The first challenge a modern child faces is actually being allowed to be born. If you are under 45, you are an abortion holocaust survivor. Something like a fifth of babies are aborted. Ironically, the great expansion of abortion has occurred just as widespread contraception should have reduced its incidence, but the only people to be surprised will be those who don't understand human nature. As well as being harmful to the baby, abortion can be destructive to the mother, with around four per cent suffering serious long term mental illness, a situation made worse by the fact that those who should have been her social support - her parents and boyfriend - are likely to have been the ones who pressured her into abortion.
On the other hand, children are all too often treated as commodities, created to serve adults' self-fulfillment - produced by IVF, donor sperm, or surrogacy, and handed over to people who should never be given the care of children: unmarried women and same-sex couples. As one of them said:
“…being “wanted” can sometimes feel like a curse, like I was created to make you happy, my rights be damned. I’d be lying if I said I never felt commodified.”If the child eventually makes it to be born, he or she may well end up without a father. Unmarried motherhood has expanded alarmingly since contraception and abortion were introduced to prevent it - but, again, this will surprise nobody who understands human nature. Not only that, throughout the western world there has been a tremendous number of studies on the effect of family structure on children, and the evidence is overwhelming: children raised by only a single parent, as a result of either illegitimacy or divorce, do much worse statistically than those raised by both their parents, even starting from birth, when they are less likely to be breastfed, and more likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even allowing for compounding effects such as race and socio-economical status, they are statistically less healthy, less likely to be vaccinated, and more likely to develop asthma, among other things. Girls are more likely to experience early puberty. The children of unmarried and divorced mothers are far more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol and/or other substances, suffer from anxiety and depression, be sexually active, get pregnant, join gangs, get involved in crime, and even to commit suicide, to list just some of the negative outcomes. They are even more likely to end up homosexual or lesbian. Fatherless boys are strongly prone to antisocial activities.
It is also well established that a father functions differently from a mother in child raising. From him, his children learn how to relate to authority. His sons learn from example how to relate to women, his daughters how to relate to men. He is the first man the little girl falls in love with, and all those who follow have to measure up.
These studies, which number in the hundreds, have been so consistent and so compelling across many decades and many different countries, it can only be the result of deliberate blindness that the media fail to publicise them, and the average person ignores them. When presented with such data, the tendency is to point to some example where they didn't apply. Non-scientists are not comfortable with statistical tendencies; they always imagine a generalisation can be defeated by an individual exception.
We could add a couple of other problems. All too often the mother shacks up with another man, in which case the child is at much greater risk of violence or sexual abuse than with his natural, married father. Furthermore, in 1973 the Government decided to pay a supporting mother's pension to unmarried mothers - apparently unaware of the economic principle that you get more of what you subsidise. The result is that both mother and children are left in an economically deprived situation.
When I was growing up, we were acutely aware of the plight of the illegitimate. The community's first line of defense was preventative: we had it drummed into us that sex before, or outside of, marriage was not only dangerous, but wrong; if you did it, you were not only stupid, but bad. Nor was this exceptional; history shows that, for hundreds of years, Western Europe managed to combine late marriage and a high proportion of never married citizens with a low rate of out of wedlock births. But if it did happen, the option was for the mother to marry the father. Such "shotgun marriages" had a greater breakdown rate than other marriages, but I have known lifelong happy marriages which started with a teenage pregnancy. Very strong social pressure was applied to the father to "do the right thing" by the girl and, of course, his child. If he didn't, he was regarded as the lowest of cads - and he was still liable to financial maintenance under a paternity suit.
Alternatively, the baby would be put up for adoption. It was emotionally traumatic for the mother, but she was then able to get on with her life: complete her education, get married, and have more children - all of which would have been put in jeopardy had she kept the baby. Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases, the adoptee had a much better upbringing.
A lot of myths have grown up about this. "It was considered shameful to bear a child out of wedlock," you often hear, as if that were the main reason. No, the reason was that she could not take care of the baby by herself. The moral law is not arbitrary; actions are recognized as sinful, and thus shameful, because they cause the sort of terrible consequences listed above. Remember Prime Minister Gillard's apology for "forced adoptions"? Rubbish! The Federal Government had nothing to do with it; adoption was, and is, a state affair. The only policy the Federal Government had was what it didn't do: it didn't pay the upkeep of illegitimate children any more than it did for those born in wedlock. Nor did the state governments have any such policy. In the vast majority of cases, you will find that the adoption was "forced" only in the sense that the girl was a minor, and her parents authorised it on her behalf. If she were legally an adult, the decision would have been hers. It would have been a hard decision, and society would not offer her any alternative other than marrying the father, but it was still her decision. I might add that adoptions like this still continue, although at a much reduced rate, and nobody calls them "forced".
It the child still manages to pass all these hurdles, there is still the strong possibility that his or her parents will split up. In the '60s the divorce rate was less than ten percent, but we still thought it alarmingly high. Now it is closer to 40 per cent. And that is not including de facto relationships, which were rare in the old days, and which have a much higher rate of breakdown. Divorce is terrible for children, half of whom still fantasize about their parents reuniting up to fifteen years later. Most of the negatives listed above for the children of unmarried mothers apply to those of broken marriages. In a small percentage of cases, the marriage is so toxic that divorce is the lesser of two evils, but in most cases the split-up is for trivial reasons, and it would have been better if they had stayed together.
Divorce is bad for adults as well. Women are typically left in straitened economic circumstances, while attempting to take care of their children. Men talk of being stripped of their assets and losing contact with their offspring - hence the fellow who proclaimed: "I don't think I'll get married again; I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house." Again, myths have developed. From online comments I have read, it appears many younger people think that forty percent of marriages in my day were unhappy, but they just didn't divorce. Completely false! People supported the institution, and the institution supported them. The high divorce rate in modern times is the result of the law making it the easy option for perceived problems.
Once you had to have a good reason in order to get a divorce, and if you were the guilty party who had broken your sacred vows, you would come out worse when property distribution, maintenance, and custody were concerned. No fault divorce was supposed to end all the bitterness. In fact, it simply moved the bitterness to another phase of the proceedings. Strictly speaking, it does not favour either men or women, but rather the spouse with the least scruples. It is a frightening fact that you can vow to love, honour, and cherish, follow it through faithfully and diligently, and then have your spouse suddenly decide to walk out on you, perhaps with a lover or mistress, and the law will force you to hand over half your home, bank account, and superannuation, and even take your children off you. Marriage is now the only contract where the one who breaks it is not simply left unpunished, but is actually rewarded.
Recently a journalist penned a heart-wrenching story about the childcare system, and how she was unable to find a vacancy for her 10 month old (!) baby. When I was growing up, we weren't farmed out to the care of others either; our own mothers took care of us. Children of mothers working full time tend to suffer (PDF).
When my generation was growing up, there was strict censorship of books, magazines, and films. There were still a certain number of sleazy magazines and paperbacks doing the rounds, but nowhere near as bad as what is normal today. I won't say they were completely harmless, but you knew that they were socially unacceptable. It was thus possible to grow up with a healthy attitude towards sex. Real pornography only arrived with the collapse of censorship in the late 1960s and early '70s, a development which the Australian psychiatrist, Dr. John Court showed corresponded to a sudden increase in the incidence of rape in every country. (This is normally overlooked these days.) Today, children are exposed to the worst type of pornography from every side. For prepubetal children, it can be very disturbing; for teenagers, it introduces them to a very sick view of sexuality.
Most of the social disintegration we see today is due to the breakdown of the family, and most of that can be traced back to the misuse of sex. The moral law, as I said before, is not arbitrary, and society ignores it as its peril. The research is clear: chastity is the best prophylaxis against divorce. The very lowest divorce rates are among those who had no sexual partners prior to marriage, while just one extra partner increases the chance of divorce more than three-fold. This, of course, will be of no surprise to those of us who understand human nature, but it is now counter-intuitive to most people. Our society has become obsessed with sex, such that that young people are bombarded with messages promoting as mainstream the same sexual mistakes which have ruined the lives of so many of their parents. Not only that but, as mentioned in Part 2, perverts are now taking the opportunity to introduce the same misinformation into the schools, often to children far too young to have any idea about sex. Once we banned dirty books lest they corrupt the morals of adults. Now governments are publishing and promoting books specifically written to corrupt the morals of children.
What other challenges do modern youngsters face? Technology, for a start, is a great servant but a bad master. I cannot resist the feeling that this modern obsession with social media is an example of a good thing taken far too far. My advice to anyone under thirty is: Get off your mobile phone and get a life! More important in the long term is the way in which technology is due to abolish about half the modern jobs in the next few decades. While it might be a bit of a challenge to have to learn new skills constantly, it will not be a major hurdle for most people. After all, my generation mastered the computer revolution and the internet. What is disturbing, however, is the loss of unskilled work. Jordan Petersen hit it on the head when he pointed out that, although the U.S. military is keen to attract and retain volunteers, it is not allowed to employ anyone with an IQ less than 83, because they cannot do anything with them. This amounts to almost a sixth of the population!
Finally, when I was growing up, Australia was a largely homogenous nation, despite massive immigration, because we took people racially and culturally like ourselves, and insisted they assimilate. Since then, the poisonous policy of multiculturalism has been introduced - without any demand from the electorate - with the aim of dividing us into tribes. Also without demand from the electorate, we are giving preference to immigrants unlike ourselves, and everybody is afraid to speak out. We have terrorism in this country because we imported an incompatible culture. It is clear that China is a looming threat, but we have imported more than half a million potential fifth columnists. As Yan Xia put it:
It is often said that we Chinese migrants leave our “loyalties” planted in the motherland, despite living in Australia. This statement may be distasteful but, sadly, there has been much truth to it.There are parts of our capital cities which don't look like Australia at all. It has even been predicted that, on present trends, native speakers of English will be a minority in Sydney in little more than ten years. In 2011 Chris Bowen, the Minister for Immigration boasted - yes, boasted! - that for the first time we had taken more Chinese than British immigrants. While the 2001 figure of only 52% of immigrants coming from Europe may be shockingly low, by 2016 it was down to only 34%. Our birth rate is well below replacement level, but the Government is topping it up, and more so, by immigration, but the immigrants are not our own kind. In other words, we are being replaced! The next generation is going to have to wake up and fight, or else they will lose their country.
Does all this sound like a rant by some old fogey? Then feel free to look for any errors. I've been around. I remember when the world wasn't always like it is now. I've seen improvements, but I've also seen what happens when a society loses its moral compass. Unless we want to see more social disintegration, we must get back to the fundamentals taken for granted in the 1950s and '60s. Life was better then.
