“This Tuesday at the Children First book launch event held at Mencendorf House hosted by and Biedrība “Asociācija Ģimene” featured book readings, stories about the importance of fathers and mothers in every child’s life and calls for purposeful perseverance in the fight for children’s rights. The special live event was visited by the author of the book Katy Faust telling about the content of the book and the situation in the US and answering questions. Thanks to the initiator and director of the book translation, Alina Ozolina and her family for the enormous work that has been done during the year! Thank you to everyone who touched the path of this book to readers!”
(Translated from the original post on Them Before Us – Latviski)
A year ago a group of motivated parents started a fundraiser to translate our book into Latvian. They saw the threats to children and marriage seeping into their small country and decided they needed to stand against it. One year later, after hundreds of hours poured into translation, design and promotion, they held a book launch in a 17th century museum which celebrates the gift of life.
Members of our translation team, family policy experts, and religious leaders joyfully gathered to celebrate the completion of this critical project, which will be used to transform both hearts and laws in this country of beautiful beaches, abundant rivers, and free-flowing beer. Them Before Us founder, Katy Faust, had the honor of joining by zoom to thank our team on the ground, and commend the audience to use the stories and studies within to fight on behalf of Latvia’s most vulnerable.
Dear authors of the book and everyone who was involved in its creation, helping it reach the hands of readers, both in the original language and in translation!
Already after reading the first pages of the book, I wanted to express my feelings out loud – THANK YOU, thank you for writing such a book! And just flipping through its last page, I can’t refrain from commenting.
This book that the authors have created is an absolutely necessary medicine for today’s society. The social development trends that took place during the last decades, intending to promote tolerance, compassion, empathy, and reduce discrimination, have led us to the formation of an egoistic society based on the interests and needs of adults and accepting permissiveness. Reducing adult discomfort, and alleviation of “difficult” situations by making appropriate political and social decisions has to an irreversible collapse of fundamental values. Allowing this indentation for the first time, we forgot that the center of any public decision-making is the child – who is the most vulnerable and at the same time our greatest value. A child who has to adapt to the whims of an adult and satisfy his egocentric desires. A child who must be able to “survive” in the shadow of these decisions, being able to grow into an adult with a healthy psyche and the ability to carry the ideology of healthy family relations into the future, which is quite an impossible task. By making decisions that compromise the echo of a healthy family model, we affect the course of society’s development in the long term. A child who has grown up in a family with a lack of a biological mother or father (for whatever reason) is emotionally traumatized for life and unable to reproduce in his personal life the family model he never experienced.
I would like to emphasize what is said in the book about the fact that our current attention is focused on problems that might not exist at all, if only we had correctly positioned our value system for the long-term healthy development of society.
Understanding family values, relations with the outside world, and general moral principles is primarily rooted in the family. It is a place where a child, feeling safe, and cared for by his two biological parents, is able to best realize his potential, becoming a responsible, educated adult in the future, who continues to pass these values on to his progeny. An adult’s ability not to give in to the temptation of an easy solution when facing difficulties and challenges in his life is his greatest responsibility, which is also a sign of a person’s maturity. A mature, responsible adult who is able to accept the discomfort of his life for a greater purpose is the best example for a child. Children are the young sprouts of our society that require careful nurturing, care, selfless devotion, and the silencing of their egos in moments that are crucial for their future.
Thank you for this book – every line of it spoke to me to the depths of my heart, recognizing in them the bitter experiences of my childhood and the related wrong choices in my current life. All this could not have happened if only my parents had known the far-reaching consequences of their ill-considered decisions. And I can only wish that I could not pass on this “broken model” to my children so that they have the right values at the center of their lives.
Thank you for translating this book into Latvian! Undoubtedly, I recommend that every member of society should read it as a tutorial, as a manual, and learn the lessons contained in it, given by the stories of experience, to be able to calibrate one’s moral position and maintain it in moments of doubt!
With sincere thanks,
your Latvian reader