and we need to see to it that it is stopped.

Of course, here in the U.S., that destruction seem to come from two things: those who seek to hurt a child's life. And those who seek to help too much. After 55 years in this country, I can assure you that both take place here, and the damage done is equally devastating. Oh, one more thing... please be careful how you use the word 'innocence', as it has become a convenient excuse for those who wish to repress intelligence and education. Young people need to know about reality and this modern trend to keep our young as young as possible and therefore as sheltered as possible is creating a generation that will be woefully unprepared for our modern world, and yet this insanity is being doubled down on at every turn. Don't believe me? Just look up 'pediatricians' on line and see what their accepted age range is. When someone who is 23 is still seeing a pediatrician, that tells me enough about how nuts modern child rearing is.

exposure to the ugly reality parts of existence.

You might think you offer a reality "corrective" here, but I respectfully disagree.

Contingency stimulus studies showed decades ago -- decades ago -- that for every negative stimulus, it takes 15 positive stimuli following it to just return to the state before that one negative stimulus. That's the physical cortisone-lowering time it takes to return to clear awareness, learning and the agency state of curiosity.

So no, I won't agree that children should get equal doses of what you call "reality." And if you call the following explanation sheltering, you're sadly mistaken.

To keep children as "young" as possible is not a modern trend in the way you suppose. It's about science; and whether adults know it or not, it's about giving children a chance to "see," think about the possibilities of their future lives beyond what exists in the present. They have capacity building to do, through experiences and processing through them.

Preparedness and vigilance behavior are internal, and developmentally take longer, the more complicated the situations are that children get exposed to. They need time to process new exposures with talking, sharing with different aged humans and reading. Then they have to look back on those exposures with an older perspective.

It's not insanity to provide space for growth through learning. But that learning must have a base -- call it home, wherever and with whoever -- of security, trust and capacity, enough to face and deal constructively with all the ugliness of the adult world.

That's the innocence I speak of.

Hurts to the body and mind are hurts to the soul. It IS an evil to destroy them. Witnessing ugly adult behavior is bad enough, but recoverable. Maybe.

Do you have kids? I've raised two, and fostered three 17, 18 year-old teens. They're all happy, high functioning adults.

What is your experience, again, that makes you call pediatric care of someone over 20 nuts?

There are laws about human "hurt" that would put every single ICE and CBP person behind bars.