To Whom Do Our Children Belong? (5)

Today we are pleased to share the fifth instalment of an important work from Geoff Thomas, “To Whom Do Our Children Belong?” The first four are available here and here and here and here.

Geoff was the pastor at Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, for fifty years. He is retired, and the author of many books and articles, having been a frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world. He still preaches at the Chapel he attends in London, as well as travelling extensively to speak in different churches.

In the previous instalment, it was established that Our children do not belong to their parents.

To Whom Do Our Children Belong?

Our children do not belong to themselves.

Thirty years ago in Orlando, Florida, a 12-year old boy named Gregory Kingsley shocked America and also made it laugh in disbelief when he announced that he had “divorced” his parents and chosen, instead, a new family. Many Americans could sympathise with the lad as, just as in adulthood, other people’s homes, and siblings, and bookshelves, are much more interesting and attractive than our own. Mary Kenny wrote, “My parents were easy-going bohemians, and during the first seven years of my life I was never forbidden to do anything. I used to listen with longing to little girls who would lisp, ‘I’m not allowed to.’ If only I could be part of a family where you weren’t allowed to! Yes. I can quite see why young Gregory (who has since changed his name to Shawn) would want to reject his episodic and disorganized mother, who could never remember his birthday, and be adopted by a well-to-do, squeaky-clean family of Mormons”. (Mary Kenny, ‘Your Child, But Not Your Property’, Sunday Telegraph, October 18, 1992)

Gregory was acting out a fantasy that millions of children have shared. His mother was a single parent working as a waitress with various boyfriends. What lies behind his action is a spirit that now is widespread in Western childcare law – the child’s best interest. The danger is articulated in the children’s rights movement. It claims that children are regularly and unkindly treated within the family unit and universally patronized. They want prima facie rights and responsibilities to be removed from parents, and children to have the right to autonomy, for example, to dye their hair green, to become a lesbian, to go to Syria and join ISIS, to feel themselves boys trapped in the body of a girl, and so on. An insurmountable weakness of this approach is that it is ignoring children’s utter lack of experience in making such judgments and their vulnerability to influence. The grass is not always greener in another place, under a different form of government, with other parents, in another gender, having sexual relations with someone of the same sex.

The film star Joan Collins was watching a popular dance programme on TV with a teenager and she remarked to the girl, “That girl in the pink dress isn’t dancing well.” The girl with whom she was watching TV cried out indignantly, “You can’t say that. It’s sexist and incorrect.”  “What can I say?” asked Joan. “The individual in the pink dress,” she asserted. “We can’t assume how she identifies.”

Journalist Martha Terry writes, “A friend recently told me she spent four years of her childhood living as a boy. ‘I hated dresses, cut my hair, gelled it and spiked it,’ she says.  ‘From aged eight I thought I was meant to be a boy.  I remember going into a swimming pool changing room in board shorts and the girls shrieking, “It’s a boy!”’  It wasn’t until my friend hit puberty that she began to feel more comfortable in her gender.  By her mid-teens she was living happily as female.  Now she’s a married mother of three who looks back on her tom-boy phase with an air of amusement.  Yet she shudders to imagine what might have happened if she’d been a child going through the same thing today”. (Spectator School, Autumn 2019, “The Gender Agenda”, p.29)

There is a new approach to transgenderism based on a child’s self-identification. He or she belongs to himself or to herself. This promotes the view that an individual has the absolute right to decide his or her gender. Medical professionals, parents and teachers are expected to affirm rather than challenge a child’s decision.  So practitioners are being discouraged from applying adequate scrutiny to children’s claims.  Teachers are encouraged to promise confidentiality to a child, in all circumstances, and to withhold information from their parents.

But adolescence is a time when children try on various looks and throw them off again.  80% of childhood gender dysphoria is resolved during this phase.  What care must be taken in affirming every Samantha who wants to be Sam.  Practitioners are moved by the fear of being branded transphobic.  Referrals to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) – the National Health Service’s only gender identity service for children – jumped 1,000 per cent from 2012 (up to 2,700 in 2019).  And of those referred, half will go on to have medical intervention, starting with puberty blockers, which are intended to “give them time to mull over their decision”.  Nearly all who take blockers will progress to hormone treatment at 16 and gender re-assignment surgery at 18.

Are children and teenagers qualified to give informed valid consent to doctors to provide for them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones when the harm they might suffer from this could have life-long consequences?  Consider the issues at stake, the age to start the experiments, their irreversibility, the serious adverse health events, long-term effects on mental health, neurological effects on cognitive functioning, the effect on bone density, circulatory systems and sexual functioning in adulthood.  Children are too immature to request experimental treatment that will expose them to significant risks.  Adults and medically qualified people cannot be sure about the risks of such treatment let alone children, but many are afraid to intervene and trample on the rights of a child because ‘he belongs to himself’.

What are the consequences of this child-centred view of reality? Harry Mount in an article entitled “Check your Brags” (The Spectator, 8 December 2018) writes of how he taught for a time at a British university, but his superiors told him he was not to correct spelling mistakes, or give low marks in exams, explaining to him, ‘You seem to think that if a student does badly it is his or her fault.’  On another occasion he was warned about teaching facts and dates to the undergraduates, saying, “‘You must understand that we’re not here to teach them what to think, but how to think.’ So these children enter their twenties thinking they are the Messiah, and if they haven’t been taught anything about the outside world or anything that offends their worldview, little wonder that they have nothing to talk about apart from the ever-fascinating subject of themselves.  The internet and social media is full of mutual praise, one great echo chamber for the ego.  The mobile phone is their most precious possession because on it they send and receive messages about themselves and why their activities are so gripping.  This is confirmed by the torrent of show-off TV shows and the advertising that is directed towards them.  They gaze at L’Oreal’s ‘Because you are worth it.’  Are you really?  It is the meek who inherit the earth.  God is banished and the ego has completely triumphed.  Once the elite feel they’ve come to deserve their superior position they also think they’ve earned the right to parade it before everyone.  Children are taught that they belong to themselves and they let their circle know how tremendous was their vacation, how brilliant their soccer team is, how funny their dog, how delicious their real ale, how terrific was the party they went to, and how adorable is their boyfriend.  Their every contact and taste they affirm to be ‘brilliant,’ so that people listening will judge that they are also brilliant.”

So here is the dictum of the child-centric western world, children must be seen, heard, celebrated, praised and obeyed all of the time.  Children are to be regarded as mini-adults with rights and must be consulted on all family matters.  If children bawled or cried loudly in church or in a restaurant then there was a time when the parents would take them out and settle them down, then they would return to their place.  It is getting to be a rarer response.  As Cosmo Landesman describes his experience, “Thanks to progressive child-rearing practices popularised in the 1980s by the paediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, adults today don’t want to act like adults and set rules and boundaries regarding their children.”  According to Spock, the worst thing you could do is to stifle a child’s self-expression.

Landesman wrote, “I recently saw a child bouncing up and down on the seat of an Underground Tube train.  I politely asked his mother to stop her child from bouncing because people had to sit on that seat.  I then proceeded to wipe the seat. ‘Don’t you dare touch my child!’ she cried with a loud voice.  I pointed out that I had not touched her child, but had wiped the seat that her child was despoiling with his grubby shoes.  ‘Don’t you touch my child,’ she said in an even louder voice. Everyone in the carriage was watching me and I made a high-minded speech about our civic responsibility to our fellow citizens.  We should think of others, I said, expecting applause.  I got silence and disapproving looks.  Then a large tattooed young man came up to me and said, ‘He’s only a kid.  Leave ‘im alone.  He needs to express himself.’  The battle for the future of the western world is over”. (Cosmo Landesman, ‘Problem Children’, The Spectator, 28 July 2018, p.17) Kids and their kind have won.

So to whom do our children belong if they do not belong to Caesar, the Church, their parents, or themselves?

Next time:  “Our Children Belong to God”