The Political Extremism of Raising Healthy Children
The Ordinary, Good Childhood, is a political project
One of the most fundamental things that children require in order to grow up healthy, strong, wise and good, is a lot of time outdoors and in public spaces. Yet what we see from more traditional families in the west, as well as from extremely wealthy families, is that they are holding their children closer than ever, and enclosing them in increasingly smaller and more carefully selected bubbles of protection.
This is because “the outdoors” and “public life” is territory that has increasingly been ceded by western society to violent criminals, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. Parenting, for those who are vigilant to the threats, can no longer be “laissez-faire” and it has become less about choosing the ideal, and more about choosing the least damaging option.
But what has been lost? And what must be reclaimed for those of us with power and spirit to have any kind of meaningful victory in this world?
Most leftists see politics through the framework of wanting to be “a good person” as it is defined by their peer group and ideology. The ordinary person, on the other hand, views politics through the set of decisions that would best protect their children and give them the best chance at a good life.
Why is this? Leftists either don’t have children, or they have children but live in gilded cages and are therefore untouched (yet) by the consequences of their ideological beliefs.
Children must exist as part of a broader community in order to develop healthily. They must be able to go to a public library, the local shop, ride their bikes to the park, take the city bus or walk to their grandmother’s house on their own. They must be able to play outside unsupervised for hours on end in their neighbourhoods.
A child who plays outside all day gets enough oxygen in his body for his bones, muscles and organs to develop properly, to grow to his fullest height and brightness.
But some measure of freedom is also necessary for children to develop a healthy psyche. A child who can go to the shop and pay for milk on his own and bring it home will develop not only a sense of responsibility, but will feel confident in his ability to do useful things. A child who can visit his friends and relatives on his own will develop social skills and a sense of belonging. A child who can go to the library on his own can begin the lifelong journey of guiding his own learning.
Such a world is not one that is ever handed to us; giving such a childhood to your children is a political achievement on its own.
I remember watching Matilda as a child and wondering what kind of a world she lived in that a four year old could walk to the public library and not get stabbed or kidnapped. Some may say that the kind of world I am describing is unrealistic and that there is always a level of danger in society, always wolves lurking in the woods, but there are societies in the world where there is a measure of safety for the most vulnerable members of society. Furthermore, this was the reality for many western cities not too long ago, for those who have not forgotten.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett and Heidi in the eponymous novel by Johanna Spyri both depict the lives of ordinary, middle class children (Dickon and Martha’s twelve siblings in the case of The Secret Garden), who play outside, exist in public and through these kinds of outdoor, and social childhoods, grow into confident, vibrant and bright people. These books were not mere fiction but accurately reflected the state of the English Countryside and German/Swiss cities in their respective time periods. Until recently, in the west children really could exist in towns, and in their public spaces with other adults who were not their parents and reasonably expect to be safe and protected from danger.
In a 2007 study done in Sheffield, UK by Dr. William Bird, he found that children in 1926 were allowed to roam up to six miles away from home unsupervised and by 2000, that number dropped to 300 metres. The major drop off happened around 1979 which is coincidentally the time when mass migration began in the United Kingdom and demographics of towns like Sheffield began to seriously shift. In the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry” released by the Restore Party of Britain, the report which details three decades of kidnap, rape and murder of a quarter of a million British girls which would have began around this time. So English parents restricting their children’s freedoms around this time period was not something hysterical or unfounded.
We must be politically courageous in order to admit what is required to maintain that kind of a world. Stated simply, a safe, healthy and good childhood requires a fundamental rejection of leftist “empathy” politics. There is one incident in particular that can help to describe how this system functions today.
In Charlotte, North Carolina (USA) on August 22, 2025, a twenty-three year old woman named Iryna Zarutska was stabbed in the neck on a train by a man named Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. She bled to death in public. The assailant was a man who had previously been arrested thirteen times by authorities for violent crimes and had been released back into society by the American justice system. Iryna had done nothing to provoke the incident and had simply been sitting with her head down, on a public train on the way back from work.
This was not some random incident that ought to be considered a natural consequence of living in a city; rather, it is an incident engineered by pathological leftist ideology which causes judges to believe that releasing violent criminals back into society is a good idea.
Leftist ideology is that which has more sympathy and concern for the feelings and freedoms of violent criminals than it does for innocent people. This murder then was not a random aberration to the norm of modern western society but rather the exact, logical result of a system and ideology.
In this kind of a system, it is unwise to use public transit without being armed, vigilant and capable of defending yourself against assault. Any place where a person must comport oneself in this way then, is not a part of civilization, but outside of it. Civil society is where women, children, the elderly, and people overall may be vulnerable without the likelihood of being punished for it. Civil society is the creation of safe public life. When a state fails to provide civil society for its citizens, it fails in its primary function because crime becomes a part of the ecosystem rather than an aberration from it.
In order for public libraries, city buses, trains, streets and neighbourhoods to be safe, the political ideology that rules the state must be one that prioritizes the well being and freedom of the ordinary person more than that of the violent criminal. To the extent that this is not true of the modern west, it cannot provide safe public spaces for children to grow up in.
The Iryna Zarutska incident is unfortunately not an isolated case but rather one example out of thousands that demonstrate how the modern western state prioritizes criminals over ordinary people. Dutch journalist and lawyer Eva Vlaardingerbroek devotes her career to documenting such incidents despite the fact that ordinary mainstream media attempts to obscure them in order to maintain the illusion of a functioning civil society.
Like you, I too don’t want to look. But being generally aware of this political reality is necessary in order to not be clueless and unaware of the kinds of risks that now exist in public life in the west.
There was once a time, not very long ago, when a fourteen year old girl could take a train all around Paris by herself and her parents would genuinely not be concerned for her safety and well being. Anyone who insists that that is still true today is out of touch.
The reason that Paris has become dangerous for ordinary innocent young girls to exist in, is because of leftist political ideology that believes mass numbers of unvetted grown male migrants from uncivilized barbaric lands is somehow harmless to society. They turn a blind eye to the significant increase in rapes and murders carried out by the exact demographic that they teach us to have “empathy” for while having no such empathy for the innocent people they terrorize.
The threats to children in modern public life are not merely physical but also spiritual. In a decent and well functioning society, public libraries do not tolerate homeless drug addicts, sex offenders and violent criminals from loitering on their couches. But they also do not carry or promote books that feature pornography, vulgarity, and demoralizing propaganda that will corrupt a child’s very grasp on reality.
Propaganda exists everywhere to expose children to sex and vulgarity, to cause them to view themselves as victims rather than agents in their own lives, and to derail and disturb their idea of reality through the ideologies of critical race theory, gender theory and feminism. It is for this reason that parents need to closely monitor not only a child’s physical safety in public but also their spiritual and intellectual development.
Some argue that children must be exposed to the depravities of the world in order to learn how to deal with them. However, children are themselves forming their sense of identity, their basic understanding of the world and their core values. As such, coming into contact prematurely with depravity will not be an opportunity to learn to face the world, but rather an opportunity for corruption. A child’s spirit is soft therefore his exposure to depravity must be calculated by his guardians at the exact moment when he is actually strong enough to contend with it.
Homeschooling, home-steading and living in wealthy, gated communities has become popular among the very rich and powerful because they are sheltering their children from premature contact with danger and depravity. Homeschooling would not at all be as popular as it has become if ordinary schools were not getting attacked by mass shootings, and unrepentant thugs who often permanently injure or kill children in “schoolyard fights”. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the spiritual depravity, vulgarity and outright ideological rot taught to children in the classrooms themselves. Of course parents would want to protect their children from this. But schools should be safe and wholesome places and it is a sign of serious rot in modern society that they are not.
Although the very rich can provide such compounds to raise their children on, what option does the ordinary person have? Their children are the ones whose growth will be stunted as they are raised in increasingly isolated or remote locations, or constantly chaperoned by parents and elders through life. Public life is increasingly a luxury for people who can access gated communities.
Political “radicalization” is not happening among people because they are cruel and unfeeling despots or racists, but rather because they care more for innocent people’s right to exist in public than they do about offending the feelings of violent criminals.
The purpose of this essay is not to demoralize but rather to bring awareness to the political dimension of raising healthy children. You cannot detach yourself from politics and simply raise a healthy family. Turning off your phone and quitting social media doesn’t make the streets, the buses, the trains and the public libraries safer.
Political extremism may be required to achieve what is in the end, a very normal, ordinary existence for one’s children. I have written this essay because many people like me are often labelled dangerous and extremist politically and yet, when I have sat down and evaluated what I want for society, it all seems to be quite…normal things. What has changed? What if it is the “normal person” today who is the political extremist and not people like me?
Restored safe and beautiful public spaces is one of the clearest measures of civic success.