Articles
What Is a Child?
This is not a trick question. The superficial answer is: “Everyone knows what a child is.” But is that true? The concept of “child” is changing right before our eyes, and we must recognize it and resist the influence that society will bring to bear upon us.
The most obvious change in how children are defined relates to abortion. One would think that technological advances which allow us to see in great detail the development of the child in the womb would create a natural sympathy for the well-being of that child. Not so. We just change the name of it: It’s not a child, it’s a fetus. That amazing organism with a beating heart, neurological sensitivity and muscular action is just tissue, we are told. That permits it to be killed without compunction the day before it otherwise might have been born. How can it not be a child one day and then a child the next?!
Another troubling view of children relates to their nurturing. George Will, referring to a book by Kay S. Hymowitz, notes that “by the mid-‘70s, when women were going to work in large numbers, the popular image of babies began to change. Instead of being characterized by helpless neediness, babies were thought to be self-sufficient, and cognitive virtuosos, needing only bursts of ‘quality time.’ … By 1997 ‘children were spending two hours a day more in preschool and school programs than they did in the early 1980s.’ Hymowitz thinks it is axiomatic that ‘children who spend the bulk of their time in an institution are going to learn a fundamentally different way of constructing an inner life than those who spend most of their days with an adoring parent’” (Newsweek, 12/6/99).
The basic psychological view of the child in our culture is that they need minimal input from parents. Evolutionary thought holds that a child will naturally develop into the humanistic ideal if not corrupted by parents. Many clinical and popular articles may be cited that disparage parents who teach their children values. Such authoritarian propagandizing is considered child abuse and an overreach of parental duty.
Thus, “the old American belief was that babies are Americans-in-training, and that adults had to work hard at making independent, rational, self-regulating citizens. The new theory is that children naturally attain that state if society does not pervert them” (ibid). This is the ideology which decries spanking, excuses criminals, champions legal rights for children, provides birth control to minors, pushes for earlier institutionalized care, etc. The devil is trying to remove our children from our care, and he’s doing a good job of it!
God’s word succinctly exposes the foolishness of man: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right … And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Eph 6:1, 4). But forget the Bible for a moment. Where has common sense gone?
(adapted from Hueytown Bulletin, 2/13/2000).
