Putting Children's Needs Ahead of Adult Desires

Or: What the Dickens Are We Doing To These Babies??

If you had it to do all over again, what do you wish had been different?

Think back to your earliest memories. Is there something you wish you could go back and change?

Was it the time your family moved and you had to leave your friends behind? Was it something said in anger to a loved one? Was it the girl you never got up the courage to ask out, or the one you wish you never asked out in the first place?

Put down the screen, take a moment, think about it.

Are you back? I don’t know what your answer may be. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and guarantee there’s one answer you did not give.

I bet you didn’t wish you were born an orphan. I bet you didn’t wish that you never knew your father and that he never knew you. I bet you didn’t wish your mother was a complete stranger.

I’m reading Dickens at the moment, so I’ve got orphans on the mind. Dombey and Son is not one of his better-known works, but it ought to be. The novel opens with the death of a mother. We follow the surviving relations through all that follows. In Dombey’s pages, Dickens gives the most moving description of a young child’s longing for a father’s love that I have ever encountered. He paints a portrait of the joys that family can bring – and the evils that arise when adults do not fulfil their duty to place the needs of their children before their own.

You don’t have to be a Dickens expert to know that the Dombey story is hardly the only one of his to revolve around the death or disappearance of a parent – in fact, you’d have to be a Dickens expert to name the tiny minority of his books that don’t!

Funny, that. There’s a whole lot of life out there. Why did the greatest novelist who ever lived return to this one idea over and over? Dickens’ father was famously imprisoned when Charles was just a boy, no doubt that left its mark. The very real plight of orphans in Victorian society played a key role, too – and ensured that large swaths of his audience could certainly relate. There is, however, a more obvious reason. Nothing is as universally understood as a child’s need to be loved by her mom and dad. Nothing is as tragic as when that most foundational of relationships goes awry. You’re unlikely to write a timeless classic about a man pining for his broken desk chair. But what is more human than the desire to know who you are, to belong, to be loved? Who can embody that struggle better than a child facing the world without a mom and dad at her side?

When tragedy happens – a mother dies in childbirth, a father lost at sea – it is precisely that, a tragedy, and should be mourned as such. Dickens shows us in many of his classics that, in the face of such adversity, new, makeshift families can do a great deal to heal the primal loss. Sometimes, however, tragedy doesn’t simply happen. Sometimes, tragedy is planned. That’s why his most memorably villainous characters are those who plot to subvert and destroy the natural family bond.

We should do everything in our power to prevent mother loss and father loss. Instead, we are deliberately inflicting it on countless children. We have become a society of Dickensian villains. (No, not Miss Havishams – that’s a different rant!).

Katy Faust can explain it all far better than I can, using truth, common sense, natural law, and rigorous science, not doorstopper Victorian novels. She has been doing amazing work for years with her organization Them Before Us. This year, they are launching a new initiative, the Greater Than campaign, to protect and defend children. Do you believe that every child deserves a mother and a father? Do you think that the needs of children should come before the desires of adults? Please, take the time to listen to this riveting interview on the topic with Faust and Frank Turek, and then sign up to join the movement.

What does it mean to place a child’s needs ahead of an adult’s desires? Well, recall our opening thought experiment. Return to that mindset, imagine once again your greatest childhood wish. Was it to grow up never knowing your father, or without having a mother? Of course not! You don’t need Dickens to tell you that no child wants that. Now snap out of it and return to your adult self. Imagine now that you feel incomplete, your unfulfilled parental instincts are kicking in big time, and you really, really want a child of your own. Are you willing to buy or manufacture that baby in the kind of arrangement that ensures she grows up without a mom or without a dad? To be clear, I’m not talking about adoption, which as Dickens shows can be an act of divine beauty that can help heal a child’s emotional scars; I’m referring to deliberately creating such scars in the first place. Goodness knows the desire for children is a good and healthy one, and I do not doubt that you desperately want a child. But – here’s the rub – does that desire of yours trump what you also know to be true, that no child should be deprived of their mom and dad? You know it doesn’t. Please, don’t make that defenseless, innocent child sacrifice her rights for your wishes. Do the right thing. One of you has to be the adult in the situation – and it ain’t the one in size 3 diapers.

Think back to the medical horrors I’ve been documenting on this Substack for years. In May 2020 – way before it was cool – I was calling out Covid lockdowns and school closures. Why? Because we have no right to ruin the lives of children for our own selfish needs. Similarly, years before it was popular, I was sounding the alarm about the evils of the trans movement. Why? Because boys and girls are not the same – and if a girl can’t become a boy, neither can a mom become a dad. And, as my long suffering subscribers know, I’ve never stopped ranting about the soul-destroying ADHD scam. Why? Because we ought to value a child’s humanity over an adult’s convenience. If you agreed with me then, or have come to agree with me since, on any of these issues, please, take a moment, visit Greater Than, and consider joining the fight.

Will the lessons of Dickens be learned anew? Our screen-addicted kids are reading less than they ever have, so don’t get your hopes up. Then again, I suppose they don’t have to read Victorian novels considering that they’re living them. I know, I know, that sounds unfair, and it may be – to the Victorians. After all, the abandoned children in Dickens’ novels are objects of sympathy, whereas today the only sympathy our society seems to have is for the adults orchestrating their purposeful abandonment. Today’s forgotten children have no celebrity advocates like a Charles Dickens; they are left to fend for themselves, and they better not complain about it. Our modern, manufactured orphans are thrust into synthetic arrangement after synthetic arrangement and expected to thrive on this thin gruel. We should fight for them, but instead they are made to feel guilty, made to doubt themselves, when they express the most innocent, the most understandable, the most human desire of all, the desire all orphans feel in their very bones: “please, sir, I want some more.”