The Children of (Lost) Men

Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal about the grim state of childhood in Britain. (Thank you, Judy Warner, for the link). Among the depressing signs:

More than four out of ten British children are born out of wedlock; the unions of which they are the issue are notoriously unstable. Even marriage has lost much of its meaning. In a post-religious society, it is no longer a sacrament. The government has ensured that marriage brings no fiscal advantages and, indeed, for those at the lower end of the social scale, that it has only disadvantages. Easy divorce means that a quarter of all marriages break up within a decade.

The results of this social dysfunction are grim for children. Eighty percent of British children have televisions in their bedrooms, more than have their biological fathers at home.

There's more grimness to be had in the article. This state of affairs, not that different in the U. S., must be admitted and confronted if there is any future at all for our "civilization." The greatest weapon of mass destruction deployed in the last fifty years? The Sexual Revolution? If you count (and you should) the number of children destroyed in the womb, it surely is.

And when children are devalued in the womb, they are devalued after birth. Why is that? Because of something that mothers know (and fathers perhaps to a lesser extent?): There is no bright line separating the child in the womb 6 months or 6 days before birth and the child 6 days after birth, but it is one long continuity of being. You can't isolate the disrespect for the small person at 3 months in utero from that at 6 months or the child at the time of his birth. The toxin of permission to kill must spread because there are no natural barriers to it. It bleeds into every thing else. Why else would a supposedly sane politician oppose something like the Born Alive Infant Protection Act? If it looks like infanticide, just maybe it is?

But bck in Brave New World, Britain: Soon every child might claim the legal right, if not to life, then at least a television set in his bedroom if he make it that far. Next up, the Feelies and Soma.

Comments

[Michael D. Harmon]

From The (London) Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4541101.ece?openComment=true

First grafs:

Sorry, no more babies. Eco-doctor's orders...

By Judith O'Reilly

Doctors have called time on big families. A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal talked of discouraging patients, on environmental grounds, from having too many children. The more people, the bigger the drain on global resources.

The editorial advised GPs not to put pressure on patients, but “by providing information on the population and the environment, and appropriate contraception for everyone...doctors should help to bring family size into the arena of environmental ethics, analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high-carbon cars”....

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Michael,
What are they going to do? Get Ob/Gyns to sign on to this? Or pediatricians? Because those are the ones that the women are mostly going to be seeing.

My wife *might* be made to feel vaguely guilty (for having eight children) if it was a bad day and she liked the physician. I, on the other, hand would relish the opportunity to rapidly put down whatever idiot ventured such an opinion to me. (Not that our GP would, he's got four girls and used to go to our church.)

[Chris Roberts]

After the birth of our first child the doctor was quick to start discussing birth control with us. When we said we were more interested in something like natural family planning he practically snorted and remarked, "I thought you were Baptist, not EWTN!" (EWTN is the Catholic TV station around these parts). So even here in the southern US there are doctors who can't imagine patients - and Protestants at that! - who do not like contraceptives.

[GL]

Chris,

After the birth of our fourth child (I'm a mere piker next the Gene), my mother-in-law (who didn't approve of her daughter having another child) "reported on what someone else asked," "Don't they believe in using birth control?" My wife, wanting to avoid a confrontation, decided to change the subject. It is amazing how many people, even some who hardly know you -- if at all -- feel free to comment on families who have more than two or three children.

A few weeks ago, we were traveling with our four children and my oldest daughter's best friend. We stopped at a Chick-Fil-A. On the way out, a young girl asked me with apparent awe, "Are all those kids yours?" I replied that only four of them were. The little girl's mother than replied, "I would go crazy if I had four children. Two are enough" I started to reply, then thought the better of it. I did, however, feel sad for the little girl, whose mother -- I am sure unintentionally -- had just told her, however indirectly, that her and her brother were so much trouble that she would go crazy were she to have any more like her and him. How very sad.

[Kamilla]

GL,

Yes, that is very sad!

And isn't it amazing how God's grace is always sufficient and you seldom hear folks with more than three children complaining about going crazy?

Kamilla

[Chris Roberts]

I'm told that after three you're already outnumbered anyway so why not keep going? We just recently learned that my wife is now pregnant with our third, so we're now in the might as well keep going category.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Chris,
We're actually Protestant as well. My wife and I were given boldness to imagine a larger family by a couple with nine children whom we met in Huntsville, AL almost eight years ago (they had just eight at the time). While poor in money, they were rich in love for one another. The father was teaching physics at the University.

[Steve Nicoloso]

you seldom hear folks with more than three children complaining about going crazy?

Umm, I've got seven and it's really rather the only the craziness that keeps us sane. But seriously, the folks who "just don't know how you do it" tend to be permissive parents who often raise holy terrors. They really would go crazy with 3 or 4; what is more interesting is that they don't seem to mind advertising their incompetence in casual conversations with strangers.

Nota bene, 3 was the most difficult transition number for us (after 1 of course) because, Chris, as you say, you're outnumbered.

[Joe Long]

It's not so much a matter of being "outnumbered" if some of them, at least, are on YOUR SIDE. Chiefs aren't supposed to complain about being outnumbered by their own Indians...

"Dalrymple" (Anthony Daniels) is one of the most insightful writers out there, though not one of the most encouraging. The book of Ecclesiastes is a good companion to his essays - Ecclesiates, or strong drink.

[Stuart Koehl]

This seems to have wandered a bit far afield from the topic of child-raising in Britain. Having just returned from that "other Eden, demiparadise", let me provide some observations.

1. Under New Labor for the past decade and a half, the concept of personal responsibility has been greatly undermined among the British people. In place of the sturdy self-reliance of the Thatcher era. soft socialism has ingratiated its way into every aspect of personal life. The State is now Mother, responsible for taking care of all human needs. It's actually a more prevalent attitude in Britain than in Sweden.

2. Concomitant with the State taking over more and more responsibility for personal decision making, the State has also adopted the attitude that the average citizen is an idiot incapable of wiping his butt without detailed instructions, and preferably with the assistance of a government-funding butt-wiping counsellor. It is the therapeutic society writ large.

3. Extended to the family, the basic assumption of the British nanny state is parents are too stupid to raise their children without detailed instructions, which are mandatory and often enforced in a draconian manner. Schools, health clinics and other centers of government activity are used to spy on parents to ensure that the The Rules are being followed.

4. Having been told that they are incompetent boobs every day of their adult lives, many British parents have just accepted that this must be true, and that they are, therefore, absolved of all responsibility for their children. Let the State take care of them, it's what the State wants in any case. Of course, the State, being British, is hopelessly archaic and inefficient, particularly the schools, which make U.S. public schools look like paragons of pedagogical excellence.

Having said all that, it should be recognized that Britain is not a monolith, that London is not typical of Britain (thank goodness!), that the south is different from the North, the industrial midlands from the rural areas, and therefore, one can find throughout Britain pockets of Olde Englande in which the old virtues are still maintained and are just waiting for the opportunity to reassert themselves when the tide changes.

It may already be changing, driven precisely by parents fed up with being told what to do by an incompetent nanny state that demonstrably does not have the interests of their children at heart. Then, too, there is that innate English stubbornness and resentment of arbitrary power coming to the fore. Brits are not Frenchmen, or Germans or Italians, but something different, and therefore not as susceptible to the continental urge to develop and implement all-encompassing theories and systems.

[W.E.D. Godbold]

Is there anything to the theory that a lot of the independent-minded continentals moved to America and thereby impoverished their native lands? Not that I necessarily favor a Darwinian explanation for their loss of testicular fortitude on so many fronts, but it might explain a lot...

[Joe Long]

Well, W.E.D., we got the fleeing Huguenots and Scots-Irish Presbyterians in generous proportions in this part of the good ol' USA...like P.J. O'Rourke said, we became Americans because we'd been kicked out of every "respectable" country in the world. And don't let the Indians fool you: many of those tribes, too, were refugees displaced by some other crowd...why, our only inhabitants who could prove they were "wanted" were those who'd been bought-and-paid-for.

But as for Darwinian pressure...well, you'd've thought Western Europe's population-wrenching wars would have sapped their fortitude, but it seems as if protracted peace has done it instead - which would favor a "nurture" over "nature" explanation for decay.

Stuart, as far as the topic goes, I'll take you and Mr. Daniels at your word - the evaluations seem entirely compatible.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Is there anything to the theory that a lot of the independent-minded continentals moved to America and thereby impoverished their native lands?<<<

As an American, I would certainly like to think so.

[Stuart Koehl]

On the Her Majesty's Government's rampant nannyism, this article from the times is illustrative:

From The Times
August 16, 2008
Fat children ‘should be taken from parents’ to curb obesity epidemic
Council warning to families guilty of neglect
Jill Sherman, Whitehall Editor

Grossly overweight children may be taken from their families and put into care if Britain’s obesity epidemic continues to escalate, council chiefs said yesterday.

The Local Government Association argued that parents who allowed their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all.

The association said that until now there had been only a few cases when social services had intervened in obesity cases. But it gave warning that local councils may have to take action much more often and, if necessary, put obese children on “at risk” registers or take them into care. It called for new guidelines to be drawn up to help authorities deal with the issue.

There have been some reported cases where children under 10 have weighed up to 14st (89kg) and a three-year-old has weighed 10st – putting them at a high risk of diabetes and heart disease. Only last week a 15-year-old girl in Wales was told by doctors that she could “drop dead at any moment” after tipping the scales at 33st.

David Rogers, the Local Government Association’s public health spokesman, said that by 2012 an estimated million children would be obese and by 2025 about a quarter of all boys would be grossly overweight.

“Councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children’s health in real danger,” he said. “As the obesity epidemic grows, these tricky cases will keep on cropping up. Councils would step in to deal with an undernourished and neglected child, so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different? If parents consistently place their children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise, is it right that a council should step in to keep the child’s health under review?”

“The nation’s expanding waistline threatens to have a devastating impact on our public services. It’s a huge issue for public health, but it also risks placing an unprecedented amount of pressure on council services.”

The association called for a national debate on how much local authorities should intervene in obesity cases. As a basic minimum, social services or health visitors should talk to the families involved, give them advice and show them how to provide healthy meals. “But in the worst cases [the children] would need to be put on ‘at risk’ registers or taken into care.”

Last year Cumbria County Council put an eight-year old girl into care as she was dangerously overweight.

Anne Ridgway, of Cumbria Primary Care Trust, said that it was extremely rare for a child to be put into care just because of their weight. “Even then the care proceedings may well have been instigated because of related problems rather than exclusively because of their weight,” she said. Extreme cases of obesity could become a child protection issue because obesity “can have very serious consequences for a child’s health and the parental behaviour that leads to childhood obesity can be a form of neglect”.

Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said: “Children who are dangerously overweight should be brought into hospital, where they can be given 24-hour care for several weeks or months. But their parents should have access to them.”

The Conservative Party said that taking children into care was a serious step. Andrew Landsley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that in many cases “it would be better to help the parents provide better nutrition for their child rather than break up the family”.

Deadly facts

— Councils are spending tens of thousands of pounds widening crematorium furnaces to deal with fatter corpses

— Standard coffins are between 16 and 20ins wide (40-50cm) but coffins twice that size are being ordered to fit larger bodies

— Lewisham Council has ordered a 44in cremator from America and is taking coffins from the Midlands. A furnace has just been installed at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, for coffins a metre wide and Blackburn is to buy a 42in cremator

— New ambulances have been introduced across Wales with special equipment for fat patients, including a winch and an extra wide strengthened stretcher

— Fire services are threatening to charge police or hospitals a fee if they are called in to move grossly overweight people out of dangerous buildings

— Many schools are having to adapt their furniture to cope with heavier, wider children. Each larger table and chair costs about £30

— It is estimated that nearly 2,000 people are too fat to work