Children are not life’s accessories

Published on April 11, 2026April 11, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

High-profile working mothers may not be the best models for young conservative women. Their attempts at juggling stressful jobs with raising children are undermining the case for motherhood.

by Sarah Wilder

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is under fire for a viral clip from an event with Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk. In the clip, Leavitt tells a young woman in the crowd that she should pursue both motherhood and a career because “actually being a mom and having a family and having a job, it gives you the greatest perspective.”

She goes on to say that “you can have the hardest, worst, most stressful day at your job, but when you go home to a beautiful baby and children who are just happy to see you no matter what, it is the most refreshing, beautiful thing.”

A lot of the debate over women working vs. staying home devolves into preachy pedantics from both sides regarding how much time a mother can or should work, at what age she can or should work, and what kind of work she can do. These conversations are nearly always fruitless because each woman’s circumstance is different. Many women do simply have to work to make ends meet, others are fooling themselves that their job that barely covers the nanny’s salary is necessary.

The core problem with Leavitt’s mentality isn’t just that she works an all-hours, high-stress job away from her young children. Nor is it just that she is painting an unrealistic picture of what’s “possible” as a working mother to women who are not going to land one of the most high-profile careers in comms in the country. Indeed, Leavitt could have a nanny bring her baby along for nursing sessions easily, but most working moms will have to pump alone in a bathroom while a daycare worker bottle feeds. She is definitely setting up her audience of normal women in normal careers for disappointment – but that’s not the whole issue.

Leavitt speaks about gaining “greater perspective” as a working mom than she would otherwise. Many criticized her for claiming her job offers her perspective on her motherhood, but she was actually claiming the opposite. For her, the job comes first and her children are the cute little perspectives she cuddles for a couple hours at home before bedtime. It’s a complete reversal of the natural order. For Leavitt, her children are a good thing because they are a net benefit to her career.

So rather than hand-wring over whether White House press secretary falls in the pre-approved list of acceptable jobs for mothers, let’s start with the principle: Mothers should prioritize motherhood, which looks like hands-on, bodily nurturing of her very young children. In the same way, fathers should prioritize fatherhood, which looks like protection and provision.

Once we get these priorities in order, the obsessive online debates over whether a man should change diapers or a woman can bring in an income seem tangential to the real issue. Mothers must seriously ask themselves if their jobs are becoming their identity over motherhood, and whether their career exists for the good of the children or the other way around.

by Sarah Wilder. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

The feminists’ assault on the family hurts children most

Published on January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family has been dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems; the consequences are catastrophic.

by Melania Gill at The Conservative Woman

THERE is no such thing as a baby,’ wrote renowned paediatrician Donald Winnicott in 1942. ‘There is a baby and someone.’

His meaning was simple and profound: an infant does not and cannot exist in isolation. It is attached. In the 1960s John Bowlby’s great insight into child psychology known as ‘attachment theory’ explained why. Over the last few decades neuroscientific research has confirmed the observations his theory (of attachment, maternal deprivation and separation anxiety) were based on. A baby comes into being initially through its attachment to its mother – ideally through attuned care, emotional presence and the steady regulation of distress by either parent. This infant dependency is not a flaw to be overcome, it is the foundation of its development.

Yet it is precisely this truth that contemporary feminist ideology and thinking denies. As science has clarified and confirmed the importance of connection, social practices have moved in the opposite direction. Practices that formally cut or break this connection, from abortion to institutionalised early day-care through to family separation, have increased or been normalised in recent years. Decisions that are framed in terms of autonomy share a common feature: the deliberate severing of human dependency at its most vulnerable points.

We are living through a cultural moment that denies such dependency, sees attachment as danger, and relational need as oppression. In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family is dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems. What is presented as progress increasingly resembles something else: a refusal to accept the basic conditions under which human beings develop at all. The casualties from this are not abstract. They are children.

Decades of developmental neuroscience show that the human brain is shaped through early emotional relationships. The neuroscientist Allan Schore’s work demonstrates that the systems responsible for emotional regulation, empathy, stress tolerance and social understanding develop in direct response to the quality of caregiving. Brain development is not merely biological; it is relational.

When caregiving is emotionally attuned, a coherent sense of ‘self’ forms. The child learns that feelings can be experienced without catastrophe, that relationships survive disagreement and that dependence does not mean annihilation. When caregiving is mis-attuned, when parenting is driven by unresolved anger, trauma, grievance or rigid belief, particularly in cases involving parental alienation, something else happens. Children learn which emotions are safe and which are dangerous. They learn which parent must be protected and when, which feelings must be hidden and which version of reality is safest to adopt. Over time, the child’s inner life thins. They stop discovering who they are and start performing who they need to be. Across nearly 20 years of family assessment, I have repeatedly seen this occurring even when there is no overt cruelty. Often it is quiet: originating in a parent who can’t tolerate ambivalence or who requires their child to mirror their emotional reality.

Unresolved anger and distress from childhood relational harm is rarely expressed directly; rather it’s projected outward on to those whom cultural narratives have already positioned as dangerous or blameworthy – men or fathers, for example. In present ideological climates, they frequently serve this function. The child becomes the carrier of this projected anger. What looks like confidence or moral clarity is, in reality, fear held rigidly in place.

Such children can speak with striking certainty about adult matters they cannot possibly understand. They repeat slogans rather than thoughts, show contempt where curiosity should be, and appear strong while lacking emotional depth. What looks like independence is a self that has had to harden too early; a fundamental and unconscious lack of trust in all relationships.

Underlying this is a failure of early emotional attunement. When children are not accurately seen, soothed, or mirrored by primary caregivers, the brain systems responsible for emotional regulation and identity integration do not fully mature (Schore, 2015; Fonagy et al, 2002).

The result is chronic, often unrecognised anger and emotional instability. During adolescence, these vulnerabilities may manifest as identity confusion, distorted memory, intolerance of dissent, and defensive self-enhancement (Erikson, 1968; Kernberg, 1975). The thousands of reality-based professionals working on family law cases across the world witness this time and again in depressingly increasing numbers.

Dependency is not weakness; it is the engine of development. Children become independent through relationship and connection, not in defiance of them. Yet much contemporary ideology rests on the opposite premise: that needing others is oppression, that attachment is danger, and that autonomy demands severance. Here, radical feminism reveals its deepest psychological error. By reframing attachment as a flawed concept and dependency as harm, it renders parental care, especially paternal care, suspect. Fathers become optional, even inherently dangerous. It creates a ‘case’ for chopping off half of a child’s relational world. By prioritising adult identity claims over children’s developmental needs, it inverts the moral order and takes over culture.

Unsurprisingly, societies that celebrate this model now face collapsing birth rates, rising loneliness and escalating psychological distress. Extinction-level fertility is not only an economic warning; it’s a psychological one. It signals a culture that has lost faith in continuity and is heading for oblivion.

It’s impossible to ignore that this same distorted psychological ‘logic’ underpins both radical feminism and contemporary transgender ideology, despite their surface-level conflicts. At their core, both reject biological givens, evolutionary continuity, and developmental constraint in favour of self-definition unconstrained by body, relationship or reproduction. When realities are treated as oppressive rather than formative, identity becomes unmoored. This creates fertile ground for narcissistic adaptation.

For children and adolescents already struggling with mis-attuned parenting or fragile identity formation, ideologies that promise absolute self-definition offer powerful relief. The projection of unresolved childhood attachment anger becomes a demand for justice. Self-righteous certainty replaces curiosity. Any challenge is reframed as harm and aggressively denied using howling moral outrage and ‘cancellation’ of those who disagree.

From a developmental perspective, this is profoundly anti-evolutionary and truly dystopian. A society that denies sex, embodiment, reproduction and dependency is not merely redefining identity, it is splitting itself from continuity. The result is fragility: identities that cannot tolerate disagreement and relationships that cannot survive difference. And there is a chilling historical parallel.

What we see now is not biological eugenics, but a cultural analogue: deciding which family bonds are expendable, which parents are suspect, and which children must adapt to ideologically curated environments.

Fatherhood becomes a developmental risk by presumption. Children are expected to reorganise themselves accordingly. They call it liberation; ‘back in the real world’ we know it as catastrophic damage to families and children on an industrial scale.

History shows that systems convinced of their moral superiority struggle to see the harm they produce. Once children become symbols rather than developing minds, the line between safeguarding and social engineering disappears. The appalling outcomes are being and will be written into the psychology of the next generation. When a culture teaches its children that they need no one, it should not be surprised when they grow up unable to love, trust, or carry the future they were meant to inherit.

The family is not a patriarchal relic. It is the primary psychological infrastructure of all societies. Undermine it, and everything downstream weakens. Winnicott was right: there is no such thing as a baby alone, a child, or in fact anyone. And there is no such thing as a society that survives the denial of dependency.

By Melanie Gill. This article first appeared at The Conservative Woman and is republished here with permission.

Melanie Gill is a UK-based attachment specialist, psychologist and forensic consultant, working as an expert witness in complex family proceedings for nearly two decades. Despite an ongoing feminist-inspired campaign to ‘cancel’ her from her family court work she continues to campaign for children and families and remains passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into policy and family law.

The Conservative Woman is one of Britain’s fastest-growing websites and is committed to explaining and promoting the virtues of people’s instinctive social conservatism and its importance for children’s wellbeing.

The Joy of Being the “Default Parent”

Published on January 14, 2026January 15, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

The “default parent” is the one who carries the so-called “invisible load” of administrative tasks related to the children, but more significantly, she bears the emotional tasks of raising children.

Author and mother Gina Bontempo noted on X recently that the online uproar over a woman being the “default parent” in her child’s life smacks of the lie that men and women can, and should, be treated as interchangeable.

For those unfamiliar with internet lingo, the phenomenon in question is as old as mothers and fathers themselves, extending beyond internet scuffles. The “default parent” is the one who carries the so-called “invisible load” of administrative tasks related to the children (doctor’s appointments, school events, family vacations). But more significantly, she bears the emotional tasks of raising children. Mothers will often complain that their sleep-deprived or sick or developmentally fragile children will flock to them even when the mothers are burned out, while their husbands stand unencumbered and unneeded right beside them.

It’s not that this isn’t true of most parent-child relationships, but that mothers need to make peace with what is both natural and, truly, a brief blessing. Children’s natural preference for their mother is a biological reality. There’s no use in fostering resentment towards either your husband or your needy children about it.

“Obviously Mom is the one that babies need and want most when they’re hungry or tired or in pain,” Bontempo wrote. “To pretend otherwise is to pretend like men and women, fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We aren’t. The feminist-coded mothers on social media complaining about the stress of always being the ‘default parent’ live in a fantasy world where moms and dads are exactly the same, perfectly equal and switchable when it comes to young children. Very dysfunctional thinking.”

The very phrase “default parent” is the type of genderless word-slop that arises from a society that views differences between men and women as symptoms of systemic prejudice, even when these differences are inherent and natural.

Rather, the “default parent” has the joy of being, albeit temporarily, her child’s almost sole source of comfort and rest. The mother has the immense privilege of satisfying all of her child’s needs in the first year or so of his or her life.

Indeed, few talk about what must be the frustrations of the parent who is not “default.” My toddler son is already starting to flip the script and as a mother I have been able to see how hard it can be to be the person your child does not primarily want for comfort.

To be your child’s “default,” to be recognized as his primary source of comfort and even nourishment is a blessing that the moms of TikTok would do well to enjoy before it ends.

by Sarah Wilder. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Homeschooling in America: from fringe to future

Published on October 3, 2025November 24, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

The number of families homeschooling in the United States has doubled in the past five years, meaning it is becoming a mainstream alternative to the traditional model of schooling.

Imagine a girl, about age 15, sitting in the cozy four-season room of her home. She might be clutching a Jane Austen novel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. A yellow school bus passes the home and stops at the corner of her lot. Children tumble out, some her age, but many much younger. They just finished the school day, having arrived at 7 a.m., and did not arrive home until about 3:30 p.m. They will have roughly two hours of homework.

The girl started her school day around 10 a.m. She woke up naturally, had the time to prepare and eat a nutritious breakfast, and then powered through her schoolbooks at the kitchen table. Today she focused on her chemistry, Latin and language arts. She completed her school day after roughly three hours of work.

Her siblings worked alongside her. Their mother, doing her household chores, periodically checked in to see how her children were doing. After the girl finished her schoolwork, she went on a walk with a fellow homeschooled friend.

She is enjoying her leisure time with her novel, and tonight she will go to tennis practice at the local community center. She has no homework and will be in bed by 10 p.m. She aspires to be a nurse, and next year will begin classes at her local community college, which will eventually count toward her nursing degree.

This young girl is homeschooled, and her future is bright. By the end of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, every state in the U.S. had some form of compulsory schooling law. Homeschooling was largely discouraged and unregulated until the 1970s and 1980s. Those who chose to homeschool were generally Christian conservatives or secular freethinkers. Homeschooling was a fringe movement that was met with official resistance. Families that did homeschool faced truancy charges and were taken to court.

Homeschool advocates sought judicial protection, citing the Supreme Court decision of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which Amish parents challenged a state law requiring children to attend school until the age of 16.¹ The Court ruled that forcing Amish children to attend high school violated their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The case centered on ending formal education after eighth grade, and it established a crucial precedent affirming parents’ rights to direct their children’s education. While few today advocate ending formal education after eighth grade, the case laid a legal foundation supporting homeschooling as a legitimate and personalized educational path.

Pandemic pivot

By 1993, all 50 states legalized homeschooling, but the oversight varied greatly by state. As a result of this legalization, the number of homeschooled children grew from 15,000 in the 1980s to an estimated 2 million just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.² Homeschooling was on the radar, both legally and statistically, but it was not something most families seriously considered.

The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by storm, and education was certainly affected. Spring 2020 emergenc school closures sent educators and parents alike scrambling to maintain the semblance of a school education at home. In the first weeks, when the closures were expected to be brief, students were often given packets of worksheets or would meet with their classes virtually for an hour, with the rest of the day dependent on parental oversight.

As the fog of uncertainty lifted to reveal a longer road ahead, schools and parents adapted to make the school
day more structured. In most instances, students were provided with electronic devices, and virtual learning went on throughout the day. The virtual learning was balanced by individual work to be reviewed by the parent or teacher after the fact. Later in the pandemic, this virtual learning combined with in-person learning to create a hybrid model. Today, the Covid school shutdowns are almost universally reviled as a failure of educational policy.

Many parents grudgingly went along for lack of choice. For the first time, they balanced being co-teachers in their child’s education with their own careers and responsibilities. Some came face-to-face with their children’s curriculum, only to cringe at what they saw.³ Others found they liked spending the days with their children and being hands-on in the learning process. These parents began to see homeschooling as a genuine option.

A dramatic increase

In 2019, prior to the pandemic, homeschooling statistically represented only a small movement— just 3.4 percent of school-age children were homeschooled.⁴ At the peak of the pandemic, most children experienced their schooling at home, while some were withdrawn from their registered school of attendance to be homeschooled. In 2020-21, 6 percent of American students were reported to be homeschooled.⁵ More recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey show that 6.3 to 7.9 percent of school-age children were homeschooled in 2024, comprising 3.4 to 4.3 million children.⁶ In just five years, the number of homeschooled children in the U.S. has doubled.

The pandemic fueled the start of this growth, and perhaps without parents having found themselves in the role of co-teachers, it would not have been so rapid. Yet, several years after the pandemic, the number of homeschooled children continues to grow. Homeschooling is no longer a fringe choice. It has become a significant educational method in the United States.

When considering homeschooling, many assume that the format of the school day is modeled after a traditional classroom. While it can fit that description, this is far from the approach most families take. Homeschoolers are a diverse group. Demographically, it runs the full gamut of religion, political affiliation, income, education levels and ethnicity. Naturally, the educational approach will vary greatly depending on family resources and priorities. Some of the more common approaches include:

Classical Education: Classical education aims for a structured approach with emphasis on grammar, logic and rhetoric through studying great books, history and language. Generally, families following this approach will purchase their curriculum through a company such as Mother of Divine Grace or The Well-Trained Mind Academy.

Charlotte Mason: A British educator from the late 19th century, Mason emphasized a gentle, literature-rich method of learning. This philosophy cultivates a love of education through “living books,” nature and the arts. “Living books” are engaging works that bring subjects to life, in stark contrast to dry textbooks.

Montessori: Based on the philosophy of Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, this method is child-led and focused on fostering independence and practical life skills in a tactile environment. This method is particularly popular among parents of young children.

Unschooling: As the name suggests, this method largely rejects the concept of structured learning and is led entirely by the child’s interests and motivations.

Hybrid Homeschooling: involves a mix of in-home instruction and outside classes, generally provided through a private, part-time school. Students will learn at the school for a portion of the week and are provided a curriculum to follow at home under the direction of the parent for the remainder of the week.

Benefits of homeschooling

Most families probably use a combination of these approaches to best fit the needs of their children. These methods are best combined with ample usage of extracurricular and social opportunities for children.

The benefits of homeschooling are abundant for most families. Katie Fitzgerald, a mother of five in Maryland, states: “My children are authentically themselves. They have time and space to pursue their God-given gifts and the support and encouragement to persevere in them. They are well-spoken and confident around children and adults.” This may be one of the more common reasons parents cite when they make the choice to homeschool. They want their children to be confident and free thinking: in the world, but not of it.

Some parents remember a school experience that was punitive if they were of the rowdier type, while others recall sliding under the radar if they were quiet: their strengths or weaknesses may have gone unnoticed if they kept their head down and followed instructions. Gifted students were often bored and unchallenged, while struggling students felt embarrassed and left behind.

To homeschool is to offer a unique solution to each child, each circumstance, each ability level: that is, to meet them where they are and help them to excel. Whereas the traditional school setting is focused on the collective, the
homeschool experience is focused on the individual, so that as an adult, he or she might be a healthy member of the community.

Individual attention, flexibility

Lorryn McGarry from Oklahoma homeschools six children and enthusiastically reports: “My children get their childhood back. For millennia, children have been taught for a few hours a day, and the rest of the day is for exploring and climbing and playing. Through homeschooling, this is how I give this centuries old, developmentally appropriate structure back to my children. They are each other’s greatest playmates.” Lorryn alludes to another great benefit of homeschooling, which is the flexibility of the day.

Much of the school day in a traditional setting is not dedicated to active learning, but to busy-work, transitions
and behavior management. A homeschooled child can achieve these same active learning hours at home under
the guidance of a parent and forgo some of the less necessary activities. Instead, the world is their oyster! As they get older, some students can begin taking courses for college credit. Students can sharpen skills they are interested in such as art, music, crafts or athletics—and without sacrificing family dinners or relaxation on the weekend.

Children who were homeschooled for the long term (eight or more years) generally report higher levels of optimism, gratitude and life satisfaction as compared to their peers.⁷ They are also less likely to report symptoms associated with depression and anxiety.⁸ In terms of academics, they tend to outperform their public school peers by 15 to 30 percentile points on standardised tests, indicating that, on average, homeschooling is more efficient than public school.⁹ If homeschooled students generally have better mental health and academic outcomes, what is the argument against homeschooling?

Principal critiques

Perhaps the loudest concern voiced by those opposed to homeschooling is the question of socialisation. They worry that if children aren’t interacting with their peers all day and following the structure of a typical classroom, they will be unable to cope once they leave the nest as adults. Something these naysayers fail to consider is what the world looks like outside of the nest.

Your average adult spends the day surrounded by adults of varying ages, often of different ethnic and economic backgrounds. Compare this to the typical public (or even private) school student. Their peers were born within nine months of their own birth date and often come from similar economic backgrounds. Let’s not forget that
school districts are funded by the property tax of the surrounding area, and that to attend most private schools, you must be able to afford the tuition. This sounds considerably more homogeneous than the world that awaits them upon graduation.

By contrast, homeschoolers who are exposed to extracurricular activities (such as a cooperative group, or even regular trips to the local library or playground), are regularly interacting with a wide range of ethnicities, religious backgrounds, economic levels and ages. From a younger age than their peers, they are learning how to collaborate and interact with people who are different from them. Of course, if a family approaches homeschooling from an isolationist mindset, their children may struggle socially. Homeschooling families must be conscientious about integrating their children into the world early and often, or they run the risk of giving homeschoolers a bad name.

The other concern involves educational blind spots in the parent acting as educator, otherwise explained as the inability to teach a subject at the level necessary. This is less likely to be a problem when teaching a young child phonics or arithmetic but is far more likely to be a concern with high-school-level instruction in foreign languages, math or science. This is solved by outsourcing the subject: by hiring a private tutor, sending the child to a class taught by an expert, or utilising online learning.

The road ahead

Homeschooling in America has always existed alongside a wide spectrum of regulations. Some states impose multiple layers of oversight, requiring parents to file curriculum plans, submit test scores or undergo evaluations. Other states demand very little documentation. Yet, even in states historically considered relaxed, attempts to tighten control can surface.

A recent example is Illinois, where a proposed Homeschool Act (H.B. 2827) would have imposed some harsh penalties, including criminal charges for submitting incomplete paperwork. Parents mobilized in opposition, and the bill was defeated earlier this year. This underscores both the ongoing vulnerability of homeschool freedoms and the steadfast commitment of families to defend them.¹⁰

Taxpayers spend an average of $16,446 per pupil in public schools.¹¹ With 3.1 million homeschooled
students in 2021-22 and the cost of their education largely shifted to their parents (who spent an average of $600 per student), $51 billion was saved for taxpayers.¹² This significant cost savings may not continue in the future as school choice options spread to more and more states.¹³

However, most homeschooling families have no financial aid to cover their children’s homeschooling costs, and many prefer it this way. More government dollars may equate to more government oversight, which generally gives families less autonomy over their curriculum and pacing. As homeschooling continues to grow in numbers, it will be interesting to observe how both state and federal laws adapt.

Homeschooling is no longer a fringe experiment. It is an increasingly mainstream educational path rooted in the
belief that parents are best equipped to guide their children’s learning and development. As laws evolve and
educational options expand, one thing remains constant: The home continues to be a powerful place of formation. In homeschooling, families are reclaiming their children’s education and finding joy in the process.

For families who are new to homeschooling, see the final endnote below for some reputable online resources to help you get started.¹⁴

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website: www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). ↩︎
Albert Cheng and Daniel Hamlin, “Contemporary Homeschooling Arrangements:
An Analysis of Three Waves of Nationally Representative Data,” Educational Policy
37, no. 5 (July 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048221103795. ↩︎
See, e.g., Mindszenty Report, September 2023 and July 2021, for discussions of
the pervasive infiltration of transgender ideology and critical race theory into U.S.
schools. ↩︎
https://hslda.org/post/homeschooling-continues-to-grow-in-2021 ↩︎
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/ ↩︎
https://admissionsly.com/homeschooling-statistics/ ↩︎
https://readlion.com/op-ed-long-term-homeschoolers-enjoy-most-favorablelevels-of-mental-health-study-finds/ ↩︎
Ibid ↩︎
https://homeschoolingbackgrounder.com/average-academic-performancehomeschooled-students/ ↩︎
https://edreporteronline.org/documents/august2025 article 3.cfm?utm source=email&utm_medium=email%20 marketing ↩︎
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/ ↩︎
Ibid ↩︎
Regarding the spread of school choice options in the U.S., see, e.g., Mindszenty Report, July 2023 ↩︎
Heart of a Mother: Offers a broad overview of guidance and curriculum recommendations specifically for Catholic families. https://www.heartofamother.net/curriculum.
Homeschooling 101: A breakdown of essential subjects to teach at various age levels. Home School Legal Defense Association: A comprehensive source for state laws and legal guidance for homeschool in the United States. https://hslda.org/legal ↩︎

Some people are still choosing to have a large family

The larger the family, the greater the gift

Published on August 29, 2025August 30, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

There are a number of factors which have led to the decline in family size, yet there are still those who understand that becoming a parent has a personal benefit, as well as a societal one.

The U.S. fertility rate dropped to an all-time low in 2024, according to recent CDC data. Our country’s fertility rate now stands at fewer than 1.6 births per woman, well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to achieve population replacement. Effectively, this means that we’re unable to replace – let alone grow – our population through reproduction. Once the trend toward population shrinkage begins, it’s difficult to reverse.

The problem is global. Twenty-three nations are set to see their populations halve by 2100, according to the BBC. Population collapse could fundamentally reshape societies as they grapple with the impacts on economics, military readiness, healthcare, and culture. Human beings remain the most important resource for any civilization – and we’re on track to run out of them.

So why is the global population, by and large, not replacing itself? A lot of factors contribute to this trend, and, at the end of the day, it remains somewhat mysterious. But we can point to some concrete reasons, outlined in Ross Douthat’s book, “The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.”

Douthat first notes the major economic and cultural shift from agrarian to industrial and urban living. This change from farm to factory to firm “made children less valuable as extra household laborers and made an intense educational investment in each child make far more economic sense – which in turn raised the costs of childrearing for the ambitious and successful.”

In the past, farms – and to some extent, factories – needed large numbers of laborers, who could be relatively uneducated, incentivizing farming families to have more kids. Today, our economy prizes automation and AI, with just a limited number of tech whizzes needed to keep the whole thing running.

The introduction of contraceptives is another factor Douthat raises. These made it possible for people to separate sexual activity from its natural procreative end, and that trend was only exacerbated by the sexual revolution of the 1960s in which sexuality was reframed as purely the pursuit of pleasure, rather than a life-giving act meant to take place within matrimony.

Feminism also urged women out of the home and away from childrearing, while the rise in divorce undercut the longevity of marriages, discouraging couples’ attempts to build large, stable families.

Additionally, the secularization of society removed religious support and motivation for extending the gift of life, while an increasingly comfortable and consumerist society encouraged self-centeredness and physical enjoyment over self-sacrifice. Further, since the sexual revolution, men and women struggle more to establish relationships with each other in the first place, even though most people still say they want relationships, marriage, and children, according to Douthat.

By some accounts, the declining birthrate is symptomatic of societal anxiety over finances. “People are marrying later and also worried about their ability to have the money, health insurance and other resources needed to raise children in a stable environment,” CBS reports. Yet financial constraints to childrearing seem more of a cultural perception problem than actual poverty, given that generations of our forebears successfully raised larger families on less wealth.

According to a Pew survey from 2024, finances aren’t the main reason people are avoiding procreation. For adults aged 18-49, the most common reason given is “I just don’t want to.” This is often because they want to focus on other things, like hobbies, interests, and careers. Interestingly, the third most common reason provided was “concerns about the state of the world.”

These responses suggest that the biggest determining factor in the birth dearth has to do with societal attitudes towards what is most important in life, and whether or not the world is headed in a positive direction. The ideologies most young Americans are formed in focus on personal fulfillment and career achievement over the sacrifice entailed in giving back to society (and one’s own offspring) through childrearing.

Further, since the breakdown of traditional ideas about religion and truth, the world has suffered from a crisis of meaning, epitomized by nihilist philosophers such as Nietzsche. Tragically, mainstream thought has largely turned away from belief in objective truth, and with it, the belief that life has inherent meaning and value.

Ultimately, our failure to reproduce stands as a sign of a profound cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in the value of life itself. Anyone who truly understands the value of life longs to share it through children. Anyone who doesn’t will see little point in reproducing.

Fortunately, some young people are rejecting this anti-life zeitgeist. In certain communities – especially devout religious ones – couples are choosing to have large families, finding greater joy and fulfillment in the process than any hobby or career could provide. [NOTE: In Hungary, the Orban government’s pro-natalist policies have had some measure of success in boosting the birth-rate. This is something that should be investigated by Western policy-makers. Read more here– Ed.]

Each new life is like the creation of a whole new world. With each child, parents give someone else the gift of experiencing the world and all that life has to offer. What could be more meaningful than that? It is in the act of giving that we also receive the most. The more we give, the more we are ourselves fulfilled – and there’s no greater gift to give than life. Many young parents today are realizing that parenthood is not only a boon to their children and society, but also a blessing to themselves. And the larger the family, the more abundant the gift.

by Walker Larson. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

UN human rights official rejects gender ideology

Published on June 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

A top UN human rights official is making waves and helping to protect women by rejecting gender ideology and defending biological sex.

A war of words has broken out at the UN as the top UN human rights official for women told governments to define gender based on biological sex. She also told governments to stop using gender-neutral language when referring to women. “You cannot protect what you cannot define,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls.

“I never imagined the day would come where the mandate would deem it necessary to prepare a report affirming that the words ‘women’ and ‘girls’ refer to distinct biological and legal categories,” said Alsalem as she presented her explosive new report at the 59th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Alsalem said the topic of her report provoked “visceral reactions” and that powerful governments and UN agencies tried to discredit her.

The report on “sex-based” protections for women in international law is the biggest blow to gender ideology since the concept of “gender” was first added to UN policy. The report says gender ideology violates international law and harms women and girls. It also calls out governments for attempting to erase references to “mothers”, “women,” and “girls” in policies and programs.

Alsalem called on governments to preserve sex-based categories in language, policies, and data. She said a failure to do so has “devastating” consequences for women because it leads governments to overlook their unique vulnerabilities and exposes them to increased violence and discrimination.

“Erasing women and women-specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong. It is demeaning. It is regressive and constitutes one of the worst forms of violence against women and girls that they can experience,” Alsalem said. Gender-neutral terms promoted by Western governments and UN agencies in recent years include referring to mothers as “pregnant or birthing persons” and referring to women as “bleeders” and “persons who menstruate.”

Alsalem explained that international law protects women based on their biological sex, not their subjective self-identification and that “gender identity” is not a protected legal category. She said that women are entitled to specific protections from violence, including women-only spaces, and that individuals who subjectively self-identify as transgender do not have a right to these same protections based on their subjective self-identification.

The largest area of UN policy and programming where gender ideology has made an impact is “violence against women and girls”. Discarding decades of sex-based laws and policies to protect women, over the last two decades Western governments have promoted the new category of “gender-based violence,” which is not contained in any UN treaty. These policies conflate gender with LGBT issues, thus diluting the focus on women.

The European Union told Alsalem that the gender approach was required under international law. Switzerland and the Netherlands called Alsalem’s approach regressive. Colombia, speaking on behalf of 37 countries, mostly from Europe and Latin America, told Alsalem that her approach was a “step back” for human rights.

Canada said that “gender is a social construct, not confined to anatomy, and vital for understanding how discrimination and violence operate in diverse contexts.” Germany said that “binary classifications and exclusionary terminology can marginalize groups such as LGBTQI+ persons, sex workers, people with disabilities, and those experiencing homelessness.”

Leading UN agencies, including UN Women, UNFPA, WHO, and UNICEF, also rejected Alsalem’s recommendations. They claimed that polices and gender-neutral “gender-based violence” programs are required by international law.

Alsalem pushed back against her critics. She said that biological sex was not “taboo or an outdated concept, but an “innate, immutable, and fundamental aspect of human existence for women and for men alike.”

The Holy See, Kuwait, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Sudan expressed support for Alsalem.

Alsalem has also received pushback at the UN and beyond for her stance against prostitution, and conversion therapies, and for defending women-only sports.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D and Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

Teaching children to embrace the difficult delights of life

Published on June 26, 2025June 27, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

Reading for pleasure has lost popularity with the rise of a digital culture: it can be restored if communities promote more traditional ‘difficult delights’.

I browsed the shelves for as long as my mother would allow when I visited the library as a child. When her patience – or our available time – finally petered out, I brought seven or eight books up to the library counter to check out – a healthy mix of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, and classics. The librarian often raised an eyebrow or chuckled at my stack of books, but my mother knew I would usually read them all.

I tore through books in my childhood and teenage years. But I wasn’t alone. My siblings read a similar amount, as did some in my friend group, especially those with little to no access to video games and social media.

Such habits are increasingly rare among children. A 2024 study conducted by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) in the U.K. found that only 35% of children ages 8-18 read for pleasure – a number 8.8 percentage points lower than in 2023. Since 2016, the NLT has seen a downward trend in children reading for pleasure.

A 2020 study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on 9- and 13-year-olds found that those who regularly read for fun in the U.S. has also dropped substantially over the past decade. Data from 2022 and 2023 show the continuation of this declining trend.

Meanwhile, screen time for children in our country continues mounting since the pandemic.

This isn’t news to most of us; we witness such decline every day in anecdotal forms. I used to see children (and adults) reading on trains and planes; now I primarily see screens. I’ve also seen the decline in the emptiness of my neighborhood library and in the complaints of schoolchildren when they encounter books I once enjoyed.

Efforts are underway to counteract this decline, however. Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced a “Summer Reading Challenge” for children in grades K-8, inviting children to read 12 books between June 1 and Sept. 5, completing a log of what they read. Each child who completes the challenge will receive a certificate, a small prize, and an entry into a raffle to visit Washington, D.C.

Schools often institute similar summer reading challenges or requirements. A classical Christian school in my area created a “Screen Free Summer Challenge,” encouraging children to spend as many days as possible without screen-based entertainment.

Such challenges can help direct children to spend their time taking in the written word rather than delighting in the easy pleasures of the online world. But reversing our culture’s trend toward practical illiteracy will require more than the enticement of a prize or grade.

In my years as a student, tutor and teacher, I have found that those who read much do so not primarily because they are required or enticed, but because of a deep love for reading, a love inculcated and emboldened by their peers and family.

In order to achieve a culture that encourages reading, we need to build sub-cultures that do not normalize ease – the ease of flipping through TV channels or scrolling through social media – but instead recognize the value of difficult delights. Such work begins in the home, with the culture of the immediate family, and moves outward to the neighborhood and then to the church or school community.

By difficult delights I do not mean only those found within the pages of a book, but also the delights of work in the garden or garage, or the delights of time spent at the piano bench in front of sheet music or on a ladder with a paintbrush in hand.

For the enchantment of literature to become once again a force in our culture, we must become disenchanted with the latest offers of a passive and difficulty-free life mediated by screens and feeds. We must become disconnected from the consumerist mindset that dominates our society. When a sub-culture, however small, connects instead with gladhearted gratitude around pursuit of the good, true and beautiful – not the easy, crass and self-gratifying – children will be blessed in all variety of ways, including a fondness for good stories.

In other words, for children to love reading again, they must be shown and learn how to love life – real, embodied life, as God has given it, with all its difficult delights.

By Sarah Reardon.

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Empty playground due to declining birth rates

Declining birth rates should worry us all

Published on May 23, 2025May 24, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

When asked what keeps him awake at night, Elon Musk said America’s declining birth rate. Falling birth rates in the U.S. and other developed countries should keep us all awake at night.

Since 2007, the birth rate in the United States has plummeted by 20 percent. This precipitous decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic or policy changes alone.¹ At the end of the postwar baby boom in 1964, the U.S. birth rate began a long period of decline. By 2001 the birth rate had begun to fall significantly, and then it went off a cliff starting in 2007. This trend is continuing and experts see no signs that it will be reversed.

Until 2001, falling birth rates in the U.S. and much of the developed world could reasonably be attributed to urbanization, women’s expanded career opportunities and birth control. The sharper drop in the U.S. since 2007, while reflecting those general trends, suggests that something more is going on today. One explanation might be found in an anti-natalist attitude that arose among American elites since the Second World War and gradually permeated the broader culture, now finding its fullest expression among Gen Z youth.

Population Implosion

Today in 63 countries the size of the population has peaked and is in decline.² For a population to replace itself, the fertility rate needs to be at least 2.1 children born per woman. America’s fertility rate is now 1.7 children born per woman and is expected to fall to 1.3 by the end of the decade.

The prospects are grimmer for other nations. Taiwan’s fertility rate has fallen to 0.865. In Japan the rate is 1.21. In South Korea, where it is 0.72, the total population is expected to decline by half by the year 2100. Australia’s fertility rate now stands at 1.6. Although fertility rates remain high in Africa, by 2100 97 percent of all countries will have below-replacement rates if present trends continue. The only countries projected to have a rate exceeding 2.1 are Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan.³

The rapid drop in birth rates beginning in 2007 caught policymakers and demographers by surprise. Demographers had projected a continuing decline, but it has been much steeper than expected. As the younger population declines, the general population becomes older on average. By 2070 there will be more people in the world over 65 than under 25.

A disproportionately aged population creates serious social and economic problems. A rising older population means escalating costs and diminishing worker-paid tax revenues for seniors’ health care, housing and general support. Dr. Natalia V. Bhattcharjee, the co-author of a University of Washington study, observes that the global population trends can be expected to “completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganizing societies.”⁴

The dip in birth rates began in the 1960s with the introduction and widespread use of oral contraception— the vast chemical experiment on women commonly known as the Pill. This coincided with another great social change: Women poured into the work force. As young women increasingly pursued higher education and jobs and became less dependent on men financially, they postponed marriage and children. The older the woman, the lower her fertility.⁵ Meanwhile, Second Wave feminists devalued childbearing and homemaking.

Governments experiencing declines in fertility rates have responded through an array of policies to encourage having more children. These policies have included tax breaks, subsidies, mandated maternity and paternity leaves, and job protections for families having children. Such policies have generally produced minimal results.

Chinese authorities have proposed incentives to encourage couples to have more babies, including expanded maternity leave, financial and tax benefits for having children, and housing subsidies. More will be needed, though, to encourage births after decades of China’s barbaric one child policy. Previous habits die hard, and high housing prices, stagnant economic growth and a shortage of child care continue to depress childbearing in China as in many other nations.

For the last half decade or so, the South Korean government has been urging families to have more children. The government has invested the equivalent of billions of dollars to promote marriage and birth rates. New policies allowing expectant mothers to work reduced hours and new fathers to take extended parental leave were enacted. For the first time since 2015, South Koreans had more babies in 2024 than in the previous year. Still, elderly South Koreans outnumber the young. Whether the recent increase in births is a blip or the beginning of a reversal in population decline remains to be seen. South Korea still has one of the lowest birth rates of any nation.⁶

Extreme Feminist Ideologies

One of the challenges to South Korea’s pro-natalist policies has come from the militant South Korean feminist movement.⁷ This movement is known as 4B and has attracted international attention. The 4B name comes from four Korean words beginning with “bi” (meaning “no”): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating) and bisekseu (no sex).

4B is an anti-heterosexuality movement that echoes American militant feminists such as Mary Daly, a tenured theology professor at Boston College who died in 2010. Daly espoused “a drastic reduction in the population of males” as an efficient way to effect a “decontamination of the Earth.”⁸ In her two widely read books, Quintessence : Realizing the Archaic Future (1998) and Amazon Grace: Re-calling the Courage to Sin Big (2006), she imagined voyages to the 2048 B.E. (“Biophilic Era”), where she communes with a like-minded tribe of unfettered lesbians, “Wild Women” on a “Lost and Found Continent.” These fictional women discovered that they could impregnate themselves without males—an act supposedly repressed by the all-male Catholic Church.⁹

At the end of the Second World War, a small group of men in philanthropic foundations, universities and government concluded that to avoid another global war over scarce land and resources, the rate of population growth needed to be reduced. These men called for population control through. artificial contraception. Foundations such as the Population Council, established by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, helped establish family planning programs in Asia and later in Latin America.

Origins of Anti-Natalist Culture

Other population-control advocates such as Hugh Moore, founder of the Dixie Cup paper cup manufacturer, promoted harsher and more coercive measures to reduce population growth—government-supported sterilization, assisted suicide, extra taxes on families with more than two children, and even the notion of contraceptives in public water supplies.

American elites within government and the private philanthropic sector joined with the United Nations and other international agencies to spread population-control programs, especially in Southeast Asia, from the 1950s to the 1970s. USAID population-control efforts under the fanatical Reimert Ravenholt came under fierce criticism by feminists for his agency’s coercive policies in Southeast Asia, which included distribution of an intrauterine device banned in the U.S.

In the 1970s, abetted by Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, population-control advocates turned to environmental activism to warn the world of coming wars, famine and social unrest as consequences of overpopulation. Second Wave feminist activists further energized the population-control movement through demands for expanding abortion rights and gay rights.

These activist movements arose separately with their own histories and trajectories, but contributed to a growing antinatalist culture. Their advocates shared a self-image as crusaders for a better and healthier world. While facing at times intense resistance in what became known as the culture war, they affected politics and gained influence in educational, media and cultural institutions.

What emerged was an anti-natalist ethos embedded in a hyper-individualized culture. Anti-natalism should be seen not merely as the hidden hand of vague social forces such as modernity and urbanization, but as a direct result of American elites pushing a cultural agenda. This agenda includes easy access to abortion and contraception, expansive sex education/indoctrination in the classroom, LGBTQ rights, and a mentality of entitlement to promiscuous sex without the need for marriage.

Gen Z (those born in the late 1990s or early 21st century) is now experiencing the full effects of this 75-year cultural shift.¹⁰ Birth rates among women in their 20s have been falling since the mid-1990s, accelerating in the Great Recession of 2008 and continuing during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the long, gradual decline in teen births in the U.S. during that period is a positive development, the same cannot be said for women in their 20s. Births have fallen for women both with and without college degrees and cannot be ascribed solely to economic factors. More young people, especially young women, simply don’t consider marriage and children a high priority. Only 45 percent of young women say they want to have kids at some point in their lives, while 57 percent of young men (between 18 and 25 years old) say they want to be fathers. ¹¹

Accordingly, marriage rates are dropping across demographic lines, with the exception of Asian Americans. In 1950, close to 80 percent of American households were married couples. Since 2010 the share has fallen to around half. In addition, men and women are marrying later on average—about age 30 for men and 29 for women.¹²

Attitudes toward this decline in marriage and childbirth break along political lines. Conservatives are worried about it, while only a fifth of liberals say it is worrisome.¹³ Progressives who claim to care about “community” should be concerned. The fact is that married couples are much, much more involved in their communities than singles.¹⁴ Married adults are far more likely to attend community meetings, undertake volunteer work, and visit a library. People who are married tend to be happier and healthier. And obviously, it is preferable for children to be raised by married parents. The U.S. percentage of births to unwed mothers is far too high—40 percent.

Generation Z Culture

If a strong marriage rate is a measure of a happy and healthy community, prospects for Gen Z don’t look good. Not only are Gen Zers postponing marriage; substantial numbers say they don’t want to marry or have children at all.

Political polarization among the young has not helped matters. More than half of all single young women report that they will not date a Trump supporter, while nearly 4 in 10 young men (18-25 years old) say they are less likely to date someone who identifies as a feminist.¹⁵ The latter preference may be prudent, but young non-feminist women can be hard to find, especially in large cities.

Some young women have become so extreme in their political filtering that they have taken vows of celibacy and identify as “self-partnered.”¹⁶ This phenomenon is part of the so-called “heteropessimism” movement, in which young women are declaring that heterosexual sex violates a woman’s privacy, freedom and self-determination. This movement might be dismissed as silly, but, shockingly, 28.5 percent of Gen Z women identify themselves as LGBTQ+.¹⁷

Other factors that could be depressing rates of marriage and childbearing include the erosion of organized religion, high U.S. student debtand higher costs of housing and cars. There is also a wider smorgasbord of enticing ways for young adults to spend their time and money instead of on children, such as travel, entertainment, restaurants, gambling, gaming and online pornography. Children bring heavy costs in return for deferred gratification and profoundly satisfying, non-materialistic rewards.

Data might suggest that anti-natalist elites have won the cultural war. However, some within Gen Z are pushing back against the culture of isolation. By some measures, church attendance among Gen Z has begun to stabilize or increase, especially among young men. This is the case in the U.S. as well as the U.K.

Christianity offers an antidote to a culture in disarray. It will take prayer and evangelisation by the whole Christian church for a counter-revolution to succeed. The young know that the current culture has failed them, and as they look for an alternative, Christ awaits with open arms.

The future of the world belongs to those who show up. To show up, they must first be born.

https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate. The birth rate is the
total number of live births in a year per 1,000 people in a population. ↩︎
These countries include 28 percent of the world’s population. They include countries
such as China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation. In 48 other countries the
population is projected to peak within the next 30 years. ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/global-birthrates-dropping. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/world-population-prospects-2024. ↩︎
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/focus/2025/03/07/south-koreas-baby-bump. ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/15/4b-south-korea-feminist-movementdonald-trump-election-backlash. ↩︎
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/mary-on-the-contrary/. ↩︎
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/style/4b-movement.html. ↩︎
https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate. ↩︎
https://www.pewresearch.org/shortreads/2024/02/15/among-young-adults-withoutchildren-men-are-more-likely-than-women-to-say-they-want-to-be-parents-someday/. ↩︎
https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/;
https://uvamagazine.org/articles/the_marriage_crisis. ↩︎
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-societal-cost-of-the-marriage-decline. ↩︎
Ibid.; https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/10/marriage-and-divorce.html. ↩︎
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-romance-howpolitics-and-pessimism-influence-dating-experiences/. ↩︎
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/style/women-trump-4b-movementheteropessimism.html. ↩︎
https://news.gallup.com/poll/611864/lgbtq-identification.aspx. ↩︎

New UN treaty allows for virtual child p*rn

Published on May 20, 2025May 24, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

A new UN treaty to combat cybercrimes would allow predators and tech giants to profit from the sexual exploitation of children, including through images created using AI.

These new threats are emerging while the United Nations launches a new treaty to address cybercrime, but the new treaty only addresses some of the threats from sexual exploitation.

While the new treaty calls for criminalizing non-consensual sharing of intimate pictures, it still allows for a broad swath of sexualized content involving children. For instance, while the treaty criminalizes what is newly called “child sexual abuse material,” this term refers narrowly to images of real children. The new term allows for child porn created through Artificial Intelligence. As is now widely known, AI images are shockingly real.

Such images, soon to be allowed by UN treaty, would still be in violation of U.S. federal law. Specifically, in several sections, the new UN treaty allows countries to de-criminalize virtual child pornography in all circumstances as well as private sexting by minors, even to adults.

The General Assembly adopted the treaty on December 24, 2024. Now countries must sign and ratify it before it goes into force. A signing ceremony for the new treaty will take place at a Summit in July in Hanoi. The treaty will enter into force after forty countries ratify it.

Supporters of the treaty argue that legalizing sexting is compassionate because adolescents have a right to sexual expression. Some argue that letting pedophiles satisfy their sexual preferences with virtual material would make it less likely that they would prey on real children. And they say that dropping the term “child pornography” is necessary to avoid re-victimizing those who have been exploited. They call all this part of a “trauma-informed” and “harm-reduction” approach, based on new theories in behavioral therapy.

Regardless of the merits of such arguments, they would appear to conflict with the priority of law enforcement of preventing abusers from harming future victims. There is no evidence that such new approaches make law enforcement more effective. Until recently, U.S. Justice Department experts argued against it.

Moreover, there is evidence that allowing sexual predators to engage with virtual pornography leads to more child sexual abuse, not less. And anti-trafficking advocates are all too familiar with how underage girls are lured into pornography and eventually the sex industry through sexting.

A recent investigation of the Wall Street Journal uncovered how Meta chat bots pose a danger to children and how executives at the company deliberately allowed the chat bots to engage children sexually and to pose as children willing to engage in sexual acts. The investigation found that sexual predators and tech giants have a common interest in ensuring that children can be sexualized online.

Meta programmers were being pushed by the Meta executive suite not to impose excessive limits on sexual content, including involving children as users and objects, because of the high engagement it generates and the profits this would generate. As a result, existing firewalls to protect children were ineffective by design. Chat bots lured children into sexual conversations that eventually lead to progressively more explicit and degrading sexual content. And chat bots also posed as children who are willing to entertain lewd and even violent sexual behavior from their adult and child users.

Congress has known for over thirty years of the importance to prosecute all forms of pseudo-child pornography, including virtual child pornography and sexting, because it places children at risk. The recent Wall Street Journal investigation would appear to confirm these findings.

SOURCE: C-FAM

Sacrifice, a mother stays home with her child

Sacrifice: a viable alternative to institutional childcare?

Published on March 15, 2025May 24, 2025 by EF TeamLeave a comment

By Kathy Clubb

Even secular commentators are noticing that children are better off having their mothers at home and are promoting the value of self-sacrifice.

The decision to place a child into institutional childcare is usually motivated by one of three things: financial gain – a mother needs to work to increase her family’s income; intellectual gain – the mother wants to have her talents or intellect recognised outside the home; or personal gain – a mother wants the freedom to pursue her own desires and from the burden of child-rearing. In some cases, the decision is a combination of all three. Yet given the indisputable evidence of harm suffered by children who undergo extended, outsourced childcare, perhaps it is time parents considered a challenging alternative: poverty in both the material and spiritual aspects.

Poverty, as experienced by most people in developed Western nations, is a far cry from the dirt-poor experience of our forebears. ‘Poverty’ by today’s standards, is more likely to involve forgoing expensive holidays and large modern homes, rather than forgoing food, clothing or a weatherproof house. The modern form of poverty is aligned with the notions of frugality and modest living, and often necessitates a degree of self-sufficiency: sewing clothes, growing food, or learning home maintenance skills.

However, even this relatively affluent type of poverty can inspire terror into a culture used to an excessively-high living standard, and so inflation, rising interest rates and financial uncertainty lure mothers into the workforce, oblivious to the economic impact of government-subsidised childcare.

We can all sympathise with families who are close to financial breaking point and facing the prospect of losing their home due to an inability to make the mortgage repayments. Yet, at what point does saving the family home (or purchasing one) become a matter of placing material possessions above the needs of children? Surely it is preferable to accept a life of renting, or living in a shabby or small home over outsourcing childcare, and giving children the subtle message that they are less important to their parents than money?

Other mothers may be in a better financial position but want their skills and gifts recognised in the workplace or by their academic peers. This is one trap mentioned by clinical social worker, Erica Komisar, who spoke at a recent meeting of ARC – the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Addressing the harms of institutionalised child care, she gives a wholistic appraisal of the value of parents, concluding that motherhood, more than simply being a role, is a vocation – a surprising conclusion for a secular psychoanalyst. Komisar states that she has met many women who want to stay home with their children but are pressured to return to the workforce because they are ‘too intelligent’ to be stay-at-home mothers.

Komisar also addresses the economic aspect, suggesting that couples should be realistic about the financial impact of children prior to marriage, and not expect a new mother to return to work, as a matter of course. She points out the need for sacrifice, noting that this is an antidote to the prevailing selfishness which makes parenthood so difficult for many of today’s young couples. Refreshingly, Komisar acknowledges the beneficial effects of the extended family, and encourages people to see the essential goodness of family life and to accept its responsibilities in order to enjoy its rewards.

The idea of self-sacrifice is echoed by Emily Finley, in her thoughtful article, ‘Mother Culture’ and Mothers as Transmitters of Culture. Finley addresses our culture’s obsession with ‘self-care’, highlighting that a mother’s experience of caring for her family is actually the means for her to experience fulfilment, rather than being an obstacle to it.

Finley also argues that stay-at-home mothers who make an effort to educate themselves are a powerful weapon in the fight to regain Christian culture. She explains how the modus operandi of revolutionary forces all the way from the Jacobins to contemporary woke neo-conservatives always includes the ‘liberation’ of women from the obligation to raise their own children. She writes, “Women who remained at home to raise their children were passing on the old ways and traditions and were, moreover, not economic contributors to the collective.”

It is good to consider that not all the harms of institutional childcare manifest in the form of poor academic outcomes or a propensity to break the law as adults. Another potential negative is the perpetuating of a cycle of over-achievement: the emptiness of this lifestyle is often hidden beneath the trappings of external success. Similarly, the contribution made by a well-educated, stay-at-home mother to her family is often overlooked. The social scientist measures only tangible markers such as qualifications, employment achievements, financial assets and other material values. Forming children’s souls and thereby improving the culture is simply too subtle a criterion. Not all of our human actions can be evaluated, tabled and then summarised in a neat abstract, and in any case, it is that kind of utilitarian thinking which is behind the philosophy that introduced out-of-home childcare in the first place.

Catholic writer Noelle Mering believes that rather than relying on studies to prove the harms or otherwise of institutional childcare and early education, we should be asking if childcare can replace a mother. She makes a good point. Whether or not a study shows that prolonged daycare is harmful, it can never place a value on motherhood itself. The idea that studies should be our source of guidance is itself a dehumanising conclusion. Mering continues, referring to mothers: “Indeed, her time, investment, and consistency are invaluable, beyond what any pile of statistics can demonstrate—and these can be discounted, and too often are, if we have succumbed to a reductive technocratic vision of the person.”

For parents to rely on traditions and on an intuition about what is good for their children is yet another exercise in poverty. To decide that, in the face of pressure from family members, co-workers, economic forces and cultural norms, they will personally raise their children, is not likely to win them any awards or accolades. However, parents who choose this kind of poverty for the sake of their children will not go unrewarded: their legacy will be a cultural contribution with an eternal value.

SOURCES:

Dear Science: What if Kids Need Their Moms? link

Psychoanalyst’s Advice For Young Parents link

“Mother Culture” and Mothers as Transmitters of Culture link

Another Perspective on the Latest research on Early Child Care link