I find myself disgusted, almost daily, on the way that children are treated by their caregivers. This is nothing new, will never be fully fixed, and is not exclusive to any one society. Everyone has blame. Unfortunately my knowledge is exclusive to the time I have lived, the things I have read, and the soil that I have stood upon. With that said parts of this maltreatment are in fact frowned upon, beatings and emotional destruction are things the law prohibits and are things that go noticed. What I speak of however, has to do with the daily treatment of children and what we consider “normal methods of parenting”.
Yesterday I decided to go on a walk. At the end of the trail I came across a piece of art, a sphere one could place messages in to send out into the universe. A child, no older than six or seven, began knocking on the sphere much like one would knock on a door. To my dismay his grandmother began to berate him. She screamed in his face demanding he feel shame, followed by a harsh lesson on what it was to behave around art. But do not be misled, this was much less a lesson than it was an outburst of rage. The mother of the child stood ide until the tirade was over. Following this, an exchange could be heard “Let’s go, we are going home!” “No! No! I don’t want to go home!”. It was a disturbing display.
But what could be done, no laws were broken, if anything, some smile upon this and say that this treatment was proper. This stems from the horrific idea that children are subhuman. I’ve spoken before of Fred Rogers and I believe he had wonderful ideas on the treatment of children. It was he who said that children are no different from adults, with complex emotions and feelings just like everybody else. So I find myself asking constantly, how can anybody get away with treating a child this way?
I implore this ‘care’ giver to treat a grown man this way and see how quickly she gets physically or emotionally demolished, as she should. It would seem because it is so easy to overpower children, those with poor self esteem or inflated egos thrive in having total control over them. They thrive not only because of this ease to overpower but because they have an excuse, “they needed to learn a lesson” they will say.
That is not to say children don’t need to be taught lessons, they do. It is to say, however, that these lessons need to be taught from a place of love and reason, not pain and suffering. Children are not as stupid as many think they are, they learn and adapt, they can make complex connections that we assume only adults can make. So when a child is acting up, do not go so quickly for an attack or an insult, but instead an explanation.
The fact of the matter is that children are not learned in our world yet, not fully at least. How was that child meant to know that sphere was a piece of art? Or even what it means to be art? Not only is it to the detriment of the child in the short-term but could also cause devastating long-term effects. I can assure you that the lesson this child took away was not, “I should not meddle with art” but was instead “I will do things and sometimes that will cause me pain, I will never know until the deed is already done.”
On that same walk I encountered another family whose child was wandering and playing off of the trail, when asked to return he inquired “why?” to which his parent responded angrily “because I said so!” The grandmother decided to chime in as well “And that should be enough!” Have these people forgotten what it is to be a child? It seems that there is this assumption from adults that they had never acted this way before, that they were different, but I can assure you this is not so. Kids have always been crazy, kids have always refused to listen, so it goes that parents should be ready to handle those actions. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case. Going back to my experience, the family continued their dialogue back and forth resulting in the child receiving no answers and the parents just getting frustrated. I realized that if they had just explained their reasoning in a way the child could understand and relate, then not only would it be a learning experience, but they would have resolved the issue more quickly!
Which brings me to my final point, it just seems that these parents don’t like their children at all. Sure they love them in the biological sense, but they seem only to want to protect them from harm, not to befriend and adore them as people. I think the mentality is that children are subhuman, there is no way you can be friends with someone like that. So the answer is quite simple. If you do not like kids, or have little patience with them, do not fucking have kids.
If you decide to have kids and don’t want to put in the effort to teach them, care for them, and spend time with them, then you are a blemish on this Earth. Not only are you hurting yourself, but also your child, and you are damaging the society in which that child grows into. Once a child grows up and knows only the ways in which you raised a child, then they as well will most likely perpetuate that cycle of poor parenting.
It’s a hard cycle to break as well. I would never suggest it be illegal to have these outbursts, that’s why this is such a hard problem to solve. You never know if that parent got 2 hours of sleep and was fired yesterday or if they are a chronic piece of garbage, so it’s impossible to tell the quality of their parenting. This is why I say that it’s not exclusive to here or now, it is a cycle that has been ongoing since the start of parenthood itself.
So here is what can be done. If you find that you were raised in a way that caused you pain and fear, notice it, harness it, and make sure to never treat your children that way. Attempt to teach others the right way to treat children, and make sure to treat children correctly yourself. These people get off by getting away with being a tyrant, let them feel shame. Show them that treating your child right can raise a wonderful human being, tell them how you did it. One day if enough people treat their children with the care, patience, and respect that they deserve, then the cowards and bastards who treat their children wrong may just be ashamed enough to change their ways.