What Are You Thinking …(Child Proof)

From athletic activities to music lessons kids from 5 to 16 are continually kept busy. One can often find children involved in two activities during the same season. Successfully combining activities with schoolwork takes a total family effort. Parents often turn into shuttle buses as their children are driven to each practice. Parents often value their child’s popularity and their own status based on the sheer number of activities their child is part of. I mention this not as a criticism but rather as a comparison to what really is important.

While everyone hustles through their busy week trying to make their children’s scheduled activity times we have forgotten what matters most. Children are no longer safe in today’s society. As successful as parents have become in managing children’s activities, they have failed in providing a safe place for them to grow up. We have all accepted that child abductions, school shootings, and school bomb threats are now part of everyday life. Every week we hear of a different child dying. Each time you drop your daughter or son off at school or they walk home from the bus there is a chance you may never see them again. Obviously, it scares any parent that their children’s safety is not guaranteed. What is shocking is that so little outrage is heard from parents on the concerns for child safety. Rather than worry and alarm that lasts a few days after each new school shooting or child abduction, why is there not a continuous drumbeat for the necessary changes required to keep these precious kids secure? Should not demands be made of all law enforcement and lawmakers that they do whatever is necessary to protect children?

Like most everything in life we instead walk blindly hoping that such terrible things like a child being abducted from her bedroom or a teenager shooting kids in a local school will not happen to us. The effort to create change needed to provide a secure existence for our children would take us away from our busy everyday lives. Until we can rest at night knowing that each and every child is safe, parents need to reprioritize what is important. No law should be created; no freedoms should be given to anything that trumps the safety of a child. Whether it is child porn on the internet or bad behavior allowed in schools, we cannot allow our children to be at risk. We can make medicine caps child proof but for some reason we lack the will to make children harm proof. Each case like Jessica Lunsford in Florida or the Red Lake, Minnesota school shooting seems to do nothing more than numb parents. Each instance appears to make us just throw up our arms and say “oh well…..it is now part of everyday life.” Like an F bomb can now be used in a PG –13 movie I guess many are willing to accept the killing of children as something that is now the norm. If so, God help us. Each occurrence should only make us grow angrier, more full of contempt. Whatever we have done with our laws, our policies, our alert systems that has allowed this to happen needs to be restudied, rethought, and reversed. Demanding anything less is to admit failure as a generation of parents. Imagine it ........in 2005 we now need police in high schools..........what does that say about the world we live in.