drugged up with psychactive 'mood stabilisers' [etc]...
- and their 'side' had the bullhorn.
And the most worser thing: they're also the core demographic in Child Warehouse Wardens (who unironically still refer to what they do as "school teacher" despite having thrown in that towel in the 1990s).
I'm so glad I don't have kids and I don't care about anyone else's kids (not even my sibspring - i.e., siblings' offspring).
While this is the worst example, I felt similarly during the shutdowns. We knew very early on that the hyped up cold affected mostly the very old and very sick. The obvious answer would be to inform people on how to calculate their risk factor, and encourage the high risk to self quarantine.
Instead, the young suffered for the old. Not just kids, but also the parents of young kids. The kids weren’t even allowed to go to outdoor playgrounds, while their parents lost their jobs. A good illustration of the backward priorities were the “senior hours” at grocery stores, where a bunch of boomers (this was not the 85+ crowd taking advantage) cleared the place like a swarm of locusts, piling their carts high, while mothers with small kids watched on, knowing they wouldn’t be getting any of their basic necessities that day.
Contrast this to the elderly in Japan. They volunteered to clean up the Fukushima reactor so younger people wouldn’t be saddled with the side effects of radiation. They came out of retirement for a suicide job to protect their children and grandchildren. While this is an extreme example, it would seem to me that literally every generation worked on the basic premise of sacrificing the old for the sake of the young, if the situation arose, and in premodern times it did often, rather than the other way around. If people didn’t think this way, the species wouldn’t have lasted.
Which brings me back to the boomers. Unless you were unfortunate enough not to be able to dodge the Vietnam draft (how messed up was the college deferment?), chances are, you never really struggled in your entire life. So it’s sort of understandable that they’d view themselves in this way. I’m not saying no boomers ever struggled (I even made a large exception), but the social conditions were such that many never had to. This isn’t even totally their own fault when viewed that way.
The boomers would go onto coddle their own kids. Where their parents at least had the excuse of waiting to shield their offspring from such tragedies as world war and depression, the boomers didn’t even know hardship and as a result viewed things like “not winning a sports match” as a hazard to be avoided.
Tldr - Yes, coddled lives are what got us here. Weak men -> hard times, and such. We’re dealing with weak men on a scale never known to man.
i disagree about boomers, as a gen-xer i was far from coddled, and neither were my friends. Coming of age in the early 80's us kids were pretty much on our own figuring stuff out. Parents were not involved in any sort of play time. We got on our bikes, met up with friends and did whatever. Some kids hung out at convenience stores and parks smoking cigarettes, others played sports, or went fishing. Both parents were working so many kids, including myself biked to elementary school and back, latch key kids they called us. Came home, ate a sleeve of oreos and a bag of chips, washed it down with a 2 liter of coke. Soon as mom got home, off on our bikes we went until dark or dinner time. Fist fights were an right of passage for boys at that age. You either fought back or got picked on until you did. It was a glorious way to grow up. It was us gen-xers that somehow coddled our kids to death. Itried with my 2 boys, but it was tough. My wife wouldnt let them walk 2 blocks to school alone. Hardly any parents allowed kids to be unsupervised at parks or fields. I gave them as much freedom as i could, but it wasnt alot. I cant for the life of me understand how this happened to people from my generation. Only thing I can figure is that we were given so much freedom, and were ignored for the most part by our parents that there was resentment. That and the fear porn that erupted about a pedophile or a kidnapper lurking around every corner. We are now paying the price.
If you go back further, there was no difference between a child and an adult. Adults had children to *work* or to marry off, send to the military, or send to the church to further their goals. Children were assets (or burdens). But the point you make here is revealing. Children are once again assets only, at least to a particular segment of our population, and they are just little adults (or adults are just bit children), but there is no compunction to think through what might actually be in their best interests.
The Nanny State says, won't someone please think of the children?
The Granny State doesn't mention the children, aside from noting in passing that they pose a potential threat to seniors.
Today’s enlightenment was oh so close ... but now with this start over, you get the cigar! Thanks again Chris.
This is one of your best that I’ve read since joining the site. The infantilization of Western adult societies is congruous with the decline of the nuclear family, and the ascendancy of “lifestyle” and material comfort as the greatest goals for our people in our hyper-materialistic culture. Human children, as opposed to say your labradoodle, who is the surrogate child for those who don’t want to commit all the way to a bipedal organism that talks back, require decades of nurturing and development to reach a fully formed state. BTW Have you noticed there are now more per commercials than child product commercials? We are totally helpless when born and stay that way longer than any other critter. Our psychological development is a highly intricate, multidimensional lengthy process that can be disrupted at critical junctures by any number of factors, leading to problems of all sorts. Much of it depends upon a stable family unit with a man daddy and a woman mommy. Radical, no? But validated repeatedly in the scientific literature and empiric observation. The targeted, intentional, cynically depraved dismantling of family roles, parental authority, and social norms by people who frankly know better has caused much of the mess we find ourselves in today. Drag queen story hour for 5 year olds? What is that really about? It’s not about kids missing out on tranny culture, because after all is that something that most of us require in order to thrive? No, it’s not.It’s about confusing and erasing identity at impressionable ages. It’s about taking advantage of cortical malleability in the child brain. The development of therapeutic culture and the widespread dispensation of antidepressants isn’t just because we are more sophisticated in our understanding of psychology. It’s also about inducing dependency and doubt, and casting blame. Toxic masculinity? Systemic racism? Other imaginary shit all from the same psychoanalytic- political wellspring. The good news is that people( kids too) are resilient, much more than we realize. And they can overcome obstacles if they can see the path beyond. And parents are waking up and fighting back. That lady from Encinitas rocks. I’m especially glad to see her because I love that little town and the current municipal wokester administration is a frigging train wreck. The Left is made up of childish weirdos, who luxuriate in their misery, who are envidious and utopian and attract same. This explains their totalitarian tendencies. Emotionally arrested, like a four year old, they seek world domination. The solution is the same as with a four year old. We should have said no to the Leftist temper tantrum a long time ago, before Junior trashed the place.
1.) Labradoodles are awesome! Back off, you!
2.) Kids are resilient, but I REALLY wonder how many will be resilient enough to overcome the baggage of these years. Children who get hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery, especially, are in deep, deep, deep trouble. There is pain ahead.
3.) Talking to young adults, I'm disturbed by the frequency and automaticity of the statement, "Oh, we don't ever want to have children." Pray for our future.
A note to number 3: My 30 year old daughter lives in VA. Lots of her friends are now getting married and trying to have children. I say trying because three of the vaccinated couples are having trouble conceiving (gee, the three doctors are mystified). It seems like, at least in her circle, the attitudes are changing. BTW most of her friends are Democrats (she is not) and they all voted for Youngkin. I am cautiously optimistic that change is in the wind!!
That is great news!
No labradoodles we’re harmed in the writing of this comment. Yeah, once they’ve gone from stupid conversations to hormonal manipulation and surgery, that’s a next level event. There is a legitimate role for treatment of gender dysphoria, but not for its politicization, and the cynical manipulation and mutilation of kids who frankly have no clue what they are signing up for. Many young people no longer see the virtue of having a family, because they see pop culture and the intelligentsia devaluing the family. Kids want to be cool, and teens are rebellious. Nature of the beast. But kids are super easy to emotionally manipulate and that’s what this part of the color revolution psyop is about. It’s not about helping. It’s about control.
Frickin’ autocorrect. Were not we’re.
Adults who alway said "well children are so resilient", unknowingly exposed themselves as frauds/hypocrites.
What did that adults response about children say about them?
Cowardness was an indulgence that was incentivized during covid.
This incentive inoculated against empathy and "seeing" the obvious; any society that sacrifices the young for those short for this world is doomed.
My 24-year old son just told me the same thing. He mentioned how it’s a bit of a cliché (“who would want to bring a child into a world like this”), but that he really is starting to feel that way. You can homeschool for a while, he says, but at some point you need to allow kids to socialize more broadly and how do you protect them from what they’re exposed to in school these days? The gender mess and the CRT etc? (And btw he is of part AA ancestry.) I 100% understand and agree with the sentiment, but it is so incredibly sad to see your child in this situation.
I’m sorry to hear that your son feels this way. I would like to tell him that it is within his power to take control. Have those kids, speak up at school board meetings, perhaps move to a district that does not teach this rot. There are choices for parents. And the more the parents take control the better things will be. We are seeing something of a revolution going on with parents fed up with this evil agenda. He should not give up. I wish him, and you, the best.
Thank you for the encouraging words. We live in a very democrat-dominant area, so speaking up may be of limited value. But thanks for the reminder to point out to him that the culture varies from one state to another!
This is pretty talented writing as well. That's what I love about Substack.
These perverts will burn in hell.
The problem is that I'm not 100% that hell exists. I'd rather see them burn now.
He'll is now
What a fascinating and tragic trajectory mirroring the rise and fall of civilization. Seems the children suffer no matter the era, from whipping to coddling to grooming.
I've thought about the decline of childhood a lot.
At first, people were making me angry: I had my son and decided I'd stay home with him, and it turns out that, for one, this is a luxury, and for another, almost no one I knew felt comfortable doing it whether they wanted to or not (motherhood has been so devalued). Then the worries to find and pay for "care", which grows this sense that children are costs, not investments. And so on.
I read about antinatalists and young people sterilizing themselves and a sort of morally superior tone in all this.. it made me angry...
But think: what is the image, the ideal, of parenthood now? Of motherhood, say?
The memory of one's mother is not that of a gentle, firm, loving person who made you cookies and kissed your knee better. Of someone who let you live your early life entirely selfishly, as you needed, and who was entirely unselfish meanwhile so that you could grown your own personality before being influenced by the needs and demands of others.
Instead, for a few generations now, the mother is increasingly not being unselfish while the child is selfish but is asking, insisting, that the child put their needs to the side so that mother can work, etc. Daycare babies are babies who had to give up their mothers - they had no choice - when their biology screams to them that their mothers are who they must be near. Their budding personality is sacrificing to others before it is formed, why they do not know. Childhood is traumatic, full of rooms of children marshaled by strangers.
The image many now have of a mother is that of a tired, harried, distant woman who despite her innate desires resents the time her children take from other demands, who puts them in the care of others almost from the get-go, who doesn’t spend time alone with them but schleps them from play date to play date, who has a career to focus on too whether she likes it or not. The child is so socialized when very young that social bonds are shallow because there are too many; only the fundamental one is missing.
Is it any wonder then that as soon as the baby is an adult, they seek only to gratify their as yet unmet need to be selfish? Yet this is happening precisely when they should become unselfish adults and parents. If they do become parents, they take baby to day care even earlier now than when they attended. Or they decide not to be parents at all and live for themselves for ever, thus disconnected from values beyond materialism and consumerism.
I advocate mothers and fathers find a way to return to their homes, to find the way to do so that works for them, but the world is anti-family in this sense, that is separates parents from children across many fronts. A battle worth fighting!
Excellent comment. Erica Komisar wrote a book about this very thing: "Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters." It was of course ignored by the mainstream media.
Excellent comment about unmet needs! I absolute believe you are right.
Hard times make strong men.....one can only hope that's what comes next!
I suspect harder times come next, but maybe after that.
I don't think there's any question.
Wait. Wasn’t there a time when ‘children’ were ADULTS and they were separating and taking on adult responsibilities at a reasonable age, like say, 16 or 17 or 18?
Yes there was. Only since the passage of Obamacare—complete with insurability of the "children" to age 26, and the "full-time" work threshold requiring full employer paid benefits being reduced to anything over 29 hours—more adults have to work multiple part-time jobs to replace income they lost from being full-time (with or without benefits). Plus they work longer weeks to try to earn more to pay the far higher costs of "affordable" care. Fewer jobs for teens. Even harder, the younger workers who actually do get jobs don't stay long or care much about responsibility. They want the income all right, but they get mad when you tell them to stop looking at their phone and pay attention to the job they're hired to do. And, I have lost count of how many times I've gotten the text 5 minutes after they were supposed to clock in: "Can't work today. Sick." They're too chicken to call and tell you that in person—and they won't return a call or text to discuss that it's the 3rd time in 2 weeks they've texted in "sick." No matter how calm or conversational a boss who challenges them, they whine "he yells at me." Never would I have imagined it, but I've had to fire 3 people in the past 2 years via text: "OK, that's fine. Since this is becoming fairly regular, we've removed you from the schedule. You don't have to worry about coming back. Hope you feel better soon."
Then there's people like me, women over 60 but too young to retire, who want a decent job but can only find McDonald's, housecleaning companies willing to pay $16/hr, and plenty of minimum-wage shit jobs, and in this state, can't work for any govt. positions unless I'm jabbed, and once people google me, they find out I'm a SS writer and I get no response... Nearly all the more reasonably-paying jobs, like in supermarkets or such, demand masks and maybe also jabs. I, and the others like me, are just EFT, if you speak phonetics. And there's STILL the same stigma as before, being unemployed, having trouble paying the rent, and people look at me like I'm a loser and a drag on society. And somehow I just barely manage to keep my self-esteem...
WOWZA! Great reply. Thank you for painting such a clear picture in one paragraph!
First job at 13. Latch-key child
Me as well. Have never stopped working and hired hundreds of young people for their first jobs over the years. But things have distinctly changed in the work ethic of not just the younger ones, but most part time workers, over the past decade.
Picked strawberries at 10 years old!
Lol. In generations past, 7,8,9 year olds were expected to contribute to the welfare of the family and community.
The past five years has been a horrifying cascade of “Nope, that’s not happening that’s a conspiracy.” Quickly followed by “Okay, it’s happening, but it’s GOOD it’s happening.” Apply this to child sexualization, child “gender transitioning”, CRT, ESG....so many sane people watched passively chalking this all up to a “passing trend” that would blow over. You are 100% correct Chris. “Adults” can’t delineate the line between childhood and adulthood because for an alarming number of them, they never made the jump. It’s the one “transition” they refused to make. Our family runs a small business. A guy approaching 30 paid this morning with a Pokémon credit card. Surprisingly the transaction was approved. How do we come back from this level of dysfunction?
It's possible massive, massive, massive death might push a few into adulthood, if they survive the cull.
What a fine and insightful article and from my standpoint, the best that Chris has written since I began subscribing. There is another element in what I will call "despoliation of childhood innocence." We live in an age of ugliness where the grotesque is celebrated, and the pursuit of beauty everywhere is looked down upon. What has remained unchanged? The innocent gaze of the infant, the wonder in a child's eyes that causes even crabby people to smile. There is a tremendous perversity in wanting the little ones to "wake up" from their innocence and embrace sexuality before its time. It goes deep in these practitioners' souls - the urge to destroy that lovely quality of the very young and we have to combat it.
I sometimes think about what these children will be like if they live to be old. Surely some of them will escape the seemingly inevitable suicidal depression and drug addiction that awaits them once they’ve mutilated their bodies based on the naïve belief that merely thinking you’re another gender makes it so. What will these girls, the ones with hideous transverse incisions instead of breasts, be like when they’re 60 or 80, with no biological children or grandchildren, the physical and psychological sequelae of decades of exogenous hormones, and a lifetime of wrestling with the fallout of choices made when they were just children and someone who loved them should’ve told them no? I don’t ever wish life away, but I’m glad I won’t be around for that. Talk about dystopia.
This is mental illness, all of it. Not sure who’s crazier—the kids or the parents and doctors who co-sign their ruin.
I hear you. It's mind-boggling, which I'm sure is part of the plan... :(
WHERE ARE THE PARENTS????!!!!
Cheering for it, mostly.
Millennial moms eat this garbage up.
Amazingly, yes.
Then maybe we need the grandparents...
Nah cause they made the mothers that act that way. People aren't going to change, circumstances will though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkVkKqQSas
I have no idea where you get your ideas, nor the significance of this clip you're posting for some reason unknown, but I don't agree with you. The off-handed "they made the mothers that act that way," is absurd on its face. It's almost as if you think ALL offspring think and behave like their parents! It's almost as if you haven't noticed a psy-op going on for nearly three years... It's almost as if you haven't had enough life experience to understand that not everything about human behavior is simple...
"The apple never falls very far from the tree"
I saw just as many boomers act stupid during the "pandemic" as people my own age.
I've lived the psy-op my entire life. My parents were not like most "parents" when i was growing up. We were never worried about being "popular" and one of my dads favorite sayings when i was complaining because my friends were doing something that he wouldn't let me was "if everyone else jumped off a bridge would you?"
The clip is about human nature, and the only way to change it is to be aware of your failings with regards to it. How many people do you think are actually conscious of that these days? We live in an abstract economy where quite a few jobs actually provide nothing of value, that will change, is changing currently. So people won't change, but circumstances will.
I've read through the comments. Children are what their parents and the culture make them. Time is cyclic, not linear. "We've" given this generation an easy life, which has made them soft, which will result it hard times, which will make them strong again. They'll go on to create good times again, and the cycle will repeat. I highly recommend the book; "The Forth Turning". Winter is coming...
"Time is cyclic, not linear."
Exactly.
Are you familiar with the book I mentioned? Frankly, it was a somewhat difficult read for me, simply because the authors' knowledge of the subject was so extensive, but the Truths therein we're impossible to miss.
Familiar with the argument, and have read discussions of it, but i haven't read the book.
I agree with that idea, to a point. But it seems to imply that children (grown children) have nothing to do, of their own volition and thinking, with what "makes" them. As if there is no self-direction, self-determination, or even self-awareness... I strongly disagree with that idea, if that's what you're saying. I am the living evidence of the contrary. I don't mean to say that there is NO influence. Just sayin'.
I do think you raise some interesting points and ideas, and I don't necessarily disagree with the "easy life" part of it.
That said, I DO think there is evolution... We are not just running in a big circle, really-- I'd say more like a spiraling evolution of consciousness... In some ways we seem to be more or less psychologically very similar to what we were, as human critters, as thousands of years ago, but that said, I also think we have evolved, we have learned and changed, as a group; and there is a plethora of evidence of that change, socially, politically, even if our basic emotional functioning is similar, or the same, as it ever was...
Wouldn't you agree? I do think there has been progress in the human realm, in some ways. But I'm not sure we are INCAPABLE of breaking a cycle, if we are able to AFFECT the cycle proactively. I think we are heavily influenced by subliminal ideology, which could change, and that change could affect what we think of as a "given." What I'm saying is, I believe there is room for progress, that we humans are not static, we can evolve, which is evidenced by individuals and smaller groups of people, if not the entire race all at once...
I'm not made of money and I only pay a few writers on Substack. I feel like a subscription to your writing is a great value. Thx.
Thank you!
I agree with that sentiment, but I have no income! Truly sorry about that, on several levels. xo
A very thoughtful piece that puts into words things that have been bothering me, like the paradox that out of the mouths of the left, for lack of a better term, children must both be protected (often from their own parents) but also have an inordinate amount of responsibility placed on them to "choose their gender" or take care of the adults around them (the mRNA vaccine in your comment is a good example of this). Like everything, there's no consistency.
Left unsaid is whether either Puritan or Victorian conceptions of a fallen or edenic childhood are ideal. I'd suggest it's a false dichotomy, and that there are far more options - as indicated by the degraded and degenerate way in which children are groomed in the modern age.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we'd be better looking at how children were raised in Greek society: not as criminals to be broken or innocents whose naivety should be endlessly extended, nor as at present, consumers requiring only that their hedonic and sexual palates be conditioned, but as pups of the wolf pack in whom virtue must be trained such that they may grow in to their full powers.
This is always a tough issue. Rearing children gently yet giving them strong morals; a good grounding in the history of their country and why we are who we are; some grounding in spirituality; and the role-modeling by adults that set those things in place. Children by and large learn by watching them emulating vs reading or via the spoken word - especially where the text and or verbal instruction run counter to what they see around them and experience in their homes by the adults therein. And I have to say it hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Children are abused and yet are required to behave in a “civilized” manner when they grow up. If they have an indulgent rearing as has been the practice among recent generations, they think they are entitled to getting “stuff” vs the idea of working for it. And they still see the adults in their world behaving wrongly so they do, too. If you want a healthy, happy, independent-minded, knows right-from-wrong, hard working child you are going to have to be those things as an adult. To show the child what you want. It doesn’t take me long to figure out what is going on at home when I see a child for the first time. Their behavior pretty much says it all. The bottom line is we must be the adults we want our children to be and to not expect our children to be any different.
Spoiled secular adults with unearned wealth might not know how to be adults or raise children, but religious adults undoubtedly do a better job. Self-respect is inherent in religious observance and absent in those who sexualize everything.
Yes, and no. I've seen countless religious adults who are unbending, narrow-minded, judgmental and sometimes downright cruel. I don't think religion is the key to understanding people, it seems almost an arbitrary side issue.