The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” has long appealed to me. Similarly, in the movie K-PAX the visiting extraterrestrial ‘Prot’ says to the clinical psychiatrist interviewing him: “On K-PAX, everyone’s children’s wellbeing matters to everyone, as everyone takes part in rearing everyone else’s offspring.”
At the risk of being deemed Godless or socialist thus evil, I strongly feel that the wellbeing and health of all children needs to be of genuine importance to us all — 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 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, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more lamely self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’
As liberal democracies, we cannot prevent anyone from bearing children, not even the plainly incompetent and reckless procreators. We can, however, educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those high-school teens who plan to remain childless. If nothing else, such child-development curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
In the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, 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). I’ve talked to parents of dysfunctional/unhappy grown children who assert they’d have reared their cerebrally developing kids much more knowledgeably about child-development science.
Given what's at stake, they at least should be equipped with such valuable science-based knowledge!
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“The way a society functions is a reflection of the childrearing practices of that society. Today we reap what we have sown. Despite the well-documented critical nature of early life experiences, we dedicate few resources to this time of life. We do not educate our children about child development, parenting, or the impact of neglect and trauma on children.”
—Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Ph.D. & Dr. John Marcellus
