ABSTRACT
With all of the usual concerns about children's well-being stemming from the breakdown of the family and cultural disintegration, it is no wonder that rhetoric about children permeates public discourse. Ironically, Americans live in a perpetual "year of the baby" with the tabloid magazines repeatedly focusing on pictures of the beautiful people who are expecting a child, usually without benefit of marriage. Numerous celebrities and actresses are pictured with a "bump", current lingo for showing a pregnancy prominently displayed. Even those children growing up in a prosperous material environment, full of opportunities for positive development unimpeded by obstacles to economic progress, too often have an impoverished emotional and spiritual quality of life. Something about babies and children brings out, in most people, the adult instinct to protect and cherish. Most adults respond to the vulnerability of children in very predictable ways.
