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Little Children Should Not Suffer the Bad, Uninformed Choices of Parents [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-28

As a moral rule, a mentally as well as a physically sound future should be every child’s foremost fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. Yet, many people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving children largely as obedient property to misuse or abuse.

Early-life abuse or chronic neglect left unhindered typically causes the brain to improperly develop. It can readily be the starting point of a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in otherwise non-stressful daily routines.

It amounts to non-physical-impact brain damage in the form of PTSD. Among other dysfunctions, it has been described as an emotionally tumultuous daily existence, indeed a continuous discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’. For some others it includes being simultaneously scared of how badly they will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.

Therefore, the wellbeing of all children needs to be of genuine importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.

Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating. Yet, largely owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, however, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’

Meanwhile, people nonetheless continue procreating regardless of not being sufficiently knowledgeable of child development science to parent in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. They seem to perceive thus treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture their children’s naturally developing minds and needs.

In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).

As liberal democracies we cannot or will not prevent anyone from bearing children, even those who selfishly recklessly procreate with disastrous outcomes. We can, however, educate young people for this most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless, through mandatory high-school child-development science curriculum. And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, which many parents would understandably oppose, such curriculum should be about understanding child-development, and not just information memorization. There indeed is a difference.

It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society. … If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?

Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).

Being a caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable parent (about factual child-development science) should matter most when deciding to procreate. Therefore, parental failure seems to occur as soon as the solid decision is made to have a child even though the parent-in-waiting cannot be truly caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable.

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