Children become what the most influential adults in their lives teach them to be.
The indisputability of this statement should be obvious. Only a fool would argue that the familial, societal, and cultural values children are raised with don’t play a massive role in how children grow to view themselves or the world as adults.
If you constantly tell a child kindness is the greatest good and actively promote that idea on a daily basis, that child is going to value kindness. If you constantly tell a child he is smart or funny or reckless or stupid, that child will inevitably start believing he is those things. Heck, if you tell a child eating grass will turn him into a cow, he’ll probably believe that too. Few would disagree with the idea that the faith children put in adults is strong, because it is through that faith that society has managed to function forever.
It goes something like this:
The older generation stumbles through life, playing whatever hand they are dealt against whatever experiences they encounter, and based on everything they see and learn they do their best to explain the intricacies of life to the younger generation. And while the younger generation rarely listens to everything the older generation says, and often has to make their own mistakes to fully understand the hard truths of life, there is no denying that the influence of the older generation has a massive impact on the direction and development of the next generation.
And that’s where it gets tricky.
You see, young people aren’t stupid. They're ignorant of some things for sure, but there’s a major difference between the two. And while the younger generation will listen to what is spoken to them about their ignorance to some degree, they also see how people in society act, what they value, and what they promote. Parents can tell kids something until they are blue in the face, but if the child senses any insincerity or lack of evidence in what he is being told, the lesson doesn’t always land. More significantly, these impressionable children are constantly influenced by all kinds of factors outside of their families. And so, for better or worse, the society a person grows up in has a massive influence on the overall development of that person.
And this is what has me so worried.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around children, but those in preadolescence are incredibly impressionable. In a perfect world, two loving parents would guide and direct children through the confusing and difficult times of youth to give them the best chance at turning out happy and healthy, but that’s not the world in which we live.
In many cases, children grow up without positive, caring role models in their lives, and in such cases, they are forced to develop their personalities and values from an amalgam of sources, oftentimes pulling information from sources that are either apathetic to the child’s wellbeing, or in some cases, downright malicious.
But let’s not pretend here. This has always been the case. There has always been a massive disparity in fairness when it comes to who is born into which family. For reasons beyond our control and understanding, some young people are born into families which can give them every advantage in life, and some are not. This isn’t a new idea, and how to bridge that gap is probably the single greatest debate which exists in American politics and arguably western thought.
What concerns me, however, in addition to bridging this gap, is who children turn to when developing their core values if they don’t have caring people in their lives. They turn to friends, they turn to the media, they turn to the schools, they turn to the government, they turn to Facebook or TikTok. In short, they turn to the society they grow up in. This is unfortunate because none of those societal forces are capable of providing these children with the love and care that it takes to produce a happy and healthy adult. Worse than that, none of these forces truly have the child’s best interest at heart, except in remarkably rare cases.
And therein lies the problem. The nuclear family which defined human society for generations is no longer raising the majority of children. Broken and nonexistent families are too prevalent. This means the most significant factor in child development for more people than not is no longer loving parents, it’s society in general.
And that is a dangerously slippery slope.
As the nuclear family of the past disintegrates further, the influence of society’s impact on the core values of America’s children increases. So while people can yell and scream all they want about how “People need to stay out of other people’s lives because it doesn’t concern them”, I would argue it actually concerns them a great deal. Because if society is becoming the major force instilling values in the majority of young people, and the society we’ve created is instilling values objectively detrimental to society, people have every right to try to get society to a place where it is instilling helpful values, not harmful ones.
The problem, of course, is that people disagree on what is harmful and what is helpful.
But I would contend that most of the arguments occurring in the political world based on that problem are missing the mark. You see, it’s not actually about what I personally think is right or what you personally think is right. I can only raise one family, and so can you. The more pressing issues therefore, is what the institutions of our society are telling young people is right. Because as stated earlier, society is now the only metaphorical mother and father of far too many children in our world.
So knowing how impressionable young people are and knowing how the greatest influences on their lives are no longer nuclear families but a variety of societal institutions, we have a problem. Because unlike a strong, loving family whose main agenda is the best interest of a child, the modern institutions ingraining our children with their values have a totally different agenda, which in no way has the child’s best interest at heart.
So no, we shouldn’t sit back and let societal institutions normalize unhealthy behaviors for children.
We shouldn’t tell teens that depression and anxiety are “normal” and “unavoidable”. The natural state of teenagers can be happy and healthy, fully aware that they are loved, have value, and have a future.
We shouldn’t tell five and six-year-olds that it’s impossible for them to know who or what they are or that genetics play no role in their personhood. The world works because of the black and white nature of genetics, not in spite of it.
We shouldn’t tell young girls that bad decisions need not have consequences, or that some lives are less valuable than others, or that their own personal bodily autonomy trumps all else. We should create a society of life protecting discretion, where we don’t enact blanket legislation based on one percent of total instances.
And lastly, we shouldn’t tell children that masculinity is wrong or that men and women are identical. We should celebrate what makes the two sexes unique and explain how those differences have helped shape the human race into what it is today.
Political decisions matter because society matters. With the degradation of the nuclear family, society’s influence on the up and coming generation is stronger than ever. Those who remain silent as the prominent institutions of society push agendas onto America’s youth share the guilt for what our society becomes.
And make no mistake, the core, family oriented values that allowed for the success and proliferation of our country and the human race in general are not the values the societal institutions of America are currently pushing on the highly impressionable minds of our children. And with every generation that stands by and allows that push to continue, the number of people available to fight against it in the future will diminish.
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