This week the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stood before Parliament (that's the Australian equivalent of the National Football League) and issued an apology to hundreds of thousands of children known as the Forgotten Australians.
It seems many of these children were placed in orphanages and foster homes in Australia up until the late 1970s. Instead of being loved like children should be, many of these kids were abused and forced to work in terrible conditions.
Prime Minister Rudd said it was an "ugly chapter" of the nation's history.
And it sounds like it was.
Children are a precious gift ... most of the time. If your children are interrupting my peaceful dinner with screaming and crying, then your children are actually a ...
I'm getting ahead of myself.
There was a time when children were seen and not heard. There was a time when children were second-class citizens, therefore somebody's property to abuse and misuse.
In schools across America, many children use to suffer ridicule and downright meanness, and I mean from teachers and administrators.
It was nothing for a kid to get slapped with a ruler, a paddle or, in some cases, a hand. And many of those kids came home after school and got more "discipline."
When I was kid, some of the really harsh disciplinary techniques were out of the schools. But most schools still paddled the really bad kids -- not me of course.
I remember going to the principal's office when I was in kindergarten for doing something harmless. He didn't spank me. He didn't need to because when he pulled that paddle out of his desk drawer, I was cured of my mean streak.
When I was in junior high, some of that meanness returned. As a class clown, it was always fun for me to harass my teachers. My teachers, because they were Communist sympathizers, did not see it as fun. On more than one occasion, I was sent to the principal's office. This time the paddle came out and was used for it's intended purpose -- to drive the meanness out of me like Jesus casting out the demons into a herd of pigs.
I probably deserved a little bit of it.
These days most schools can't touch a kid. They can send him to alternative school. They can send her home for three-day suspensions but very little paddling. Maybe that's a good thing.
The days of abusing kids still aren't over but it seems like it's getting better. And in some ways maybe the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. Let me explain.
First, let me say that parenting is hard. I know. I am one.
Like most teenagers, when I was in high school I promised myself that I wouldn't "bring a child into this cruel world."
But also like most teenagers, somewhere along the way I got a lot smarter.
My wife and I had our first baby when we were very young. When that little bundle of joy came into our lives, my first thought was, "I'm going to be the best parent ever to this kid and never make any common parenting errors."
That promise lasted about 45 to 50 minutes, when I turned him on his tummy in the baby warmer thingy in the hospital and got yelled out by a nurse, who called me everything but a father.
My parenting skills have gotten somewhat better through the years, but there was a time when I was terrible.
Both of my kids are great because of my wife, not me. The closest thing I came to earning "Father of the Year" was changing a poopee diaper when my son was six months old -- even though I used a garden utensil, a water hose and rocket launcher to place the foul diaper in my neighbor's yard.
I probably messed up a lot. My wife even messed up once, probably.
But we loved and still love our kids. We would have done anything for them. We would have taken a bullet for them. We sacrificed for them. And we try to teach them how to be productive members of society.
Did I mention parenting is hard?
Many parents don't seem to want to spend a whole lot of time with their kids. I mean they are with their kids a lot, but they aren't really "with" their kids.
I mentioned the crying kid at the restaurant ruining my dinner. This child for no reason kept shouting at the top of its lungs. Not once. Not twice. But every 15 to 20 seconds for a solid 30 minutes.
I don't know what was going on with kid. Maybe it could not distinguish between right and wrong. Maybe it was embarrassing the parents as much as anybody.
But, what I suspect, the parents just didn't care. They said, "Let the child act out. We're used to it. We don't care if it affects everyone else."
But it will affect us all. And not just over dinner. One day these little brats are going to be doctors and lawyers and senators and kiosk salesmen at the mall and they are going to make life-changing decisions for my generation.
Lord, help us.
I almost believe that allowing your kids to run around and act like a herd of skittering wildebeests is probably just as much abuse as what went on with those kids in Australia. It might be easier on the kid physically, but he's probably suffering just as much damage on the inside.
I hope we can all learn a lesson from Australia. I hope we decide to love our kids, really love them by spending time with them. I hope we want the best for them and that sometimes mean being a little harsh when they need to learn a small lesson. And I hope that parents give out hugs freely to their children every day. They need it. They deserve it.
And I deserve it. I don't want to have to deal with it 30 years from now.
Read more of Rodney Hays' humor on his blog at www.rodhays.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/rodhays.