Society itself is becoming increasingly disordered even as we in effect consume our children. As our middle class disappears, those children who do survive until birth are either palmed off to the state, then to drugs, technology, and further dependency, or put onto “the path to success” at the hands of various facilitating professionals who coddle them in a stress-filled manner creating sky-high suicide rates and the pathetically fragile creatures who inhabit elite institutions of education. This is a society suffering from a veritable death wish, as those with the responsibility for raising responsible adults either eschew children altogether or abandon them to others while they pursue their own vision of personal success, treating spouses and children as mere accoutrements, consumer items made more precious by emotional attachments that, alas, are rooted in precious little practical experience at shaping lives and characters together.

. . . 

Many public policies contributed to the downfall of the traditional family and its moral core of child rearing. From the nationalization and exponential expansion of social security and other welfare programs to the so-called professionalization of all kinds of local public services, the drive for uniform fairness and security has stamped out much of family and community’s reason for being. But the essential problem goes deeper, for it is spiritual. A healthy, vibrant society requires citizens who see themselves as parts of things that are larger than themselves, in which they must play important, though rarely central roles. This means that families, churches, voluntary associations, and states are part of a way of life. They are aspects of our nature as social beings. 

Bruce Fohnen, "The West's War on Children"