Guest Voice: Child Abuse Worsens as Families Change
This is a Guest Voice column by Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s oldest son, who is also a popular radio talk show host.
Child Abuse Worsens as Families Change
Making Sense, by Michael Reagan
Child abuse is growing out of control here in America, and there’s a good reason why: the traditional family is coming apart at the seams.
According to reports made to state agencies, there were 900,000 incidents of child abuse in 2005 alone. These raw numbers give no clue just how much child abuse correlates with parents’ marital status or the make-up of the victim’s household, although these are vitally important factors in child abuse cases. The proof is in the news far too often.
Nothing is more important to child welfare than living within the bosom of a stable family, and nothing is more destructive to their well-being than being forced to live in a fatherless household where dad is replaced by the live-in boyfriend, or as is often the case, by a series of live-in boyfriends.
In almost all cases of horrific child abuse that is exactly the situation of the victim. Nobody is more at risk today than children living in fatherless homes where the mother’s boyfriend is sharing her bed while avoiding the commitment of marriage, or a new husband views her children as unwanted consequences of the new marriage.
You have young women who for one reason or another have not gotten the love of their child’s father, their former husband, who confuse sex with love, and give no thought to the consequences of bringing a man who has no emotional ties with their children into their homes and expect them to act as substitute dads.
In pursuit of maintaining their so-called relationship, many allow these men to beat their children, often as punishment for having disturbed the boyfriend in some way, such as crying or soiling their diapers.
It never occurs to them that in most cases the boyfriend views their child as an inconvenience to be put up with as a price for getting sex without commitment. Yet they do not hesitate to put their child in his care, especially if she is the breadwinner in the household while the often-jobless boyfriend stays home with their son or daughter and lives on her income.
We read about the deadly consequences children pay for being forced to live in these circumstances where they find themselves in a home where their real father is no longer present and a stranger is taking his place.
A tragic case in point involved two-year-old Riley Ann Sawyers whose body was found in Galveston Bay, in a plastic box, on Oct. 29. Riley’s mom and real dad were not married and had split up and gone their separate ways.
Her mother, 19-year-old Kimberly Dawn Trenor met Royce Clyde Zeigler II a couple of years ago while playing an online game, World of Warcraft, according to the Associated Press, which reports that she moved with her daughter from Ohio to Spring Texas and married Zeigler.
In a statement to police, first reported by Houston television station KTRK, Trenor said that she and Zeigler, 24, killed her daughter last July 24.
She said that the little girl was beaten with leather belts, had her head held underwater in a bathtub and then was thrown across a room, her head slamming into a tile floor, and added that they kept the body in a storage shed for one to two months before they put it in a plastic bin and dumped it into Galveston Bay.
Sadly, we read about this kind of outrage all the time. We are appalled that it happens but we are unwilling to look at the causes. Americans have said that they are willing to accept all these distortions of family life and they do not dare to define marriage as a lasting arrangement between a man and a woman. Nowadays, marriage is whatever aberration we say it is.
We don’t want to offend anybody, and while we are avoiding offending single mothers living with their current boyfriends, or men and women who treat their marriage vows as temporary arrangements without regard to the damaging effect divorce has on the kids, children are being beaten and children are dying.
And in the face of all of this, Massachusetts is worried about spanking.
Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.”
©2007 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc.
4 Responses to “Guest Voice: Child Abuse Worsens as Families Change”
Another major victory “Increased Child Abuse” for political correctness and the no-fault divorce laws.
The above information and much more has been comming out this year in a couple of studies on the issue of child abuse and the family lifestyle.
Sure I can hear it now, “Child abuse occurs from fomes with moms and pops too”.
Yes, it does but the stats are starting to show that it is much-much higher in families where either the mother or farther is not the the biological parent.
This is just my opinion, but I think a lot of this rise in chid abuse has to do with the erosion of extended families and of real communities. I grew up in West Philadelphia and then in suburban Maryland – two entirely different environments on the surface. But both neighborhoods were just that. We knew all of our neighbors and my brother and I played with the other kids. The other parents would watch out for us and everyone knew everybody else’s business. When I visit my parents now, it’s very rare to see other neighbors outside with their kids or just dropping by to say hello and have a cup of coffee. As other families have moved away and new ones have moved in, that sense of being a tightknit community has waned.
We don’t look out for each other anymore. Nobody is there, volunteering to pick up the slack when a single mom needs an hour to go grocery shopping or when a widower dad needs advice raising a daughter. It’s no wonder the parents lash out (or let someone else do the lashing) when they are stretched thin and have no safety net. That doesn’t excuse the abuse, not at all. But it might be an explanation for it.
Amanda’s comment makes a lot of sense to me.
I think it’s overly simplistic to point to the make-up of a family (second marriages or absentee dads).
Even during slavery, mothers did fine in rearing children, in spite of forcible separation of the parents by slave owners. If families could weather those dark days, why do the relively minor hardships of today have such dire consequences?
I also suspect the erosion of community spirit and the demise of extended families. Look at us, we’re here commenting on blogs in solitary fashion instead of being out talking to neighbors.
Perhaps urbanization plays a role. Crowding, with anonymous faces blurring together, can produce the longing for the oppostite- solitude.and separtaion.
Jobs centered on a local business or manufacturing plant created a community in a way they no longer can. The opposite is true, with people moving multiple times to chase jobs around the country.
As a result of the disappearing community, we gauge well-being by referring to the fake community of TV screens. We are no longer content with out lot in comparison to friends and neighbors, because we compare our situation to the glitter on TV. If you don’t have the big kitchen of TV families, you feel left out and left behind. Enter the dark side of onsumerism.
Modern day families live with stresses unknown in previous generation. To look for the causes, look at how our society is changing. The disappearance of outside support for families with any and all memberhip scenarios is a striking example of change.
There’s no such thing as good and bad, right and wrong, in today’s post-modern lefty world!
Except when inverting the words and concepts in frequently bashing Bush…