If we TRULY put kids first...
An investigation into the past, combined with modern science, for the constructive purpose of designing something better. Framing ancient wisdom and traditions as practical guidance for the transformative work ahead in raising our children with the best possible intentions and information.
The image of the mother goddess overseeing both creation and destruction becomes a powerful metaphor throughout the story - helping readers understand that meaningful change requires both letting go and building new, both honoring what came before and creating what needs to come next.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Breaking Ancient Patterns in an Age of Unprecedented Information
When I began researching holiday traditions for my first children's book, I never expected to uncover evidence that would challenge our understanding of religion, history, and power. Wondering about how I would tell my children about why Santa comes down the chimney, I discovered ancient pre-christian practices involving red-and-white mushrooms, sunlight celebrations throughout the year, and linguistic fossils of ancient traditions that had been hiding in plain sight for centuries, all over the world. It was like everyone in the past was converging on the same idea: that the brilliant cycle of the stars and the seasons is mapped within our own cellular biology. That the story of the seasons can be explained as a dramatic play on the lifecycle of humanity.
What appeared to be separate traditions - from Siberian winter rituals to Mexican female festivals disguised as Saints, from Croatian sacred wells to African oases - were actually telling one unified story, a dramatic play on the story of the creation of life.
This investigation reveals how humanity's oldest wisdom preserved itself through millennia of attempted erasure - in fired clay tablets, in place names like TAMANRASSET, and IS-RA-EL, in seasonal celebrations, in folk knowledge, and even in our own bodies.
From Croatian jewelry and sacred burning traditions to excavations and discoveries from Mexican festivals and African lore appropriated by colonizers, we trace patterns suggesting that our understanding of human history, religion, and power might be profoundly incomplete.
But this isn't about returning to some idealized past. We have never before had this information at our fingertips. Nobody has lived in such an era of communication. We stand at a unique moment in our shared human story - able to access both ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science, and the freedom to decipher it for ourselves, able, for the first time, to combine indigenous knowledge of our elders with global data to see patterns that were invisible to previous generations.
At the heart of this discovery lies a troubling pattern:
the glorification of sacrifice rather than protection.
We've consistently prioritized abstract principles over children's wellbeing, from reciting a story of ancient child sacrifice within the crucifixion narrative, to economic exploitation and pollution, and especially, in the over-burden placed onto modern families of young children. Yet when we put children first - all children, for countless generations to come - everything changes.
This story explores how our religious narratives, environmental practices, and social structures continue ancient patterns of sacrifice that no longer serve LIFE itself. They were temporary drastic measures for war time and cosmic events, that more spiritual cultures, like that of the Egyptians and Jews, had already pulled away from. But before that transition was complete, a mistranslation of the story was manipulated into a history that gets repeated daily, reminders of a very strange past that no longer serves us.
Most importantly, this study shows how the rejection of the natural system has trickled into modern day where the body's wisdom has been systematically overridden by modern systems. Our "marshmallowed” traditions have been stripped of their potency while retaining their forms - like the plant that was once medicine of the marsh turned into a sugary shell with the same name- creating a society where youngest generations desperately seek meaning but find only consumerism dressed as tradition.
The idea of men being in charge caused a new set of problems the stories attempted to explain: we always knew who a child’s mother was, but it would have taken a long time to understand paternity. To really know, women would have to be tightly watched, and expected to remain pure, while men could do what they pleased. This is NOT how it always was. In fact, the emphasis on female control only proves it was a new notion, needing to be explained and enforced.
This obsession with controlling female sexuality appears repeatedly in religious narratives. We read countless stories of divine male figures raping women - Zeus alone has over 30 examples. Biblical narratives offer daughters to be raped instead of boys. God coming to Mary, a young pre-teenage girl, essentially her boss, requesting of her to do him a huge favor, would be totally unacceptable today, when we have clarified these kinds of things as inappropriate for a reason. She was not yet of the age where she could have known her true self. These aren't just ancient tales but blueprints for a worldview where female bodies, like the Earth itself, exist to be conquered and exploited.
They mirror the Roman example of raping the Sabine women, a group of rogue warriors at the foundation of the Roman state who tricked a nearby town into attending a party, only to steal all the women to extend their short-sighted legacy. To have a ruling city, you need to have heirs, and they realized women were not so expendable after all, yet to be tightly controlled as their heirs will inherit their property. In Roman law, women and children were seen as property of men, hardly above the status of slaves.
This continued the Greek ideal of raping women to "steal their powers" as once the powerful goddesses in charge. But we learn from victims worldwide, a goddess' bloodline cannot be tainted because a man caused her physical harm. Her royal blood cannot be removed from the equation, and though she may have hidden for a time, she can still rise back in full force. And in that rise brings back a balance we have been looking for.
The same pattern of domination extends to our relationship with the Earth itself. The rampant exploitation of topsoil and nutrients with mono-cropping, over-harvesting, and spraying of poisons reflects this same mentality - a simplistic approach to complex living systems that prioritizes short-term gain over long-term flourishing. Just as women's bodies were reduced to vessels for male heirs, the Earth has been reduced to a resource for extraction.
Inherent wisdom and rhythms were dismissed as irrelevant and antiquated. In the older religions, like those found all over Africa, elders were revered in the same respect as gods. Even the very notion of “new” needed to be redefined around the time of this monotheistic boom, not as immature, but as “progress”. The “New” Testament was one of progress, not accuracy or carefully collected wisdom of the ages. The ancient cultures of Africa and the Middle east, with their goddess worship and maternal bloodlines, had to be maligned so the past greats would be seen as unimportant. They were maligned particularly because they were once so revered.
The parallel is unmistakable - patriarchal religious narratives that glorify male conquest while controlling female sexuality mirror agricultural practices that dominate and deplete rather than work with natural systems. Both reflect a fundamental disconnection from the wisdom encoded in bodies and ecosystems, a rejection of balance in favor of hierarchy, a preference for simple control over complex relationship.
This book traces how ancient wisdom preserved itself despite systematic attempts to erase it, showing how reconnecting with bodily intelligence might help us rebuild our relationship with the Earth as well. By shifting from exploitation to regeneration, from conquest to partnership, we can break destructive patterns and create environments where both human bodies and planetary systems can thrive.
Just like the mother goddess was in charge of both love and war, creation and destruction, birth and rebirth, we face a moment of both ending and beginning. In planning for the rebuild, let's focus on what really matters - honoring the wisdom encoded in our bodies and the Earth's systems, creating conditions where children can develop without artificial barriers, where the cycle of seasons is celebrated rather than exploited.
This parallel exploitation of land and body created a perfect storm: as we separated from our own bodily wisdom, we simultaneously separated from the Earth's natural systems. The same worldview that labeled natural bodily desires as "sinful", the act of sex that was once considered sacred for creating life, also treated the planet as a resource to be dominated. Sex, in the hands of this new world order, was a means for making babies, a cold, calculated task that should not provide any pleasure.
At the same time, the modern goal of exploiting for convenience, instant pleasure and profit deprives us of true satisfaction and a sustainable future.
The Earth has always been the place we get our food. When we treat it as something to be conquered and extracted from rather than a living system to be nurtured, we create the same disconnection in our bodies that we've created in our environment. The processed foods engineered to maximize profit while minimizing nutrition mirror our hollowed-out traditions - keeping the form while removing the substance, creating addiction rather than satisfaction.
This book traces how ancient wisdom preserved itself despite systematic attempts to erase it, showing how reconnecting with bodily intelligence might help us rebuild our relationship with the Earth as well. By shifting from exploitation to regeneration, from disconnection to relationship, we can break destructive patterns and create environments where both human bodies and planetary systems can thrive.
The guidance we need has always been here - hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to recognize it with fresh eyes.
While we were trying to control sexual temptation as sinful, the modes of exploitation of the earth extended into the nutritional realm. The earth has always been the place we get our food. and the modern goal of exploiting for convenience, instant pleasure and profit deprives us of true satisfaction and a sustainable future.
Our environment has become actively hostile to natural development, flooding children's bodies with chemicals, processed foods, and manipulative media before they can even choose. Hormones of fertility, and basic living, cannot express themselves correctly if we are stressed, whether mentally, physically, or nutritionally.
The solution isn't simply educating adults. It is not enough to just have enlightened priestesses and priests in society, just as being educated does not mean our children will be born ready to absorb it all through osmosis. Each child needs to experience life for themselves, needs to have their own education and experience with awe.
What we can do is remove artificial barriers while allowing natural growth. It is our job to let our children struggle with what should be normal issues, rather than fighting the environment from the start. They still have a whole life to live that will present its own complications, and we want them to be able to always come back to seeing there IS beauty in this world.
This perspective transforms how we understand:
Ancient Wisdom: Practical recognition of biological reality, later maligned as superstitious - from treating pregnancy as sacred to understanding seasonal cycles, from communal child-raising to sustainable resource management. How goddess worship predated god worship, how cooperation rather than domination enabled human survival, how body wisdom guided mate selection and childrearing before modern disruptions.
Hidden Connections: How the name "Israel" contains elements of divine balanced power, how Easter preserves the goddess Isis/Aset and the place of the rising sun in its very name, and how Christmas traditions echo ancient solstice celebrations of divine birth of children equated to the sun.
Wisdom Preserved: How ancient knowledge survived through language, folk traditions, how bodily intelligence still guides us when not overridden, how seasonal cycles teach balance rather than hierarchy.
Modern Challenges: Symptoms of disconnection from natural patterns - from processed food to environmental toxins, from sacrificial thinking to exploitation of future generations. How children are born with 200+ toxic chemicals in their cord blood, how processed food hacks biological regulatory systems, how disconnection from nature undermines development. And how our earth suffers when we treat it only as a being to be exploited.
Future Possibilities: How putting children first transforms religious understanding, environmental policies, educational approaches, and economic models. Not as technological utopias but as balanced systems that protect children while fostering their growth - creating environments where natural development can proceed without artificial barriers.
Ancient wisdom offers solutions to our most pressing contemporary challenges - from mental health crises and social fragmentation to environmental degradation. By reclaiming what was hidden in plain sight, we can create a future that truly honors children's wellbeing rather than sacrificing it for short-term gains.
Just like the mother goddess was in charge of both love and war, creation and destruction, birth and rebirth, in planning for the rebuild, let's focus on what really matters. As old systems falter and new information challenges longstanding narratives, we have an unprecedented opportunity to create something better - not by returning to the past, but by bringing ancient wisdom into conversation with modern knowledge.
This isn't about imposing a single vision but creating space for the questions children naturally ask before we teach them to stop questioning. This isn't about rejecting tradition but understanding its deepest meanings. It's about recognizing that what has been passed on to us is a shell of what was once crucially relevant and reclaiming that potency for future generations. It’s about creating space for exploration.
We don’t have to abandon technology, but we do have the task to ensure technology serves us rather than undermines human development. There may not be any perfect solutions. What we can do for certain is remove the unnecessary barriers we've created.
As the ancient Egyptian burial texts remind us, death itself meant "to return to the earth" or with appropriate symbology, "to return to the mother." Even in endings, there is renewal - if we remember our place in natural cycles rather than trying to dominate them.
By shifting from sacrifice to protection, from domination to cooperation, from extraction to regeneration, we can break ancient patterns that no longer serve life. The wisdom to guide this transformation has always been here - hidden in place names and seasonal celebrations, preserved in ancient traditions we still partake in simplified form, and remains encoded in our very bodies, if we only have the patience to listen.
The time has come to see what's been hidden in plain sight and use it to create a world worthy of our children.
From Sacrifice to Protection: Transforming Our Deepest Stories
The stories we tell shape the world we create. When our central religious narratives glorify sacrifice rather than protection, they set in motion patterns that ripple through every aspect of society - from how we raise children to how we make policies, from how we wage war to how we approach life's most intimate choices.
The Pattern of Sacrifice
The crucifixion narrative stands as perhaps the most influential story in Western culture. For two thousand years, we've taught children that the ultimate expression of divine love was a father sending his son to die. The message seems clear: suffering makes one sacred, death redeems, sacrifice saves.
This narrative didn't emerge from nowhere. It transformed earlier patterns of actual child sacrifice practiced across ancient cultures from Carthage to Canaan. The eating of bread of the body and drinking blood of wine hark back to cannibalistic practices, ones Egyptians were proud to say set them apart. Jews were proud to say no to the child sacrifices of Canaan and say lets pray as sacrifices instead, that is the essentials of rabbinic judaism and temple sacrifices of animals. Only Rome, with its many misrepresentations of the bible, brought back in the grossest misunderstandings of all time in their JC.
Archaeological evidence from sites like Tophet in Tunisia confirms that children were indeed sacrificed to appease divine powers. As societies evolved, these literal sacrifices became symbolic, but the underlying pattern remained - the innocent must suffer to restore cosmic balance.
The consequences of this narrative extend far beyond Sunday services. We see it today in extremist groups like Hamas, whose leadership believes using children as shields is acceptable essentially because the next life is more important. We see it in suicide bombers convinced their death will please God. We even see it in policies that prioritize abstract principles over living children's wellbeing. We should run from this kind of mentality. Our own christian values preserve just this: sacrifice of life for the better good. I do not believe that should be our narrative anymore.
This sacrificial framework creates a troubling value system: the next life matters more than this one, suffering purifies, and death can be holy when serving a "greater cause." When we teach children such narratives, should we be surprised when some take them to their logical extreme?
Reclaiming Protection as Divine
What if our central stories emphasized protection rather than sacrifice? What if we taught children that the divine is most present not in suffering but in nurturing, not in death but in flourishing life?
Evidence for this alternative narrative exists in our oldest traditions. Before crucifixion became Christianity's central symbol, early Christians used fish, bread, and grapevines - all symbols of nurturing life. Before male sky gods demanded sacrifice, earth goddesses ensured fertility and protection. Even in our biological makeup, we find evidence that cooperation and care, not just competition and dominance, enabled human survival.
"We were never the biggest or the strongest or even the smartest," as research confirms. Neanderthals had larger brains, yet Homo sapiens prevailed through our unparalleled ability to cooperate. Our evolutionary advantage wasn't sacrifice but connection - not dying for the group but living and working together.
This shift in understanding transforms how we approach our most challenging social questions.
Beyond False Dichotomies: The Case of Abortion
Few issues better illustrate the limitations of sacrificial thinking than abortion debates. The question "Are you pro-life or pro-choice?" forces a false dichotomy that traps us in endless conflict while children suffer.
When we prioritize protection over sacrifice, we ask different questions: How do we best protect both women and children? How do we create conditions where every child is wanted and supported? How do we honor the sacredness of ALL life in all its complexity?
The data speaks clearly. Societies with comprehensive sex education, accessible contraception, strong family support policies, and safe, legal abortion have fewer abortions. Meanwhile, crime goes up when abortion is banned, as modern research shows us. The irreparable damage that comes from being unwanted creates cycles of suffering that persist for generations.
Those claiming to be "pro-life" while cutting support for families after birth reveal the incoherence of sacrificial thinking. A true life-honoring approach would ensure every child has healthcare, nutrition, education, and love - not just mandated birth followed by abandonment.
Ancient cultures understood this nuance better than we might expect. "Ancient Egyptians (and Romans) had specific herbs... that was an ancient birth control." They recognized that responsible parenthood sometimes means choosing when not to become parents. The Romans' overuse of silphium drove it to extinction - perhaps our first documented contraceptive environmental crisis.
Communal Responsibility
The shift from sacrifice to protection requires reclaiming communal responsibility. We are a deeply communal society, and we lack community support. Our current isolation of nuclear families places impossible burdens on parents while depriving children of the village they need.
Indigenous cultures understood this. Children belonged not just to parents but to communities. Elders shared wisdom, multiple adults provided guidance, and children learned from diverse examples. Intergenerational bonding was good for the old and the young. We've lost this understanding, creating systems where Republican values that want to force that life to continue also provide the least support for young families.
A protection-centered narrative would recognize that children need communities, not just individual parents. It would acknowledge that elderly people will need these young people one day and therefore have a vested interest in their wellbeing. It would understand that even if we do not have children, we still have a role to play in nurturing the next generation, in not “shitting in the bed we sleep in”. We are really just borrowing this world from the next generation. We will pass this world onto them, like it or not. What is the legacy we want to leave behind with that returned library book?
The Cosmic Dance
Perhaps most beautifully, this shift allows us to reclaim the profound wisdom encoded in our seasonal celebrations. The spring equinox with its perfect balance of light and darkness symbolizes mystical unity... a balance of light and dark, yin and yang, male and female. Nine months later, the winter solstice celebrates birth as darkness gives way to returning light.
This natural cycle teaches cooperation rather than dominance, balance rather than hierarchy, nurturing rather than sacrifice. Our ancient ancestors understood these patterns, encoding them in celebrations that modern religions inherited but often stripped of their deeper meanings.
By reclaiming these patterns, we reconnect with wisdom that predates patriarchal dominance and sacrificial thinking. We remember that our children are not just little adults to be exploited, they are ours to protect and teach, and become our greatest teachers.
A New Story
Imagine teaching children that the divine is found not in suffering but in protection, not in death but in life, not in sacrifice but in nurturing. Imagine religious narratives that emphasize how we care for one another rather than how we die for abstract causes.
Men have been separated from our parent’s birth rooms because of an outdated fear they would not want to leave their families to go to war. This harks back to the hero in Troy, saying goodbye to his young son and wife for the last time.
Imagine social policies that prioritize children's wellbeing over institutional power or ideological purity.
This transformation doesn't require abandoning tradition but understanding its deepest meanings. It doesn't mean rejecting spirituality but reclaiming its most life-affirming expressions. It doesn't demand throwing away sacred texts but reading them with fresh eyes that seek wisdom rather than justification for dominance.
The evidence for this alternative understanding exists in our oldest artifacts, in linguistic patterns preserved across millennia, in traditions that survived despite suppression, and in the questions children naturally ask before we teach them to stop questioning.
Let's stop, once and for all, the sacrifice of our children. Let's tell different stories - stories that honor protection as divine, that celebrate life as sacred, that recognize children not as means to ideological ends but as the very purpose of our existence.
Many of the stories in our bibles and sacred books are just mistranslations of ancient wisdom. Much of what is there is great to learn, but should be totally reframed and rewritten with more understanding with a new interpretation of their true meanings. As most children see and expect of religion: it was once about love.
When we make this shift, everything changes - from how we approach intimate family choices to how we create social policies, from how we understand our past to how we shape our future.
The ancient fire that lies within the sounds of “ash, ish, oss”, the words for “god, sun, son and ray/rex" can illuminate a different path - not the path of sacrifice but the path of protection, not the glorification of suffering but the celebration of nurturing life.
This is the transformation our children deserve.
Beyond Sacrifice: Breaking Ancient Patterns
In the quiet of my research, surrounded by maps tracing ancient goddess names across continents, a startling pattern emerged. Our most revered religious narratives - particularly the central Christian story of Jesus's crucifixion - continued a tradition far older and more troubling than most believers realize: child sacrifice.
This isn't the comforting interpretation taught in Sunday schools. Yet when we examine the narrative with fresh eyes, uncomfortable questions arise: If Jesus died as punishment under Roman law for disturbing the peace, how was this a "sacrifice"? If God was sacrificing his son, what higher power was he appeasing? And why would a loving deity require such a brutal death as payment for humanity's redemption?
The pattern becomes clearer when traced back to earlier traditions. Ancient cultures indeed practiced child sacrifice - from Carthage to Canaan, from Celtic Europe to pre-Columbian America. These horrific acts were gradually replaced by animal substitutes and symbolic offerings. Yet the core concept remained: appeasing divine powers through the death of the innocent.
What's remarkable is how this ancient pattern was transformed rather than rejected. The crucifixion narrative took a Roman execution of a Jewish rebel and reframed it as the ultimate sacrifice - the last one the biggest, with the most fanfare and fireworks, the last child sacrifice to end all sacrifice that we will bring back to life every Sunday and wedding in all our minds.
If we truly want to put children first, we must question even our most sacred narratives. What does it teach our children when our central religious story glorifies sacrifice rather than protection? What patterns does it set in motion when we celebrate a father sending his son to die, no matter how noble the cause?
The alternative isn't abandoning spirituality but rediscovering older, wiser understandings. Perhaps, as lingering linguistic evidence suggests, the crucifixion story originally involved appeasing a female divinity "that once ruled over him, possibly alongside him, but definitely one the church is still afraid of." This would match patterns found in older traditions where divine feminine power was gradually subordinated to masculine authority.
Many theologians and scientists are already finding new ways to understand divine presence - many in the church are willing to see god as nature. Many scientists see god in science, in the unknown we will never know, even and especially Einstein, one of our favorites. These thinkers recognize that divinity transcends simple human categories like gender, existing instead in the intricate patterns of life itself.
This more expansive understanding connects rather than divides. We are all made of the same gases and material that made up the sky, and god herself, itself, himself. Whichever you prefer. The divine exists in that plan of telling ourselves when to fall in line, when to act, and how. The DNA embedded in every seed that is not so different from us.
When we recognize this interconnection, we shift from sacrifice to stewardship. Instead of glorifying death as redemptive, we honor life as sacred. Instead of teaching children that suffering is salvific, we show them that protection is divine.
I have been asked if that means I am pro-life or pro-choice. This is a very personal question that keeps half the country divided against each other. Just like climate change, it asks wrong questions. If I have to choose between, I choose choice, because i think it honors people, in this life, rather than ones to come. I think we need to understand that some people are not yet ready to take on the immense task of raising life. And we should help them as much as possible to want to do it themselves, and if they cannot, maybe they should not be having children, for whatever reason, which is often medical. We should work hard to ensure people do not have to feel abortion is the means, and thankfully, it is a very rare use, compared to other methods. I think we also need to rethink birth control. Ancient egyptians and romans had specific herbs, that the romans used and abused, so that it went extinct, that was an ancient birth control. If a parent is not ready, from drugs, health reasons, whatever, who is helping that person once the child is here? the repulican values that want to force that life to continue also provide the least support for young families. How is this pro-life? We see all kinds of issues that develop from children born to unloving families. Irreparable damage comes from being unwanted. Again, we are a deeply communal society, and we lack community support. We should use technology when it is needed, but try other methods first, that are more gentle, more guiding. Just like procedures in birth, start with gentle, intelligent methods first, don’t start with surgery. More work in the short term (not even THAT much more!) means much better recovery. Freakonomics reported that crime goes up when abortion is banned. We have more discontent in life when people are unloved. Who is going to manage those already damaged, and who is preventing more damage from occurring?
If we put in the work when children are young, it will be less work on us when they are older. The best parents create children who do not need them. Our hardest job is to create humans that love us, that we can let go to find their own path, and hope they come back to us as much as possible. We will need them to take care of us one day. This is one thing that is missing in today’s elderly, the realization that they will need these young people one day, we all will. Even those making the most money, they also need more than money. We are at our worst when we hide behind group think or corporatins, not individuals with consciences. We need to hear eachother out, and be communal once again. It does not take huge changes, and yet it could make drastic ones in our daily world.
This shift changes everything:
How we treat the environment (we need to see animals and trees and fungi as part of this shared ecosystem"
How we approach gender equality (just as both girls and boys should be celebrated)
How we understand education (nobody should be denied an education, especially not for religious reasons)
How we view sexuality (let people find love wherever makes them happy, where it helps the next generations thrive)
The ancient stories around birth, in an age where child mortality was as high as 50%, remind us of our true responsibility - not sacrifice but nurturing, not domination but care. We are not done once they are born. And even if we do not have children, we still have a role to play.
This isn't about erasing traditions but understanding their deeper meanings. The cycle of the year still holds wisdom when seen clearly - spring equinox celebrating mystical unity... a balance of light and dark, yin and yang, male and female, and with this unity (i.e. sex), 9 months later, this dance shows a child born on winter solstice, symbolized by the sun, honoring birth and renewal. And Easter preserving the goddess herself in its very name: the east of ist, isis, the Greek form of the name aset, pronounced eest, and preserving that t sound that is feminine.
Let us, once and for all, stop sacrificing our children - whether literally through violence and neglect, or symbolically through narratives that glorify suffering instead of protection.
Our children are not just little adults to be exploited, they are ours to protect and teach, and there to be our greatest teachers.
Let's put the work in now, the real sacrifice, to ensure a better world for everyone. This is the true meaning of sacred: not what we're willing to kill for, but what we're willing to live for, to work for, to change for.
When we put children first - all children, for countless generations to come - we break ancient patterns of sacrifice and create new patterns of nurturing. This isn't just about rewriting history; it's about reshaping the future.
True Choice: Protecting Children in a Manipulative World
A dangerous new ideology has emerged, cloaked in the language of freedom and autonomy: "Let the child decide." This seemingly progressive stance ignores a fundamental reality - the world our children inhabit has been deliberately engineered to manipulate them at every turn.
The Myth of Neutral Choice
When we say "let children choose," we imagine them making decisions in a neutral environment, following their natural instincts toward what serves them best. But nothing about our modern environment is neutral.
Food has been engineered to be addicting, as are screens and children's favorite shows. Corporate interests have spent billions researching how to bypass rational thought and target the most primitive reward centers in developing brains. Bright colors, strategic sugar-fat-salt combinations, carefully calibrated dopamine triggers - these aren't accidents but deliberate design choices meant to create dependency.
We have made our world as one being drug addicts surrounded by cocaine. Would we place a recovering addict in a room full of their substance of choice and say, "You decide"? Would we consider this true freedom? Yet this is precisely what we do when we abandon children to "choose" in an environment engineered for addiction rather than health.
The consequence is devastating: a generation experiencing unprecedented rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, attention disorders, and disconnection from natural rhythms. When children inevitably "choose" what they've been programmed to want, we either blame them for lacking willpower or blame ourselves for not letting them "express themselves" freely enough.
Both responses miss the fundamental problem: true choice requires preparation, education, protection, and guidance.
The Body's Wisdom vs. Environmental Manipulation
Research confirms what traditional cultures always knew: If we give children only real food options, they do choose nutrients good for their health. They choose liver, when their taste buds learn to like it. They CHOOSE the best things when their body is not tricked otherwise.
A fascinating study followed children given access to a variety of unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods without adult instruction about what to eat. Over time, these children naturally selected balanced diets that provided precisely the nutrients their growing bodies needed. Some days they craved fat, others protein, others specific minerals - following an intuitive wisdom their bodies possessed.
As we age, our rates of protein needs also change, as does everything else, in details real food provides in more nuance than we can fathom.
But this natural intelligence functions only in appropriate environments.
Children are not born with a blank slate. Umbilical cords have blood with an average of 200 harmful chemicals. They are starting with the worst start in history.
Once the food supply is infiltrated with hyperpalatable, supernormal stimuli designed to override internal regulation, the system breaks down. The body's wisdom cannot distinguish between actual needs and artificial triggers specifically designed to hack its signaling system. Top "notes” of food are chosen to trick the body that the rest are soon to follow, but that nutrient expectation never arrives.
The same pattern applies to media, social interaction, sleep, movement, and virtually every aspect of development. Our children's bodies and minds possess remarkable wisdom, but this wisdom functions properly only within the environments we evolved to inhabit.
It takes about 10 generations to see enough rna changes to make real dna changes. These kind of food changes only started with the two world wars and economy of scale. Using war time techniques to make pesticides and canola oil and fake foods that taste like real food and light up dopamine centers in the brain to be more drug than food. Our bodies and world have simply not been given enough time to react to the damage we are throwing at it, at least not to be fixed in our lifetimes.
Critical Windows and Developmental Timing
Another crucial reality the "let them decide" ideology ignores is developmental timing: "We need to pay attention to the natural milestones, that are very time dependent, since our DNA works on a timescale. If we miss this, some things are never recoverable."
Brain development follows a precisely choreographed sequence with critical windows that open and close according to genetic programming. The window for language acquisition, emotional regulation, sensory integration, motor control - each has its moment when the brain is uniquely receptive to specific inputs and vulnerable to their absence.
Leaving children to "decide" during these critical windows isn't granting freedom but abdicating responsibility. By the time a child is old enough to consciously choose, many of these windows have already closed. The foundation has already been laid, for better or worse.
This timing extends even to prenatal development: "Wouldn't we have wished our parents... did what they could do before we were out of her belly to give us what we need for our organs and brain to form at its best, as it was meant to?" The mother's nutrition, stress levels, and environmental exposures during pregnancy shape the child's lifelong health trajectory before conscious choice is even possible.
As it has been in the past, pregnancy should be sacred. Birth should be sacred. It is the time to let natural essences flourish and real care means real food, not just convenience. Self care is not always indulgence, it is also providing that which makes our cells flourish. Good food and real nutrients tastes amazing! We just have to learn to teach our taste buds back to natural food rather than temporary mouth pleasure. The most expensive and delicious restaurants understand this, using the most recently picked food straight from the garden.
The Balance: Protection and Preparation
Rather than abandoning children to navigate a manipulative world alone or controlling their every move, the true middle path involves protection and preparation:
We need to help them have better microbiomes from before they can choose, THEN help them have the skills to learn how to navigate the world after us, when they are alone.
This means:
Creating environments where healthy choices are easy and natural
Protecting developing systems from manipulation during critical periods
Teaching discernment rather than consumption
Building strong foundations that enable true autonomy later
Modeling the balance we hope they'll achieve
Cultivating this questioning mindset is a win win for everyone. In a constantly changing world, this ability to thrive in a RANGE of situations is key. We should not just be geniuses in a single task, though those savants are always great. We need to come back to what we are great at, being scavengers, being diverse, finding and learning what causes us to thrive. Most are similar, a non toxic food source, but there are infinite combinations within that.
Parents who provide primarily whole foods, limit screen exposure in early years, prioritize nature connection, and maintain consistent rhythms aren't restricting freedom - they're preserving it. They're ensuring the child's biological systems develop normally, creating the very capacity for wise choices later.
Would we all wish our parents had fed us the best foods and instilled the best habits so WE are not addicted to things that make us fat, depressed, and sick? Almost universally, adults who overcome these challenges wish they'd been given better foundations from the beginning.
Finding Beauty, Not Just Doom
Perhaps most importantly, protection and guidance allow children to discover something essential: We want children to see there is beauty in the world, not just doom.
A child abandoned to hyperpalatable foods never experiences the subtle sweetness of a fresh carrot, or even a strawberry. A child raised on hyperviolent games may never discover the quiet thrill of building something with their hands. A child whose attention is fractured by constant notifications may never know the deep satisfaction of sustained focus.
Technology is easy to learn, it was meant for our grandparents to figure out. Hands on skills using every sense, ones we don’t even know about, is what is essential to cultivate. This is an immersive education that encompasses sounds that prove healthy, movement, visual eye practices that scan and alternate rather than stare in one place. There is wisdom in running in the woods, breathing the terpenes of trees and hearing birdsong and trickling water and children laughing. If more kids climb real trees, and maybe yes, break more bones, they learn their limits and have less catastrophic falls. We cannot protect them so much that they never learn balance and risk for themselves.
True freedom isn't infinite, consequence-free choice. It's the capacity to engage deeply, to find meaning, to experience beauty, to form authentic connections. These capacities develop only with protection and guidance - not "to throw them in a world of murder, drugs, vice and sex and say figure it out."
Even an economy dependent on more people each generation is not sustainable. Retirements that require more people every year play out more as a cancer on this earth with uncontrollable growth, rather than true sustainability. Even burying people in coffins, stuffed with poisons, rather than being returned to the earth as seeds, how many generations can we keep this up before our whole earth is made up of coffins?
The Path Forward
When we understand development this way, the path forward becomes clearer.
Instead of the false dichotomy between control and abandonment, we can:
Create environments that support rather than undermine natural development
Protect children from manipulative influences during critical periods
Teach media literacy and critical thinking as appropriate
Gradually expand the realm of choice as discernment develops
Advocate for policies that prioritize children's wellbeing over corporate profit
We all feel best in a balance, and that can be learned, no matter what age. And when we realize this, we all wish we had started sooner.
This balanced approach isn't controlling - it's liberating. It frees children from manipulation by commercial interests. It gives them the foundation to make truly autonomous choices rather than simply responding to engineered cravings. Most importantly, it provides what every child desperately needs: the security of knowing someone cares enough to protect them from harm they cannot yet understand.
True choice emerges not from abandonment but from protection, not from exposure to everything but from thoughtful guidance, not from an attitude of "anything goes" but from the deep commitment to helping children develop their fullest potential.
This isn't about restricting freedom but about creating its very possibility.
Ancient Echoes, Modern Poisons: Reclaiming Sacred Protection
The threads connecting our religious practices to their ancient origins run deeper and darker than most recognize. The Eucharist - eating bread as body and drinking wine as blood - doesn't merely symbolize sacrifice; it echoes cannibalistic practices that many ancient societies eventually rejected. Egyptians were proud to say cannibalism set them apart from neighboring cultures, while Jews were proud to say “no” to the child sacrifices of their fellow Canaanites, by substituting animals and eventually prayer offerings. Egyptians cut off a “head of corn” in religious symbolism to please the gods. In considering the narrative that God wanted to sacrifice his son, we must consider, who was the higher power he was looking to impress? I can only offer, it was Her, his partner in creation, and she was silenced from speaking up about this ridiculous tradition.
Yet Rome, in its simple imperial reinterpretation and mistranslation of these traditions, brought back in the grossest misunderstandings of all time by centering a religion around symbolic cannibalism and human sacrifice. We’ve seen it time and time again: the Greeks and Romans looked up to the Egyptians and Middle Easterners for a thousand years, but were not initiated to learn their whole truths. Anyone who was, particularly Pythagorus, was murdered, and his students went underground, only to emerge in the Illuminati and others who dared to think differently from the insane times. We see this Greek/Roman tradition of usurption with error in Homeric epics copied from Egyptian ones of Isis searching for her husband, and of the first author, a woman, Enheduanna writing about the creator goddess Inanna, and even an Egyptian/Jewish version of Troy. We see this copycat technique in constellations that date to antiquated copies, and a solar year full of errors. Their influence extends back another thousand years before their Greek and Latin languages even developed, direct moments lost to memory but preserved in words and matched by trade in blue beads from the Mediterranean to Germany. We see copycats of the religious stories of men born on the winter solstice in strikingly similar narratives, born of a “virgin”, which of course, was an Egyptian notion, only one where a woman was reborn a virgin every day, no matter how many children or lovers she had, like newly fallen snow on a landscape will always be new again. But these translation have major implications in today’s world, where women are held to a standard of being mothers while never having sex. They make no sense. Embedded in our words, we feel remnants of these stories, most potent being East, and Israel, and we are brought back to a time when the woman was involved in balanced creation, and Africa and the Middle East were the dominant powers, with the gold, glory and grain to all the envy of the world.
These aren't comfortable observations, but examining them honestly helps us understand how deeply sacrificial thinking has shaped our worldview across millennia.
Bodies Bearing Witness
The evidence of our collective choices doesn't just appear in ancient texts and archaeological sites - it's written in our children's bodies from before birth. Children are not born with a blank slate. Umbilical cords have blood with an average of 200 harmful chemicals. They are starting with the worst start in history. And we are the first generation expected to live shorter lives than our parents.
This startling reality emerged from studies of newborns' cord blood, where industrial chemicals, pesticides, flame retardants, and plastic derivatives appeared in samples from babies born in remote mountain villages and bustling urban centers alike. No child today is born untouched by our environmental choices.
These toxins represent a new kind of sacrifice - not deliberate like ancient rituals, but equally deadly in their consequences. We have collectively chosen economic convenience over children's wellbeing, corporate profit over developmental health, short-term ease over long-term flourishing.
Hospitals are incentivized to create lifetime customers, managing symptoms, rather than promote real health and prevention.
The timeline makes this particularly concerning. These kind of food changes only started with the two world wars and economy of scale. Using war time techniques to make pesticides and canola oil and fake foods that taste like real food and light up dopamine centers in the brain to be more drug than food.
Our bodies haven't had time to adapt to this toxic onslaught. It takes about 10 generations to see enough RNA changes to make real DNA changes. We're witnessing in real-time what happens when environmental pressures outpace evolutionary adaptation - rising rates of autoimmune disorders, developmental disabilities, hormonal disruptions, and mental health challenges.
Reclaiming the Sacred
Facing these realities leads not to despair but to clarity about what truly matters: "As it has been in the past, pregnancy should be sacred. Birth should be sacred. It is the time to let natural essences flourish and real care means real food, not just convenience. Hormones of fertility, and basic living, cannot express themselves correctly if we are are stressed, whether mentally, physically, or nutritionally.
This isn't about returning to some idealized past. We have never before had this information at our fingertips. Nobody has lived in such an era of communication. Changes are coming. Discoveries are changing religious narratives and interpretations of times, locations, and people, and we need to be prepared to have our systems rocked. In planning for the reguild, let’s focus on what really matters.
It's about recognizing patterns that supported human thriving for thousands of generations and applying their wisdom in contemporary contexts. When traditional cultures treated pregnancy and birth as sacred transitions, they weren't being superstitious - they were acknowledging biological reality. These remnants still exist in our holidays. In a world where teenagers are looking for meaning, our marshamallowed hallow traditions can be looked at in new ways to find infinite possibilities for hope and adventure.
The foundations of lifelong health are laid during these critical periods.
Self care is not always indulgence, it is also providing that which makes our cells flourish. Modern wellness culture often reduces self-care to consumerism - special treats, luxury products, momentary escapes. But the deeper meaning involves nourishing our bodies at the cellular level, creating environments that support rather than undermine our biology.
Good food and real nutrients tastes amazing! We just have to learn to teach our taste buds back to natural food rather than temporary mouth pleasure. This re-education isn't deprivation but discovery - the subtle sweetness of a fresh carrot, the complex flavors of bone broth, the satisfaction of a strawberry grown from a seed. The most expensive and delicious restaurants understand this, using the most recently picked food straight from the garden.
Learning From Diversity Within Parameters
Human beings evolved as adaptable omnivores. We need to come back to what we are great at, being scavengers, being diverse, finding and learning what causes us to thrive. Our strength lies not in specialized adaptation but in flexibility within certain parameters.
In a constantly changing world, this ability to thrive in a RANGE of situations is key. The most successful human societies weren't those that mastered a single environment, but those that could adapt to changing conditions while maintaining core principles about what supported health.
It is not enough to just have enlightened priestesses and priests in society, just as being educated does not mean our children will be born ready to absorb it all through osmosis. Each child needs to experience life for themselves, needs to have their own education and experience with the divine. What has been passed on to us is a shell of what was once crucially relevant and potent, in the sun rising, in the stars traversing, in our our bodies sense the world around us.
This perspective transforms how we think about education: Technology is easy to learn, it was meant for our grandparents to figure out. Hands on skills using every sense, ones we don't even know about, is what is essential to cultivate.
Rather than training children for specific technological roles that may soon become obsolete, we might better serve them by developing their full sensory capacity. This is an immersive education that encompasses sounds that prove healthy, movement, visual eye practices that scan and alternate rather than stare in one place.
Nature provides the ideal environment for this developmental work. There is wisdom in running in the woods, breathing the terpenes of trees and hearing birdsong and trickling water and children laughing. Studies confirm that forest bathing reduces stress hormones, improves immune function, increases activity of the natural killer cells in our blood, enhances creativity, and builds resilience - benefits no screen can provide.
Balanced Protection
This doesn't mean bubble-wrapping children. If more kids climb real trees, and maybe yes, break more bones, they learn their limits and have less catastrophic falls. We cannot protect them so much that they never learn balance and risk for themselves. ER doctors mention they see fewer broken arms, but more children have extreme accidents from not knowing their own limits.
The key distinction lies between meaningful risk that builds capacity and needless danger that diminishes potential. Climbing trees develops proprioception, strength, risk assessment, and confidence. It also provide shade and a space away from hot plastic off-gassing harmful chemicals in the sun, and absorved in our children’s skin from modern playgrounds and fake grass.
Consuming food laced with endocrine-disrupting chemicals offers no developmental benefit while potentially causing lasting harm.
Paid off scientists say: “this stuff doesn’t kill us”, before the studies came out that it does in fact kill our microbiome, the bugs in our gut which bear striking similarities to the larger bugs they were created to destroy, which does cause slow deterioration like cancers in our lifetimes, and even younger in our children’s lives. Farmers are winning lawsuits over glyphosate poisoning, but laws have yet started to ban it, at least not in America. Or they get started with one president, to be cancelled by the next (Hello Obama/Trump). This does not a sudden death, but an incessant burden that can manifest into real disease and complications like the more and more common Alzheimers and immune disorders and fatigue.
True protection means creating environments where children can safely develop their capabilities - not environments devoid of all challenge. It means setting appropriate boundaries around genuine threats (like processed food engineered to override satiety signals) while allowing exploration within parameters that promote growth.
Removing these barriers should be the norm. It is our job to let our children struggle with what should be normal issues, rather than fighting the environment from the start. They still have a whole life to live that will present its own complications.
Sustainable Cycles
This protective approach extends beyond individual children to future generations. Even an economy dependent on more people each generation is not sustainable. Retirements that require more people every year play out more as a cancer on this earth with uncontrollable growth, rather than true sustainability.
Our current economic models demand perpetual growth on a finite planet - a mathematical impossibility. Even our death practices reflect this disconnection. Burying people in coffins, stuffed with poisons, rather than being returned to the earth as seeds, how many generations can we keep this up before our whole earth is made up of coffins?
Are we so afraid of dying we cannot let our own bodies move on to the next phase? The heat is gone, and we can choose to let the waters of rain and earth purify us. Time will regain these bodies regardless, just not in our lifetimes. Nature will always continue, even after millions of years of burning chaos, just like we saw after the dinosaurs. The mushrooms survived underground, and even are shown to break down nuclear waste. We can choose to ignore them, or learn from them and train them. Mushroom burial suits have also been created.
Ancient words for burial in Egyptian mean “to return to the earth”, and with the appropriate symbology of the earth mother, “to return to the mother.” Traditional cultures understood themselves as part of natural cycles: dust to dust, ash to ash, soil to soil, mother earth to mother earth.
Modern practices often interrupt these cycles, treating human remains as something to be preserved and isolated rather than returned to nourish new life. This mirrors our larger disconnection from natural systems.
The Integration
When we examine these patterns together - from religious sacrifice to environmental toxins, from educational approaches to economic models - a consistent theme emerges. We've systematically disrupted the cycles and connections that supported human flourishing for millennia, replacing them with linear processes that extract, consume, and discard.
The solution isn't rejecting modernity but integrating ancient wisdom with contemporary knowledge. We can use modern science to understand why traditional practices worked while adapting them to current contexts. We can leverage technology to support rather than supplant biological processes. We can build economic models that prioritize regeneration over extraction.
Most importantly, we can center children in this integration - not as passive recipients of our choices but as the very reason for making better ones. By protecting them from manipulation while preparing them for autonomy, by honoring their developmental needs while fostering their adaptive capabilities, we create the conditions for genuine thriving.
This isn't just about individual parenting choices but about collective priorities: the policies we support, the systems we build, the stories we tell. When we truly put children first - all children, for countless generations to come - we transform not just our families but our future.
This life is our story. What characters do we want to play?
