Lately, I have been seeing videos, reading stories, and looking at photographs of women who are unspeakably cruel to the children in their care. Each story leaves a heaviness in my chest. I struggle to understand how anyone can be so indifferent to the pain of another person's child.
Perhaps it is time we begin to question a practice that has long been normalized. Children should not be sent away as domestic help. They are not burdens to be transferred or responsibilities to be outsourced. They are childrenโdeserving of safety, dignity, affection, and protection.
If we choose to bring children into the world, we must also accept the responsibility of caring for them. Too often, children are sent to relatives or strangers in the hope of a better life, only to become vulnerable to neglect and abuse behind closed doors.
What is particularly heartbreaking is the double standard. A parent may overlook the mistakes of their own child with patience and understanding, yet respond to the same mistake from a domestic child with violence and rage. A spilled cup of milk should never become a justification for cruelty.
The uncomfortable truth is that many people who commit these acts did not invent such behavior; they inherited it. They watched it growing up. They learned that some children deserve tenderness while others deserve suffering. And because it was normalized, they carried it into adulthood.
But inheritance is not an excuse. Every generation has a choice: to repeat cruelty or to end it. We must choose to end it.
No child should have to pay the price for being born into a family with fewer resources. No child should live in fear in a place they were told would be a home.
He was as an innocent, kind, gentle genius exploited by opportunists; he was "tortured, exploited, and punished for things he had NOT done."
โTom Mesereau