How We Are Failing Our Children

We’ve heard time and time again that children are the future, and that any hope for the human race lies with them.

But what kind of future are we looking at when we’re seeing massive spikes in mental illness and ‘behavioural issues’ in children, especially when the go-to method of addressing it is prescription medication? The rate of suicide is increasing among children as well, but it seems not to be a pressing matter when it comes to the discourse on public health. Young individuals, perhaps the most vulnerable demographic group, are choosing to end their lives before they’ve even really started.

What can we expect when schools in the US are grooming children into identifying as transgender without the knowledge of their parents, and basically encouraging secrets? If those schools are adamant in declaring this behaviour to actually be okay and moral, are they arguing that children aged 5 to 18 completely grasp the implications of transitioning socially and medically? Are they affirming that kids don’t really need their parents, that as long as they have them — complete strangers who don’t care for their wellbeing — they’ll be okay?

Depression rates in the United States have risen since the early 2000s, and especially in children between the ages of 12 and 17 - increasing from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 12.7 percent in 2015. Suicide rates have followed as well.

According to the US Surgeon General, up to 1 in 5 children aged 3 to 17 were reported to have a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioural disorder, and a recent advisory reported on some especially concerning statistics:

From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%; the share seriously considering attempting suicide increased by 36%; and the share creating a suicide plan increased by 44%. Between 2011 and 2015, youth psychiatric visits to emergency departments for depression, anxiety, and behavioural challenges increased by 28%. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among youth aged 10-24 in the US increased by 57%. Early estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics suggest there were tragically more than 6,600 deaths by suicide among the 10-24 age group in 2020.

As far as outcry goes, there hasn’t been much of it. There’s more outcry around the Omicron variant than there is about these appalling statistics — even though children haven’t been considered an at-risk demographic for any COVID-19 variant.

The surefire solution, or at least the one to which many parents and doctors have turned, is medication. About 75% of young children receive drugs as treatment for an ADHD diagnosis, and less than half engage in behavioural therapy. Drugs for this kind of treatment include Ritalin and Adderall, and they come with very concerning side effects. Yet many doctors and parents are keen to put young children on these — even preschoolers around 3 or 4 years old.

In the interest of “catching something early” very young children are put on these medications and then tossed aside. But if medication is supposed to be a good solution, why are the rates of mental illnesses and suicide continuing to rise?

ADHD is characterized by problems with inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, and it’s diagnosed and treated more in boys than in girls. Could it be that in some cases, we’re medicating perfectly natural behaviours in children? Children need to play, after all. It’s essential for their mental wellbeing and cognitive development. They learn a lot about the world and themselves while playing and figuring things out on their own, yet the structure of the modern school system demands that they sit down, stay still, and listen to teachers lecture about a topic. If you try to stifle a child, they will of course exhibit restlessness and pay less attention — medication as a solution to this problem seems to aim at neutralising children so they can learn and engage in school in a way that is least inconvenient to a teacher, and not most advantageous to the child.

There is a certain irony in a government that claims to care about advancing children equally (see, No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act) while in the name of equality, some of its schools are flat-out abolishing standards for Math and English.

“What’s the worst that could happen with medicating a child?” some may ask. Medications such as Ritalin may cause side effects which can further worsen psychiatric issues, such as depression — especially while withdrawing from the drug. With both Ritalin and Adderall, it’s entirely possible that a child could actually acquire anxiety, insomnia, or lethargy.

Nevertheless, there is no major movement that challenges the attitude of medication being a be-all-and-end-all solution. It’s accepted as a necessary evil, with no other avenues meriting our consideration.

God forbid we tackle issues that are breaking apart families in America and hurting children. We could urge people to take family planning seriously, and start treating parenthood like it’s a noble venture —- something challenging and yet rewarding, rather than an encumbrance on life, or a death sentence. We also need to encourage people to be together for their children, and one reason so many people are averse to doing so now is because men and fathers are disadvantaged when it comes to divorce, and this severely hurts children.

If we diminish the importance of active parental involvement in a child’s life, we cause other things to become more important to them, like validation by peers both at school and online. This in turn makes a child more susceptible to grooming by monstrous adults such as those in California schools. It gets really dark really fast when an underage child insists on transitioning, on taking hormones, and planning out how they’ll get life-altering surgeries, all because their teachers or classmates encourage it. If this truly is the right course of action for a child’s life, they and their parents must be utterly certain of it, without a shadow of a doubt. Those who jump into that decision recklessly end up dooming a child to crippling difficulties in future life, such as permanent body changes, infertility, and body dysphoria.

These issues and more were severely exacerbated by the pandemic.

In Clark County, Nevada, (the U.S.’s 5th largest county), 18 students had committed suicide between March and December of 2020; the youngest victim was 9 years old. This was, again, in a single county, in a matter of months. This pressed the district to explore ways to bring students back to in-person learning.

The pandemic caused immediate and immense disruptions to everyday life. Almost two years after the start of it, children are still unable to live life as they knew it. In New York, they’re becoming targets for forced vaccination — even though children in the target demographic, aged 5 to 11, don’t carry IDs. Are we now demanding that they carry around a vaccination card? The New York Police Department certainly does.

We cannot expect COVID restrictions to ease up overnight, or expect the government to suddenly grow a heart or conscience. The only way they understand is when their taxpayers flee, and take their wallets with them - so for parents this means moving away from hellscapes like New York City and California. Restrictions, mandates, and infringements on liberty will only continue to grow, and they will affect children if left unchecked. In terms of freedom, our children will grow up in a world that’s vastly different from the one the adults in their life knew.

We need to stop focusing on government recommendations, and the opinions of doctors that don’t personally know our children. We need to become more involved in our children’s lives. If you take a backseat in your child’s life, it opens the position of “parent” in their lives to anyone: subversive activists, the government, other children their same age, and people who have no regard for their wellbeing.

Fighting for a better tomorrow necessitates advocating for children, and putting yours first, especially because there’s people in power who would love to take and abuse them. There’s no shortage of powerful people who’ve been accused of abhorrent pedophilic acts; one of the most notorious nonces, Jeffrey Epstein never faced justice, and recently, CNN producer John Griffin has been accused of disgusting pedophilic acts against children as young as seven years old

Now, more than ever, it’s imperative that you be aware of what your children are being taught – with leftist ideology prevailing in many schools, they may be taught to hate themselves if they’re white (at best) and at worst, they may be groomed into declaring themselves trans in response to emotional distress or psychiatric ailments. If you need to pull them out of school to homeschool them, or send them to a school which doesn’t have a goal to indoctrinate, then so be it. If you have to move somewhere the local government isn’t aiming to exercise tyranny over them, then so be it. If you have to send your children to do hard work on a farm for a month, if you have to work on communicating with them, then so be it. But now more than ever, we need to seriously consider sacrificing more for them, so that there’s still a chance for a brighter tomorrow.