Trenchant insights from one of the great social philosophers of the late 20th century:

The unexpectedly rigorous business of bringing up children exposed me, as it necessarily exposes almost any parent, to our "child-centered" society's icy indifference to everything that makes it possible for children to flourish and to grow up to be responsible adults.  To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light.  This perspective unmistakably reveals the unwholesomeness, not to put it more strongly, of our way of life: our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of "making it"; our addictive dependence on drugs, "entertainment” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties; our preference for "nonbinding commitments"; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we "impose" our morality on others and thus invite others to "impose" their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.

Source: Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York and London: Norton, 1991), pp. 33-34.