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.
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.
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!
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'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...
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.
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.
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.
These perverts will burn in hell.
The problem is that I'm not 100% that hell exists. I'd rather see them burn 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!
Hard times make strong men.....one can only hope that's what comes next!
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.
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.
WHERE ARE THE PARENTS????!!!!
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...
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.
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.