Innocence, Interrupted

Kids shouldn’t have to grow up faster just because the world is unraveling louder.

They shouldn’t have to see pain so often that it starts to feel normal.

They shouldn’t live in a world where tragedy is background noise and outrage has a shelf life.

Where suffering becomes familiar enough to stop interrupting dinner, and grief turns into something you scroll past.

They shouldn’t have to learn how to brace before they learn how to dream.

They shouldn’t have to wake up carrying the weight of things they didn’t cause and cannot fix.

They shouldn’t assume danger is the default.

They shouldn’t believe kindness is rare.

They shouldn’t learn that empathy is optional

or that decency depends on who deserves it.

They shouldn’t have to carry adult fear in child-sized bodies.

They shouldn’t have to inherit adult failures and be told, this is just how things are now.

Because that sentence is where responsibility goes to die.

They are learning how to cope before they’ve learned how to be.

And that should bother us.

It should sit heavy in our chests and refuse to be ignored.

The grief that comes with realizing how exposed they are.

How little is hidden.

How quickly innocence collides with reality.

Crashing into them without waiting for their hearts to catch up.

They see everything.

They hear everything.

They absorb more than we realize before they have the language, the context, or the protection to make sense of it.

And it doesn’t matter what you or anyone believes,

human decency should not be up for debate.

The fear isn’t that they’ll see pain.

It’s that they’ll start to believe it’s inevitable.

That this is just how the world works.

That cruelty is normal.

That caring is conditional.

A child who learns to brace early doesn’t grow up strong.

They grow up scanning rooms.

They grow up guarded.

They grow up surviving instead of living.

We call it resilience when it’s really adaptation.

We praise kids for “handling it so well” without ever asking why they had to handle it at all.

That isn’t strength.

It’s theft.

It steals wonder.

It steals softness.

It steals the right to feel safe, before learning how to endure.

They are deserving of a childhood that doesn’t require armor.

They deserve years that are not heavy.

They should not have to sacrifice childhood to accommodate a broken world.

This isn’t about pretending the world should be perfect.

It’s the fact that children shouldn’t have to live in survival mode because adults haven’t figured out how to do better.

They shouldn’t be the ones who pay the price while we debate it.