Life is Never Childproof

My wife and I have been talking about raising children.

One issue that came up was the nature of the property where we live. It’s mostly pasture and forest. I have a house and a workshop, and the rest of the property is full of things like nettles, poison ivy, blackberry briars, holes, and snakes. The house itself has no bedrooms for children on the first floor. We live on a private road that opens onto a two-lane highway with a 55-mph speed limit, so opportunities for riding a bike are not good, and the nearest house is probably 250 yards away.

I’m not sure what to do about the house.

We have two stairways. One is carpeted. The other is hard oak. If the kids live upstairs, what are we supposed to do to protect them?

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a two-story house. They moved into another two-story house when I was about 5. The second house had a set of steep concrete steps covered in thin, hard vinyl.

I never saw a baby gate until I was an adult. I don’t know if they existed. My grandparents had 8 grandchildren, and none of us ever fell down the steps or came close to it. Neither did my grandparents. Nobody did.

The cabinets had no childproofing. I used to play inside them. Whatever chemicals were in the house were available to all. The guns were not locked up.

I have never known anyone except me who had a poison scare as a child. I sampled some rat poison once, and nothing happened. They sent me home from the ER without doing anything for me.

I have never lived in a modern baby-safe house. I don’t even know what the rules are.

I have never known anyone who fell down the stairs as a child (or adult) and had an injury of any kind. Does that mean the concerns are overblown?

I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I was three. My dad bought a house when I was that age. It was one house over from a corner, and the street intersecting our street was somewhat busy. A block to the east, there was a big lot which was often flooded, and there were snakes.

My friends and I used to walk out the door early in the day and spend our time running around like wild Indians. We didn’t cross the busy street, but we could walk a block or two in the other direction, all by ourselves. No one cared. No one was afraid grown men would grab us and have sex with us.

We didn’t know what homosexuality was, and we didn’t know what sex was.

We built forts in the swamp area. We used to have wars. We would chase each other around and hit each other with sticks and branches. Houses went up sometimes, and we played on the construction sites. It was understood that the big sand piles were there for our amusement. I was probably in junior high before I realized people weren’t supposed to go onto other people’s property and play in their unfinished houses.

We played with what are now known as war toys. My parents got me a plastic machine gun and a plastic battleship. We always had cap pistols. I had boots and a cowboy hat. We played cowboys and Indians, and no one ever questioned the notion that the Indians were bad and had to be shot. Sorry about that. We learned from Hollywood, which is always a stupid idea.

No one I grew up with ever committed a gun crime. I did throw a knife at my sister when I was a kid, but most people would have done the same thing eventually. She was special. My gentle 103-pound mother went at her with both fists.

When I used to visit my grandparents, my grandfather would put his grandchildren in the back of a pickup and drive us around on mountain roads at up to 80 mph. We loved it. We never died. I was his favorite, and he used to let me “help” him on his farms. He would sit me on the fender of his tractor while he raked or mowed, and he would also let me steer. If I had fallen off the front of the fender, I would have gone under the rear tire.

We used to shoot together. I never had a lesson in gun safety. I think I was expected to be smart enough not to shoot anyone.

He taught my aunt to swim by throwing her in a river.

Kids were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted in cars. My father used to put me on his lap and let me steer. I sat in the front seat like other human beings. We had a station wagon, and I liked riding in “the very back,” next to the rear window. In sedans and coupes, there were “parcel shelves” against the rear windows. Flat places big enough for kids to lie down in. And we did. Sometimes we had to move the little air-freshener dogs with the bobbing heads.

There were no such things as baby seats.

When we got bicycles, we rode on the streets. There were no helmets. I knew one person who got hurt. He was a teenager who decided to ride down from the peak of Miami’s 79th Street Causeway bridge at top speed. He rode on a narrow sidewalk, and he lost control and hit a sign with his face. He ended up with dentures. A helmet wouldn’t have helped.

We didn’t wear knee or elbow pads. Sometimes we rode barefoot, which was really dumb. I tore half the nail off my big toe that way.

My elementary school was a mile from my house, and my junior high was half a mile farther away. I used to walk and ride to school. Not always, but sometimes. So did my friends. The whole time I lived in that area, I heard about one kid getting hit by a car.

It was bad. A teenaged girl with no license spread him out on the asphalt like chicken salad. There were big stains. We were told his brains were splattered. But the rest of us got by without school zones.

At phys. ed. class, we were told to climb ropes to the top, or maybe 15 feet, above hard-packed ground. I was the kid who could never figure out how to climb the rope, but others made it. At playgrounds, we had merry-go-rounds, and naturally, we got them going at top speed and jumped off. We had see-saws, and we used to do things like jumping off while the other kid was up in the air.

I was probably 10 when I got my first pocket knife, and I got my first rifle at 12. No one thought it was weird to let me have these things. My best friend was a year older, and he was shooting deer and antelope.

My parents thought it was okay to buy me slingshots. Two neighboring kids had bows.

On Halloween, we went out without adult supervision, even though our mothers worried about us and believed legends about razors and drugs in apples and candy.

We always threw the apples out anyway. It was so unfair; giving us fruit. We got really angry at people who gave us things they knew we didn’t like.

Today, it seems like very few kids participate in Halloween. It seems like it’s more of an adult holiday. Adults go to parties and get high and drunk, and as a female comedian said, the women only have one costume: “It’s a slut.”

“Sexy vampire.” “Sexy nurse.” “Sexy witch.” “Sexy Disney character.” “Sexy nun.” Plain old whore. That about covers it.

When kids go out now, they form little squads behind adults with flashlights, they go to a few houses on prearranged routes, where they only see the same parents they see all the time, and they go home. Halloween was never really dangerous, but this is where we are.

Halloween is a Satanic holiday. It’s huge with the witches. That’s the reason to stay home and dress normally. The razor blades and drugs are mythical.

If your parents let you did things leftists from up north thought were unsafe, or they slapped or spanked you, leftists could not do anything about it. There were no powerful agencies roaming around taking children away from old-fashioned parents. If your parents took you to the emergency room with bruises, the doctors never called anyone to interrogate you and have your kids carted off to scary facilities where bullying and sodomy took place.

It must be true that kids used to have more accidents. Surely modern practices have made some difference. I’m sure government intervention saves more kids from abuse than it used to. I guess kids are safer if they can’t leave their yards. But I think some of our measures are overprotective. The truth is that a healthy upbringing in which kids face some risks is valuable. Probably so valuable that it’s better to lose some kids than to turn the rest into helpless basket cases.

Some kids have no common sense. Some kids are smart but make stupid mistakes. These things will always be true. Bad things will always happen.

Here’s a problem: now that we have all these safety policies, even if they’re overreactions, if your child has a very rare accident because you didn’t adhere to modern nanny standards, you will be considered a bad parent. Your spouse may agree. Society is destroying fathers’ ability to do a very important job: toughening kids up. It’s siding with destructive female neuroses.

Disempowering fathers and enabling neurotic women are almost always disastrous.

When I think of the terrible ways in which my parents failed me, I never think about not having a bike helmet. I think about my dad choking my mother. I remember my parents making no effort to teach me good habits or help me succeed. They didn’t teach me to do homework. They didn’t make me do chores. They didn’t show me how to defend myself. They taught me nothing about investing. My mother didn’t teach me proper hygiene. I was not introduced to the Holy Spirit, who is the only source of safety and success. The guns, skateboards, knives, fireworks…not issues.

What do we do about the house? Do we sell it? Do we seal off the upstairs, hoping there won’t be a fire? Do we put cameras up there?

The yard is both good and bad. It’s a world of adventure for kids. On the other hand, the grass in this area is thin and awful, so you wouldn’t want to lie down on it or do much of anything not involving being upright. It has a fence and gate, and that’s good for safety, but getting to other kids will be impossible without vehicles.

The workshop might as well have been designed intentionally to put kids in the hospital. Table saw, band saw, tractor, lawnmower, sharp things, pointy things, hammers, chemicals, torches…send them in there when you get tired of feeding them, and you might get lucky. I guess locks can solve the problem.

What about cars? My Explorer is turning out to be a lemon by design, and it’s a horror to work on. Ford designed it so stupidly it is likely to need thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs even if I take care of it, so I’m thinking of getting a Toyota 4Runner. But the 4Runner isn’t THE safest car on the road. What if my kids get in an accident, and I didn’t buy them THE safest car?

The guns can be locked in a storage room, and of course, the key will have to be hidden, and not in a place the kids will find it, unlike most things parents hide. Every dad who ever hid a dirty magazine, and every mother who ever hid a device or outfit from a dirty boutique, should be aware that their kids found them. It happens.

What are we supposed to do about schooling? DeSantis has done a lot to help, but Florida schools are still dominated by leftist morons and affirmative action cases. They didn’t disappear when he was elected. They are burrowing and hiding, waiting for him to leave.

They will still try to groom our kids and, yes, turn them into homosexuals and phony, mutilated “transgenders.” They will still teach them that socialism is a great idea. It worked out so well in Cuba and Cambodia. They will teach them that rebellion is brilliant and that their elders, with all their wisdom, are silly imbeciles. They will still see our children–God’s children–as theirs.

Some day, this blog post may be seen as proof my children should be taken from me.

Homeschooling is a must. That or private schooling. What are the odds we’ll be able to find a good private school that acknowledges the Holy Spirit?

The kids won’t be able to walk past our private road. They won’t be able to ride bikes much of anywhere. The geography won’t permit a lot of wandering.

What do we do about phones? Thanks to Disney, Florida is a pedophile’s dream, so they flock here. You can’t turn a kid loose without some means of calling for help. But if you give them smartphones, they send each other naked pictures and videos, and they watch adult pornography. If you give them cheap phones, the other kids torment them.

We can’t protect them from society, which is now extremely filthy. They have to live on this planet. It’s not like it used to be. By the time they get to high school, they will know about sodomy, VD, pornography, and seductive causes that give them excuses to cultivate sadism, bigotry, and arrogance.

What do we do about the Internet?

It’s like we’ll be raising children in a building with walls, floors, fixtures, and furnishings smeared with excrement from diseased people, hoping they won’t get sick.

With regard to the physical dangers, we’ll have to make decisions about risk and accept the consequences. That’s all we can do. We can’t raise kids, especially effeminate boys, who can’t do anything but cry and operate phones and tablets with their stick arms and muscular thumbs.

I told my wife to expect our children to get cut, scraped, burned, and bruised. It’s not preventable. They will get sick sometimes. They will get scars. We live in a cursed world. If you don’t want your kids to suffer, have yourself sterilized. If you don’t want to risk losing children, don’t have them in the first place.

God risks it, and loses, every day. He loses most of the people he creates.

I have been concerned that I might love my children so much I smother them and stunt them. It will be hard, handing a kid a new pocket knife or even letting him ride a bicycle in public. It will be hard to let him associate with other kids without me, knowing about bullying and peer pressure, which is the voice of the antichrist. I have to remind myself that human beings like me ruined the world and made it an unsafe place, and now we have to live in it without hiding from it.

Regarding the spiritual dangers–the temptation and corruption–we will just have to stay close to God and do what we know to do. After that, we have to accept what happens. Short of joining a cult and moving to an isolated compound, I see no way to raise kids in anything resembling an acceptable environment.

This world is a rotten place, and it’s our fault. It’s disgusting and dangerous. Not really fit to live in. It’s getting worse rapidly. I wish we had somewhere else to go. But it’s either have kids here or die childless.

I hate this world. Having children will make me hate it more.

God created the world so he could reproduce, and he expects people to have children. We will play the ball as it lies, and we will rely on God, thanking him and never blaming him.