To the editor;
Though it’s only for April, every day of the year should be Child Abuse Prevention Month in this world.
Emotional and/or psychological trauma from unhindered toxic abuse typically results in a helpless child’s brain improperly developing. If allowed to continue for a prolonged period, it can act as a starting point into a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines. It’s like a form of non-physical-impact brain damage.
The lasting emotional and/or psychological pain from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
It’s written in the book Childhood Disrupted: “[Even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
Being free nations, society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children. Society can, however, educate all young people for the most important job ever, through child-development science curriculum. If nothing else, such education could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
The health of all children needs to be of real importance to us all — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
A physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. Mindlessly minding our own business on such matters has too often proven humanly devastating.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock, B.C.
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