Dialogue: Why we're killing our children

It's long past time we had a Commissioner for Parents. We've got commissioners for just about everybody and everything else - children, human rights, health and disability, mental health, retirement, the environment, you name it - but none to stand up for parents, who seem to have lately become the most threatened species in the country.

Every man and his dog seems to want to tell parents what they should and should not be doing, to such an extent that we no longer live in a Nanny state but in a Daddy and Mummy state, in which politicians and bureaucrats seem determined to take over the role of parents.

Which ignores the fact that they, in their ideological blindness and politically correct naivety (Nuclear family? Oh, no, we can't have that any more) haven't got a clue about proper families - which have always been, are and always will be the foundation stones of a well-ordered society.

We have a Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act. Look where the family is placed in that title - how the emphasis has shifted from parents to children.

It's been going on for years, ever since overpaid United Nations bureaucrats with not enough to do thought up the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, to which witless New Zealand no doubt became an early signatory.

And where has it got us? The evidence is that children are worse off today than in any time in our history - and certainly in the past 50 or so years since I was a child and my children were children.

The shameful epidemic of brutality perpetrated by parents and relatives against defenceless tots, some of whom have died in agony, is a modern phenomenon.

There are those who blame poverty. That's nonsense. Anyone would think that poverty was something new. Well, there was plenty of it about in the 1940s and 50s when I went to school.

We all knew children whose parents were poor because dad couldn't or wouldn't work. They were the ones in the hand-me-down clothes who lived in the poorer part of town, never had enough to eat and had no toys or bikes or any of the other things most children took for granted.

But none of them ever came to school with bruises or black eyes. They were, like most children always are, resilient and made the most of what they had. If they had any "rights," they were blissfully unaware of them.

Children's rights were taken for granted - the right to shelter, clothing, food and education. And if they lacked any of those, the community - neighbours, relatives and the law (but only as a last resort) - firmly and decisively made sure that the parents were called to account.

There are those - poor, silly, misguided souls - who, having triumphed with the collusion of equally mentally challenged politicians and bureaucrats over corporal punishment in schools, now blame parental smacking for child abuse.

That, too, is nonsense. If it were true that corporal punishment and parental smacking were causes of violence, why were there not epidemics of child abuse in the days when they were routinely practised?

Almost everyone seems to have an opinion on the cause of this grievous human tragedy - radio talkback and letters to the editor columns testify to that - but it is rare to see or hear anyone put his or her finger on the real cause. It is quite simple: the cause of this evil, and almost all the others our society faces, is immorality.

It is the loosening of the moral strictures that for centuries kept the nuclear family as the principal unit of power in society that have led to its disintegration and thus to all the social problems that were an inevitable result.

The assault on the family began with the loosening of the sanctions against divorce, was given a huge fillip with the arrival of the Pill, took another giant leap forward with the rise of radical feminism, advanced rapidly with the decriminalisation of abortion and homosexuality, and was dealt a near-fatal blow with the domestic purposes benefit.

Society is in disarray because it is morally bankrupt, and it is morally bankrupt because the power of the family has been virtually destroyed. And don't think I'm pushing my Christian beliefs here. Centuries before Christ was born, an anonymous Chinese sage wrote these words:

"If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world."

On second thoughts, it's not a Commissioner for Parents we need, its a Commissioner for Families.

garth_george@herald.co.nz