Not long ago, President Donald Trump signed The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. Surrounded by a bunch of sweet and excited young girls, the action was heralded with fanfare, proclaiming that common sense had returned to America and that the young females among us would no longer be threatened by predators in their gender-specific spaces.
Yet this action didn’t put an end to such threats, as a recent example from an Illinois middle school shows. According to one mother, school administrators forced female students like her daughter to change in front of a male student identifying as a trans female in the women’s locker room.
This example is only the tip of the iceberg. For the last several years, our children have been pushed ever more aggressively toward exposure to indecency, whether through children’s library books demonstrating various sexual activity to drag queens dancing before their eyes.
It’s not hard to see that our children are under attack, but we don’t often think about the reason they are. That reason is to create despair and chaos in the next generation.
Cultural critic and author Neil Postman advanced this idea over 40 years ago in his book “The Disappearance of Childhood.”
“With the gradual decline of shame there is, of course, a corresponding diminution in the significance of manners,” Postman writes. “Everything from table manners to language manners to the manners of dress is intended to reveal the extent to which one has learned self-restraint; and it is at the same time a means of teaching self-restraint.”
But when manners and restraint are removed from society, as we’re particularly seeing through the heightened sexualization of children, “both the authority of adulthood and the curiosity of childhood lose ground,” Postman explains. Children fail to gradually learn the secrets of adulthood and experience the slow maturation that is needed to live the life of a well-adjusted adult. As a result:
Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arrogance. We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children.
Some may think this is a good scenario. After all, it’s a tough world, and children need to recognize this so they can become adults who can handle these harsh realities.
The problem is, children exposed to the harsh realities of the world too soon will be even less able to handle them.
“In the case of childhood, for example, secrecy is practiced in order to maintain the conditions for healthy and ordered growth,” Postman continues. “We wish to keep this knowledge [of killings, indecency, etc.] because for all of its reality, too much of it too soon is quite likely dangerous to the well-being of an unformed mind.”
And children who don’t have the blessing of sheltering adults in their lives who teach them the components of basic morality, Postman explains, will “find it difficult to be hopeful or courageous or disciplined.”
Parents these days face a mountain of difficulties in raising their children, not the least of which is protecting them from the sexual deviancy which seems to abound in society. Yet all too often, parents who attempt to protect their children from these things are ridiculed for their stances, told to lighten up, and stop being mean toward those who just want to “embrace their identity” in front of a watching world – including children.
If we want a world where the next generation of adults is cowardly, undisciplined, full of despair, arrogant, and cynical, then we should continue criticizing and thwarting the parents that fight indecency in our society and seek to protect their children. But given the fact that these traits are the exact ones we’re seeing in today’s young people – and are very concerned about – then perhaps we need to acknowledge that those parents seeking to instill manners and self-restraint in their children, all while protecting them from indecency, are the ones who’ve been right all along and deserve our wholehearted support.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Pxhere
