I want to believe in the nobility of the human spirit. I want to believe that mankind is essentially good and that the horror I see and the horrors I hear about are simply the last cries of a dying specter that haunted our fragile globe for just too long. – The Legendary Pink Dots, “A Velvet Resurrection”
In fact, everything in my childhood world tried to keep me from becoming just that, from twining loose and easy like a wild vine, from embracing full joy and desire, from spilling myself out in generosity. Which makes sense: As a whole, children in dominator society are not truly loved because we equate love with weakness and ease with failure.
Sure, there might be individual moments of care, roofs and dinner tables and music lessons dutifully supplied. Our kindergarten teacher might chat about the need to share, but other adults will chastise us for exactly that – giving away things they bought with hard-earned money, inviting friends over to eat our food.
As an adult, sharing things is considered foolish, nonsensical: That homeless guy is probably scamming you. She’s probably just going to buy drugs with it. We laud people who buy things as supporting the economy and engaging in self-care, but view people who give things away suspicion: Well, there must be something wrong with it. What’s her motive? What’s he selling?
Those attitudes – selfishness masquerading as self-sufficiency, suspicion as virtue – are typically rooted in our childhood experiences because that’s how a cultural system self-perpetuates. Because our particular flavor of dominator society is based on Christianity, we’re confronted with two oft-quoted Biblical messages: Honor thy mother and father, among the Ten Commandments, and Spare the rod and spoil the child, which might as well be.
Honoring thy mother and father unquestioningly makes sense if you’re trying to reproduce a hierarchical culture that is similarly based on unquestioning obedience to a superior. While Jesus himself welcomes children (in his own words), I think it’s telling that treating children – or, well, really anyone – with love and kindness didn’t make the Top Ten.
Dominator culture is warrior culture, and thus considers violence to be a sacred duty; shirk this duty, and you raise your children to be “snowflakes”: weak, emotionally sensitive critters who will be unable to pick up a rifle for the holy war.
Do not withhold discipline from a child; although you strike him with a rod, he will not die.
There’s a fair amount of stuff in the Old Testament about how a loving parent – specifically a father – should beat their children in the name of discipline. We are enjoined to ignore the child’s tears during this beating for the sake of his soul. And just as a father beats the child he loves, so, too, does The Lord ™ cause us to suffer. As the child obeys the parent who beats him, so should we obey God.
Dehumanization and violence are thus the very foundation of dominator society, ideally enacted from our first entrance into the world, amid a gush of amniotic fluid. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984: Love is hate. Kindness is cruelty. War is peace.
We say we love children, but we really hate them – deeply, unequivocally.
Mom and Dad, this isn’t intended to be a slam.
I am going to get to that whole concept in a minute, but I do need to address something rather personal. My parents read this blog, and I know they may view today’s topic as a personal criticism. I would ask that they – and any of the parents reading out there – take a larger view.
Parents themselves are products of culture, and of their own family systems. Rather than viewing my words as that of an ungrateful kid criticizing her folks – i.e., disobeying the cultural mandate to “honor thy mother and father” – I want you to think back on your own childhood and the messages there. How you were raised. How and when your pain was ignored, your need for kindness and gentleness thwarted with slaps and harshness.
Because I know y’all have stories, many of them shocking. Here’s the deal: The further you go back in time, the worse those stories get. Dial back the clock far enough, and you arrive at the Roman paterfamilias: The father who had the right of life and death over his wife and children. Yes, back in ancient Rome, dad could kill you if he wanted because if you weren’t top dog, you were pretty much the same as an actual dog.
These days, I’m reading Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. It’s a gripping read and offers insight into what life was like for kids just a few decades ago. While Ireland is, of course, the subject, you can probably extrapolate those experiences elsewhere.
You know all those stories in the news about priests molesting children for decades? Everyone knew this was happening. The church knew, parents knew, cops knew – and nothing changed because the experiences of children were not culturally valued. Enduring the predation of adults was part of the social role of children and still is today, albeit in different forms.
Such things weren’t talked about outside the confessional, so no one could recognize their commonality and work for change.
We do love that rod an awful lot, don’t we.
To this day, we discount the narratives of children. We taunt them as snowflakes who require safe spaces (because apparently the more noble thing is to live in an atmosphere of constant threat and violence). We put their problems and suffering in air-quotes, and blame these “problems” on social media use.
Meanwhile, statistics show that one in three teenage girls has thoughts of suicide, according to recent articles I read in The New York Times and The Washington Post. (I have subscriptions to both.) That teenagers consider ending themselves isn’t new, although perhaps the acknowledgement and the willingness to talk about it is; I think, back in the day, little Ned and Nora just disappeared and no one talked about it, just as Patricia would go on a nine-month-long visit to her aunt in the country (nod nod, wink wink).
Dig down a little, and you can’t just blame childhood despair on Facebook or TikTok: Sexual assault and sexual abuse are rampant in this population, and they likely always were because children – being vulnerable by definition – cannot protect themselves from predators. And those predators are not drag queens or strangers. Rather, we find these human sharks among families and beloved family friends, schools and sports teams, the church – the ranks of “trusted adults.”
Perhaps related: About 35% of all Internet downloads are porn, and pornography tends not to consist of humane and gentle depictions of love.
The willingness to talk about teen depression and suicide is a positive development, don’t get me wrong, but we still culturally dehumanize children and regard their voices as valueless – just like we do with “crazy people.” Look at the Internet comments on any news story about young people. It’s all: “Hey snowflake, your feelings don’t matter to anyone. Get off TikTok and just shut up.” (I wish I was joking, but I’m not. I’ve seen the “your feelings don’t matter to anyone” thing repeatedly.)
That comes down to the inherent structure of dominator culture: We define power as that which one wields over another, the subjection of will to force. Until the age of majority, young people cannot vote and have the legal status of chattel: i.e., they’re owned by adults.
Adults may love them and have their best interests at heart, but they also may not – and it’s up to the children to endure until they are able to leave. Kids are a bit like pets in that way; it’s illegal to abuse them, but really difficult to extract them from situations of abuse, or even detect it in a lot of cases because of the privacy of the home, which is considered sacred in an individualist, capitalist society.
Young people bear the burden of shootings and receive training to counteract these shootings with their own bodies, if need be, because adults refuse to address the situation. It’s young people who will inherit a world shaped by rampant climate change and species loss. It’s young people who have their gender presentations increasingly policed (“is she girl enough for the swim team? Drop your drawers so we can check”).
We are social mammals and harsh treatment has tangible, physical effects — just as it would in any social mammal. (Consider rescue dogs or cats, for example.) Cruelty and harsh treatment don’t just cause emotional dysregulation (AKA, what we usually consider mental illness or personality disorder), but actual physical disease throughout the lifespan, since it raises cortisol levels in the body. We’re talking about things like cancer and heart disease: real, honest-to-Dian Cécht diagnosable diseases and disorders.
Treating people with compassion — with respect, kindness, gentleness and listening — at all phases of life doesn’t just heal the mind, but the body, too. We shouldn’t be beating any animals with a rod, including human children.
Individual salvation versus seven generations
The societal hatred of children probably roots in our own mortality and fears of individual replacement. They are living reminders of our aging and future death, and that society will go on without us and be shaped by different hands.
What’s interesting, however, is that many Indigenous societies don’t have this dread or hatred of children. In fact, the children of European colonists who ended up being raised by the local Indigenous population — often in the aftermath of violent raids; Indigenous people emphatically did not consent to displacement or enslavement — typically didn’t want to return to colonial society, which was profoundly unloving and unkind toward children (and women and Quakers and pretty much everyone).
In fact, the Haudenosaunee famously base their decisions on what would benefit people seven generations into the future. Looking up the math, that’s 150 years. It’s not enough to think of your own children; you’re called to consider children whom you will never meet.
If we unconsciously fear being replaced by our children, we’re centering our entire perspective on ourselves as individuals. Which definitely tracks with capitalism, as well as dominance narratives. The Christian sects that tend to hit the “spare the rod” message most strongly (pun intended) are also those who reject the social justice message (i.e., the “love thy neighbor” stuff) and focus solely on individual salvation. The rest of the world will burn in the Apocalypse, but we ourselves will live forever, and that’s what matters.
That’s putting ourselves at the center of the story again: a form of existential narcissism. We hate children because we think we should live forever, unchangingly – which is a ridiculous and utterly unrealistic notion.
You can keep the stick but only if you use it correctly.
Dominator society is right in one respect: Raising your children with unconditional love and acceptance really will shatter the uber-culture long-term because love is peak rebellion.
Love – that which permits, which breaks down the boundary between self and other – is the water that douses gunpowder and rusts the sword. Generosity – giving unstintingly to another for their flourishing, expecting no payment – mounds fertile earth over greed and selfishness. Kindness and gentleness shatter the chain of cruelty that one generation passes to the next. Honesty and openness speak the secrets that endanger us, and so protect us all.
If you try to transform the world with bullets and blades and metaphors of war, you just end up with more of the same. When you say that violence is inevitable and so we must raise up our children to succeed in a violent world, you’re creating that violent world – and harming your children along the way.
Parenthood is tough – made tougher by a complete lack of community in the West. Childhood is arguably even tougher than parenthood because children have little in the way of power. Let’s put aside the “honor thy begetter” bit and work for the cause of children’s rights – to safety, sanctuary and, above all, love.
As for the rod, I invite the Christians to adopt a different – and no less biblical – metaphor. You talk a lot about shepherds and shepherds carry a big ol’ crozier, right?
Shepherds tend sheep, and live – even sleep – among them; it’s a gentle profession. As such, they do not beat the sheep with the big stick. They use that stick to maintain their own footing in the hills, or to ward off predators. Sometimes – if a sheep is wandering off – they may press it into their side and guide them gently back to safety, no beating involved.
In many traditional societies, shepherds were traditionally … children, often approaching their teen years. Just some thoughts as you mind your metaphors.
White Cat Grove 
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