Our Culture Is Apathetic Towards Children.

How American culture has abandoned children, and the many problems they face today.

What the hell is wrong?

Something is drastically wrong with our country, our culture, and our social cohesion. It is undeniable. You can feel it in the air every time you turn on the tv, check any of the many social media apps we doom scroll on for hours, or just try to have a conversation with anyone who voted for a different candidate than you. It feels like walking on hot coals. One wrong move and you will burn all good will.

Additionally, it seems like so many people speak on topics from a position of perceived authority, while knowing next to nothing about what they are talking about. What in the world makes them so bold? But it’s not just a lack of understanding of the many social dynamics at play, that could certainly be forgiven. Many people in my generation, Gen Z, and some younger millennials lack basic knowledge of just about anything. Just watch this short video from YouTuber Justin Awad where he asks young adults basic questions on history, math, and geography and they struggle to come up with a coherent answer:

If you are anything like me, it is quite jarring to watch people that we interact with on a daily basis completely unable to answer basic questions (though admittedly still funny). It would be incredibly easy to say that the education system has simply failed our children, that they should have learned these things in school, and you would be correct in doing so. Though there does seem to be a deeper cultural issue at play that sees a general disinterest in education in the first place That starts well before the classroom, it starts at home.

Our culture has grown a strange apathy for children with dire consequences for the future that we are still only just beginning to feel. Between the abortion debate and declining native birth rate, increasingly poor educational outcomes, rise of childhood chronic disease, and the uncontrolled technological spaces we allow our children to occupy, the children of this nation are sick.

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Making it to birth

Once upon a time, the leading narrative amongst pro-abortion advocates in the Democrat party was that it should be, “safe, legal, and rare.” Since then, the narrative has shifted so far in favor of abortion that we are seriously considering abortion up to birth in several states and altogether denying the humanity of the children whose lives abortions claim. In fact, states like Colorado, New Jersey, and Oregon allow abortions without a gestation limit and do not require explicit medical reason. This is moral decay.

Of course, many states in this country offer abortion services for reasons other than “medical necessity,” which is largely in of itself a myth. There are very few instances in which an abortion is a medical necessity where a caesarean section birth could be performed, saving both the mother and child. Furthermore, in every state we make exceptions to allow the mother’s life to be saved. But while this is the loudest part of the abortion debate, it is far from the biggest.

The reality is that only around 2% of reported abortions nationwide are for medical reasons. Conversely, about 96% of abortions are for purely elective reasons, be it, economic, lifestyle, or other concerns. This is cultural decay, and it is a shocking part of the abortion debate that many people do not want to talk about.

All of this brings up an interesting point regarding the birth rate in the United States, which has been in decline for some time. Similar to abortion, the vast majority of couples who choose not to have kids report their reasons for not wanting to do so as being purely economic and lifestyle concerns, or a general disinterest. Others express a concern for the world they would be bringing these lives into. This is perhaps a more compelling argument when we look at the reality of the lives of kids today.

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Kids these days!

“Kids these days don’t know anything! They just sit on their asses mindlessly looking at a screen all day. Back in my day…” is a statement we have all probably heard before, or something close to it. As a member of Gen Z, I would be hard pressed to say there isn’t some element of truth to this claim. Actually, it may be more true than my generation wants to give it credit. Educational outcomes in the United States of America are in a horrible state, but rarely do we get to the heart of why that is. Instead, the common narrative is that we simply don’t put enough money into our kids' education, but is that actually true?

One could perhaps be forgiven for making it through highschool without having a full understanding of calculus, but it is a shame that any child should struggle to read in this country. As such, I feel that literacy rates are a sensible metric for school performance. Any schools that cannot properly equip their children to read are abject failures. So then, it should be shocking to hear that 77% of students tested at Patterson High School in Baltimore read at an elementary to kindergarten level. This is devastating.

This is despite the $21,000 spent on each student every year in Baltimore city schools, as of 2022. For comparison, the national average per student in FY2021 was just over $14,300. As some further food for thought, Benjamin Franklin High School District in Louisiana had a 99% reading proficiency score in FY2024 and only spent just over $11,000 per student. In short, there is more to schooling than the money put into it. There is also a cultural aspect, and what we find is that our culture simply does not value education as much as it used to.

Now when I say that, what I mean is that we simply do not pay nearly as much attention to what our school experience is like for our students as we should. In fact, according to the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, the vast majority of parents are completely out of sync with their own children’s opinions on their education. For example, Brookings found that only 26% of students say they love their school, while a much larger 65% of parents believe their kids do. It is bizarre to me that any parent would not know how their own child felt about their school experience.

One key way parents can get more involved in their children's education is through school boards, which have been traditionally overlooked. It was not really until covid that parents at large started taking a good hard look at what their children are truly up to in schools, sparking videos from across the country of angry parents chewing out school board officials. So then, you may find it interesting that a study by American Progress found that 68% of school board members do not have kids enrolled in the districts they represent, if they have kids at all. Parents truly seeking change need to occupy these spaces.

However, that's not going to change overnight. School boards are elected, and currently, the average school board election only sees about 10% voter turnout tops. To add insult to injury, The Journalist’s Resource suggests that in several states, the majority of people that do vote in school board elections also do not have kids enrolled in the district. As I said before, it is time for parents to step up.

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The broken home

There Will Be Blood is a fantastic movie. If you haven’t seen it, I cannot recommend it enough. Even without the context, there is a little something that our society could take away from Daniel Day-Lewis performance as Daniel Plainview. I doubt that this will be the first time you have heard someone mention that America has a real problem with divorce and absent fathers. There are many reasons for this that we could get into, be it culture, the welfare system, economics, et cetera. You get the point, and while these things do matter and are partially worth discussing, as far as I am concerned, these are excuses meant to abdicate our society of its responsibility to its children. Instead, let us look at the data of how kids from broken homes wind up, and then you decide for yourself whether any of these things matter more than the state of our children.

According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, last year over 23 million children belonged to single parent households, with 14.3 million of these children residing in a home with only the mother. For comparison, only 3.5 million reside only with the father, with the rest of the cases being split custody. These children are more likely to live in poverty, display behavioral issues, and experience childhood trauma. They are more likely to drop out of high school. In young boys, single family households are found to significantly increase the probability of committing juvenile or early adulthood crime.

Divorce itself takes a huge emotional toll on children, often amplified depending on the age of the child. A study published in PubMed found that young men exposed to their parents divorce experience more than double the suicidality of their peers, even when accounting for other childhood trauma.

Interestingly, many of the problems we see in children from single parent households are amplified in young boys. Fathers are incredibly important in the development of boys. Mothers, on average, just aren’t fully equipped to raise and discipline young boys the same way fathers do. This often leads to boys growing up without fully understanding boundaries, consequences, and their responsibilities as a man. Many of these men will repeat the same mistakes as their estranged fathers, feeding into the cycle. As a society, we must find a way to break this cycle and raise a new generation of young men to be present in their children's lives.

One way to do this would be to break the incentive structure feeding into the divorce and single parent household system we see in the United States. Instead of giving extraordinarily large welfare checks to single parents indefinitely, we should put a heavier focus on helping these single parents find stable employment. Additionally, we should put higher incentives towards marriage. Increased tax credits for married couples, children, and potentially more favorable loans for houses for married couples could help to ease the economic burden on couples and help encourage them to stay together.

Culturally, we need to bring back the focus on marriage and the nuclear family. While non traditional family structures can sometimes work, we know that the single parent family structure does not, and we must move away from this for the sake of our children and their future.

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Childhood chronic disease

The fact is, chronic disease in this country is way up across the board, including our children. Obesity, autism, asthma, and a litany of other diseases are far more prevalent in children today than those of previous generations. A common counter argument to some of these diseases being on the rise, such as autism or ADHD, is simply that past doctors were not as good at diagnosing these diseases. If that were true, we would expect that there would be an increase in adult diagnoses to match the skyrocketing childhood diagnoses. While there is some evidence to suggest that there has been a slight increase in adult diagnoses year over year, it does not track what we are seeing in kids. It also says nothing about other diseases like allergies and obesity. As President John F. Kennedy once famously said:

“There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their weeks exercise.”

So then, it is perhaps fitting that his nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr., is one of the leading activists in the United States for pointing out this glaring issue. Yet he has received massive backlash for being willing to actually do the work to find out what exactly is behind the rise in childhood disease and not simply accepting this as the status quo. Instead, critics will criticize him for suggesting we do more research into vaccine safety to ensure that the way we vaccinate our children is not causing any adverse effects. Granted the average child in the United States will receive 25+ vaccinations by the time they reach 18 months of age, this is hardly an unfair question, and it is worth doing independent research uninfluenced by the pharmaceutical giants that have helped to fund past studies.

While vaccination is certainly a heavily contested debate, food is most certainly not. The food we eat today is full of chemicals, be it preservatives, food dyes, gums, or otherwise. Some of these chemicals are banned in other parts of the world, and yet we allow ourselves and our children to eat them on a daily basis. Changing the food industry to remove these chemicals which almost certainly play a part in the poor health of our children, and the average American generally, is yet another herculean task that will require government intervention. Thankfully, with Robert Kennedy Jr, we may finally be able to begin the process of making America healthy again.

Physical ailments are not the only medical plague on our children. It is no secret that America has a crisis of mental health. Depression and suicidal ideation, ADHD, and other disorders are far higher than in previous generations. While the previously mentioned challenges certainly play a part in this, one thing we have not mentioned is the influence of social media.

For young girls, social media is a source of incredible social pressure and stress. Women are, on average, more social than men and more susceptible to forces of social cohesion. They have a stronger natural desire to fit in. This manifests in a variety of ways. Take as an example the bombardment of “influencers” who have had thousands of dollars of cosmetic enhancements, creating the “unrealistic beauty standards” as we have come to call them. Teenage girls cannot achieve these beauty standards, nor should they have to in order to be comfortable in their own skin. Regardless, the constant bombardment has driven many of them into mental illnesses like depression, anorexia, or otherwise.

On the other hand, we can look at the constant flow of the 24 hour news cycle driving both young men and women to want to stand up for whatever the cause of the day is, these pressures build up on young and malleable minds who desire acceptance. The reality is that these children cannot live up to the standards that social media appears to set for them. It is natural to want to help when you see messages saying “Black Lives Matter,” or “Trans Rights are Human Rights.” The messaging of these political campaigns is designed to make you feel bad and drive you to want to help. Unfortunately, your average teen just isn’t equipped to drive massive social change in such a manner, and so that bad feeling that something is wrong and you cannot help continues to build, creating more anxiety and depression.

But that is not where it ends. The social pressures put on children at an ever increasingly young age has driven them to the uncertainty and anxiety that causes them not to want to have children, as we have discussed before. The less children, the more the apathy grows, and here we have the negative feedback loop that has fed the social decay in our society for the past few generations.

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Saving the children

Well, that was a lot of doom and gloom, so what can we do? First, the messaging from older generations to the children of tomorrow needs a drastic overhaul. Does America have it’s problems? Undoubtedly, it does. Yet America is still the greatest country on Earth, and one of few where real change is possible. If you want to effect real change, the doom and gloom is not going to be the way to do it. A dissatisfied and unhappy population is almost never effective at bringing about positive social change. Just look at the French Revolution, Maoist China, or the founding of the Soviet Union. All were incredibly bloody and ultimately unsuccessful in establishing a better future.

Real positive social change requires positive messaging and happy, hard working, principled people to bring it about. The Democrat Party has completely lost this basic truth. While they often portray themselves as being happy, positive people, such as Kamala’s campaign of “joy,” the reality is that their messaging if full of doom and uncertainty. They do not provide a positive outlook of the future. Instead, they have provided a messaging that large swaths of the country are under attack. This has lead to their incredible unfavorability as of early 2025.

In comparison, Donald Trump won in 2024 with his historic second, non consecutive term, winning both the popular vote and electoral college. One thing those on the far left fail to understand is that Donald Trump provides a hopeful vision of the future that is attractive to those in the center, or soft on liberalism. He inspires pride as an American in a time where that is hard to come by. While this is great for him, it is not reflective of the Republican Party as a whole, which is not united in this messaging.

While the Democrats have an uninspiring and uncertain message of doom and gloom for the future, many Republicans have stuck to the message of “picking yourself up by the bootstraps and working hard” in a time when house prices are far out of reach for Americans working the average household income. This is not helpful messaging, and it is why, with the exception of Donald Trump, the Democrats and Neocons have had near total control for decades.

While younger children certainly are not receptive to these messages, their parents are. When their parents feel hopeless, so the children feed off these negative emotions and too suffer. Older children see these messages on social media, in the news, or through picking up on the conversations of the adults around them. In this way, it then becomes the duty of us all to provide a positive outlook of the future for the next generation.

We must take the health of our children seriously and explore every option to increase the quality of their foods, medications, and end the chronic disease epidemic plaguing the country. Americans deserve better than to suffer from depression, anxiety, obesity, anorexia, ADHD, asthma, or any of the countless diseases we see on the rise today. We must make our children stronger in both the body and the mind.

We must reform education, and inspire our children with knowledge. Knowledge is power, and it unlocks countless possibilities for our future. It is a shame that any child should not be curious and have a desire to learn. Something is wrong, and we cannot allow it to continue.

We must save the family. Reform the welfare system that incentivizes single parent households that scar children and provide instability in the most important years of development. Provide incentives for marriage, and inspire a generation of fathers to love and teach their children, breaking the cycle of fatherlessness. In doing so, we will see more children born and start to turn around the declining birthrate. In this, we can only hope to make abortion unthinkable once again.

Our children are the future, and we have not done them justice. There is no better time than now to turn things around.

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I hope you enjoyed. This is part one of a series of essays I plan to write on American Culture, its foundations, and where we have gone wrong. In the next essay, I plan to detail the central American values that inform our culture and history. In the meantime, subscribe for free so you know when part two drops!