Let’s expose the children-haters

I always thought kids were considered sacred, but I’ve been proved wrong

My joy at the rescue of 12 young boys and their football coach in northern Thailand was Mountain-high, valleydeep, and river ... that’s enough Tina Turner triumphalism, we get it, you and the planet were thrilled. It was an unadulterated good thing.

Meanwhile, the snatching of small children from their asylum-seeking parents at the U.S. border is a continuing crisis. Good people are working to reunite them, but the Trump administration failed to meet a courtmandated deadline.

Even eventual success would not be an unadulterated good because this fact remains: Many Americans have been revealed as being fine with cruelty to Central American children. Trump himself detests these foreign toddlers. But he never liked his own children, and Ivanka only inappropriately.

What made U.S. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen defend the border kidnappings, even to the point of lying? Was it ambition? Sadism?

I always thought little children were considered sacred, but events have proved me wrong. Many societies don’t like children. I have no doubt that Brits prefer the cats and dogs in Battersea Dogs Home to their children in boarding school.

Canadians don’t buy dogs, they adopt furbabies, style them, and push them in special strollers. “My, your child is hairy,” I always say. Great offence is taken.

As a species, we don’t like children as much as we pretend to. Why is this?

The Children’s Commissioner for England once warned of his nation’s “deep ambivalence” toward children. As journalist Libby Brooks explained in “The Story of Childhood”: Adults invest hugely in their own children while remaining equivocal about other people’s, particularly if they’re poor, distant or foreign.

Indigenous children in Canada still suffer to a horrendous degree yet it does not grab public attention, even though many of them are as trapped in permanent misery as the Thai boys were for two weeks. Is this guilt? Racism?

The continuing scandal of religionist pedophilia is monstrous but has been largely shrugged off. It’s in the past, let it go, the victims are always told. Pedophiles always head to where the kids are — U.S. migrant jails are one destination — but the very subject makes adults itchy.

That is how pedophile Larry Nassar put his bare hands inside hundreds of young U.S. female gymnasts for years. It was first reported in 1997 but not prosecuted until 2016. At base, no one liked those girls enough to come forward and make a noise. Why do predatory hockey coaches and U.S. wrestling and football coaches get away with it? Adults don’t care to hear.

After all, the brutal sexual abuse of young hockey player Sheldon Kennedy began in 1984 and his pedophile coach, Graham James, was not prosecuted until 1997. James, a serial offender, repeatedly received light sentences. How do abuse survivors live with the societal verdict that their agony doesn’t matter? I suppose the same way women do.

The needs of children — with their smaller bodies and tender sensibilities — should come first in every part of life: Divorce cases; police arrests; Ontario school repairs cancelled by Premier Ford; road safety; single parenthood; vaccination tracking; oversight of teachers, doctors and coaches lest they be predatory; free health care; parental presence during a child’s ambulance trip and hospital treatment; antibullying efforts; a ban on corporal punishment; sex education that teaches children their rights.

This is basic, except when it isn’t convenient for adults.

Some adults like children. Others don’t. Many of the ones who don’t like children probably didn’t like being children and now they are parents themselves.

These are the adults who complain about crying babies on airplanes, forcing stressed parents to hand out placatory goody bags to grotesquely self-regarding adult passengers. Perhaps they were neglected as infants, proving the existence of the human drive to do to others what was done to them, generation after generation.

Fewer children are being born now, mostly for economic reasons but partly because young parents, particularly mothers, can’t cope with society’s disregard. Other countries have universal daycare and full-pay family leave.

Why don’t we?

Having children is one of the greatest pleasures of life, despite the huge financial, health and career sacrifice.

So we do it, despite having learned that the wider world, for some reason, is not sympathetic to us, not parental at all.