Let me begin by confessing my own sins: The ideas I had about raising children before I had children were wildly wrong. We parents often joke amongst ourselves that “the only perfect parent doesn’t have kids” whenever a childless person talks confidently about what they will/won’t do if they ever have kids.
This cognitive dissonance is understandable—but when you become a parent, you finally begin to understand the profound vulnerability, innocence, and lack of brain development that leave children unable to discern threats or realize when they’re being coerced and manipulated.
It’s easy to chuckle at non-parents who gripe about a baby crying on an airplane or give a side-eye to a mom handing her kid a tablet to keep them quiet in line at the DMV—but as our society rapidly shifts from one where adults get married and have children to one in which a growing percentage never do either, the policy-setting implications are profound.
As Tiffany Justice warns, Colorado is moving to pass a law that will brand it abuse if parents “question their child’s desire to ‘change their gender.’ This isn’t a minor policy tweak; it’s a full-frontal assault on parental rights.”
Cayleigh Weigtbrodt recently went viral for calmly calling out the Fairfax County Public School Board for unanimously voting to move forward with a radical gender curriculum for young children that parents had overwhelmingly rejected.
Sane parents look at these dramatic policies in horror and ask: How did we get here? How are parental rights eroding before our eyes?
It’s not hard to read the tea leaves. 47% of non-parents under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children and 29% of non-parents report not wanting children—up from 14% in 2002.
Parents are becoming an increasingly smaller coalition, meaning parental rights are increasingly in peril. I hope this is a sobering wake-up call to anyone who still believes common sense will naturally prevail.
We do have reason to hope—when parents join together, stay informed, and take action, things change.