We have spent a century replacing what will never be replaced. Now let’s check the scoreboard. Today’s match pitted Progressive Era feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman against 21st century memoirist Rob Henderson in a close battle.
As for me I’ll never get tired of saying it, Gilman told stories about children by telling the story of Pan. Home baked bread is inconsistent. Different flours and grinds, different rises, different oven temperatures, and different baking times. So 100 loaves of homemade bread will be 100 different types of bread. Some are burnt on the outside, while others are undercooked in the center.
What we know about children, what we have learned through direct experience over thousands of years of human experience, is now controversial.
But industrial bread consistent. Gilman argued that the Second Industrial Revolution and the replacement of domestic industry by corporations standardized and specialized the production of what farmhousewives had failed to do for centuries. All the bread in the same huge commercial bakery was baked with the same ingredients, the same technique, in the same oven, at the same temperature, and for the same time, so the quality was predictable.
If this is all true for the one home function we have specialized in, then why not continue to specialize even more in what we think we specialize in, she wrote? House function? Why not raise your children through standardized interventions by qualified teachers, trained social workers, and an intensive moral and intellectual curriculum developed by qualified professionals?
All breads are the same. It is the basis of the social vision of progressivism and the ostracism of families by “aid professionals.”
Rob Henderson grew up in foster care, “living with nine different families until his eighth birthday,” and then with rotating adoptive parents. He bounced around through his childhood, spending a few months in one orphanage and then watching caseworkers show up to take him to his next temporary family. He wrote about this experience: new book, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.” I can’t recommend it enough.
Henderson writes that very young children are answering fundamental questions about who they are and what their lives mean.They are clock They learn how much they are valued by how adults treat them. am i loved? I don’t care? Am I someone to be thrown away, or am I someone to be cherished? Those lessons shape their lives.
It is also a part of our lives because we live in contact with abandoned children who have grown into troubled adults.
What children discover about themselves colors what they discover about the world around them and shapes how they live within it. A life without value, a world without value.
“When children are in a stable environment with reliable parents and predictable patterns, they feel included in their social environment and are more likely to make friends with peers who want their best interests.” Henderson writes. This is why, for so many children, foster care is a pipeline to homelessness, drug addiction, and incarceration. teach They are instability and pain.
Henderson had extensive contact with caseworkers, counselors, school psychologists, and (eventually) substance abuse counselors. What he always needed was family — parents who showed up and stayed.
He cites the sickening observations of psychologists who treat abused children. “I have never met a child under the age of 10 who was being tortured at home and would not choose to stay with his family rather than be placed in a foster care facility.” Young children who are severely abused by their parents. still longs for a mother or father. They instinctively seek home, family, and secure attachment. Dragged from abuse, they are in pain, searching for a home.
If you are a parent, this will be painful to read. Act on that pain.
We have spent decades deemphasizing families through deliberately designed public policy. We have destroyed parenting as an honorable profession and destroyed the bond between parent and child.california state congressman Ridiculing the “issues” of custody And explain that families are often very toxic. Children become mentally healthy and stable by receiving “mental health services” from trained professionals, which are clearly funded and provided by the government.A valid assumption of the political class is that parents Can not Because we are not allowed to talk meaningfully to our children. here, see what the congressman says.
What we know about children, what we have learned through direct experience over thousands of years of human experience, is now controversial, if not completely discarded. I am. They cannot be replaced by professionals who support families. This will never succeed. We are sowing the seeds of destruction in our children’s lives by abandoning the connections they need most. But don’t worry, we’ll just assign a caseworker to everyone.
We could never be more ashamed. we had a choice. We are now condoning deliberate destruction.
