There Is No Them. There Is Only Us.

A Letter About Children, Empathy, and the Legacy We Carry

My dear beautiful souls,

It always fascinates me what is awakened within me - and how it asks to be expressed.

🕊️ The Moment I Knew

Ever since I was little, I felt a deep urge to protect the most vulnerable among us.

I was about seven years old when I watched my then-stepmother work in a children's nursery in my birth town Schönebeck/Elbe in the former German Democratic Republic.

There I met our tiniest, most fragile lives - and I remember the exact thought that passed through my young mind as I stood in that quiet room, holding one of them in my arms, looking around at the sleeping babies:

“They need protection.”

A thought that never left me, even when I did an apprenticeship in a kindergarten years later before I headed to London as an au-pair.

Deep down, I’ve always known: we are all someone’s child.

But humanity tends to forget that, and at times, I was forgotten too.

Perhaps that’s why I carry such a strong need to remember, daily, and to remind others. Remind you. That we all have a responsibility … to speak when we witness injustice.

And not to pick a side - but to stand in our center.

🌿 Not a Role - A Calling

Despite having had that urge to protect children, I was often misunderstood.

My late mother assumed I wanted to become a mother, to have children young, just as she had. But I could always sense her own struggle with the role of motherhood that was placed upon her. She never asked what I truly wanted. Instead, she talked me out of even considering a life with children, as if caring for the vulnerable meant I would disappear into motherhood and lose myself.

She didn’t see me - until last year, just before she passed.

For the first time, and that to my very own surprise, she saw me clearly: not as someone chasing a role, but as someone who had always stood for something deeper.

That just because I cared - for children, for people, for humanity, animals, plants and for myself - didn't mean I was trying to fill a void. It meant I was answering a calling:

To bridge. Between what is, and what could be.

To help children rise in a world that so often strips them of power.

A Light - symbolizing hope emerging from struggle (photo by Stanisław Krawczyk)

💔🦋 Turning Shame Into Story

And no, I wasn't what some people call blessed to have children. I wanted them, deeply. But the universe had something else in mind for me.

There are no regrets - not anymore. Especially when I look around and see how the world often treats its children. They deserve better. I deserved better. And maybe that’s exactly why I feel called to speak.

I'm not here to argue sides. I'm not here to play politics.

I'm here to defend truth, humanity, and the right of every child to be protected - regardless of where they come from.

🔊 When I First Spoke Up

I remember too clearly that little, cute, blond-curly girl with those big brown eyes who had just been moved from the nursery to the kindergarten to be with her slightly older brother. She wasn’t even fully two years old and struggled not to wet herself, let alone her bed during the afternoon naps, for which she was told off by a rather uncaring child carer.

And there was me - about 16 or 17 years of age - shaking my head, questioning this behaviour. Not the little girl’s, but that of the woman who should have known better.

Why didn’t she just put a nappy on her until she was ready?
Oh, right… that wasn’t her job.

All that woman did was instill unnecessary, lasting fear into this little soul who was here to learn - to feel - to remember.

One afternoon, while the children were “pretending” to sleep - there were always a few who kept one eye open - listening. I overheard something that shook me deeply. The child minders had gathered, laughing and gossiping - about the kids, and even more so about their parents.
I sat there stunned.
Until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

I spoke up. I said something which I today cannot remember. I didn’t make any friends that day - I knew that - but I couldn’t stay silent. Because it hurt. It brought back a memory I had buried: being in kindergarten myself, overhearing women tearing their mouths apart about my family, about my mother and her “upcoming divorce.” And how my late mother had stormed into the kindergarten one day to set the record straight.

It didn’t necessarily make my life better back then. But now, I understood my mother.
I felt her. I still do.

And I felt for these kids.
And for their parents.

🧳 We Are All Carrying Something

You could tell - you really could - which families were struggling, just by the way they dropped off their children between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning, barely awake, worn down already before the day had begun.

So many people judge.
So many walk around certain of who others are - of what they lack, what they’ve done wrong, where they’ve fallen short.
But the truth is: so many have no clue what life is like for the other.

And maybe that’s because, deep down, there is no “other.”
There’s only you.

What we see in the other - the fragility, the fear, the mess, the chaos - is often what we’re trying hardest not to see in ourselves. And just the same, what we admire in the other - their strength, their resilience, their care - that lives in us too.

The mother or father dropping off their child at 6:30am, barely holding it together - that could be you.
The child wetting the bed, too afraid to cry - that was me.
The father too ashamed or proud to ask for help - maybe that’s you tomorrow.

Judgment separates.

Recognition - resonates - connects. Our hearts.

And every time we reduce someone to a stereotype - a bad parent, a misbehaving child, a broken home - we close the door on a part of ourselves.

But when we pause long enough to see the person before us - really see them - we may find not distance, but kinship.

There is no “them.” There is only us.

🧠 A Legacy Few Talk About

What I didn’t realize then was that this kind of behaviour had deep roots.

Many child carers and pediatric nurses - and quite possibly even teachers - in Germany were still, well into the 1980s, shaped by the lingering influence of Johanna Haarer’s infamous book The German Mother and Her First Child (Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind, 1934).

It was a Nazi-era child-rearing manual that promoted authoritarian parenting: strict discipline, emotional detachment, and early independence in infants. Cuddling, comforting, even responding to a crying baby, were discouraged.

The goal: raise children to serve the state, not themselves.

Although intended for mothers, Haarer’s ideas seeped into kindergartens, hospitals, and schools, everyday life. Her influence survived well past 1945. Reprinted into the 1950s and 60s, her ideology became an invisible framework that shaped how care was given - or denied.

Many post-war parents raised their children according to Haarer's guidelines of strict discipline, emotional distance, and rigid scheduling - often without explicitly referencing her book. This created a generational cycle of emotionally restrained parenting.

A significant shift only began to take hold in the 1970s and especially after the 1980s.

During this period, Germany saw the rise of more humane, attachment-oriented parenting philosophies, influenced by thinkers like John Bowlby, the founder of the attachment theory and Jesper Juul, a Danish family therapist known for advocating respectful, empathetic parenting, which gradually began to replace Haarer’s harsh methods.

🧊 When Empathy is Erased

In the former GDR, Haarer’s principles lingered well into the 1980s. Many parents or childminders didn’t realize their language and practices echoed Haarer’s near word-for-word. But children felt it.

I felt it.

I remembered wetting the bed myself until age nine. I remembered being beaten for it. I remembered my stepfather’s rage, shaped by his own upbringing under Haarer’s cold logic. I remembered how he ended my 'half-hour cuddle hour' with my mother - because in his eyes, a child didn’t deserve the comfort he himself had once been denied.

Or the time he insisted my mother cut my long hair, simply because he couldn’t stand seeing it around the house - making me look like a boy, as if that somehow fixed the problem.

This was not just personal trauma. This was ideology at work.

So, when those “bed-wetting accidents” happened, I looked to the little girl’s older brother - a child himself - to take his sister by the hand and go with her, while I quietly stripped the bed and brought the sheets to the laundry. I said nothing.

But I intuitively knew that children don’t need discipline first. They need understanding. They need safety.

They need to feel held - emotionally and physically. They need to know that someone cares about them just for who they are.

So many of us, especially here in Europe, and likely elsewhere too - were raised with rough discipline, a militarized sense of duty, and emotional isolation dressed up as strength.

And if you dared to break away, to question it, to choose softness over stoicism - you were met not with support, but with a sense of guilt.

And I know.
I dared.
I broke away.
And I have wrestled with the guilt ever since - guilt for choosing myself, for surviving in the only way I knew how.

Because I just couldn’t keep pretending to be “a good girl” when all I ever wanted was to be me.

---

My eight weeks in that kindergarten in the early 1990s cured me of any illusion that I could work as a childminder in a system that, consciously or not, tried to keep children small - a system that does everything it can to erase empathy.

My time as an au-pair in London in the mid-1990s confirmed it too, even though I loved the autistic boy I cared for over two years. Still, I realized painfully:
I couldn’t save the world - not on my own.

I also felt torn apart leaving behind my two beautiful nieces in Berlin when they were still small, my clients at the COPE Foundation in Cork, and the elderly in the nursing home outside Kinsale. All I could do was drop seeds, hoping some would eventually sprout. And maybe, someday, I am remembered.

Even if just quietly, by someone whose life I touched.

I've always loved the idea that "if you save one life, you save the world."
I still do.

But the truth is, empathy doesn’t always shine.

My caring was often invisible - mistaken for weakness, ignored, unspoken.
Bridging gaps, holding space, choosing kindness - none of it ever asked for applause.
But I hoped it mattered. I hoped I mattered.

And maybe, someday, that matters enough to be remembered.

---

But Haarer didn’t invent the erasure of empathy.

She merely codified and intensified a way of parenting deeply rooted in Germany’s cultural past.

In Wilhelmine Germany, in Victorian England, and later in Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy - militarism, hierarchy, and patriarchal authority didn’t end at the school gates or the barracks doors.

They entered the home. Sat at the dinner table, and whispered into lullabies. Child-rearing became a rehearsal for obedience.

Obedience was virtue.

The so-called “good” child - the “good girl” or “good boy”- was expected to submit to adult authority without question. But this wasn’t respect; it was instilled fear. The ideal child was disciplined, emotionally restrained, and dutiful - mirroring the broader militarized culture.

Questioning was rebellion.

Physical discipline in form of corporal punishment took place at home, at school, everywhere and was widely accepted. Emotional warmth, particularly for boys, was viewed as a weakness - unless it was pride or rage in service of the "greater order."

Indoctrination started early in life.

Boys were raised to become soldiers and patriots, girls were raised to become mothers and wives; parenting and education served the needs of the state.

And those values didn’t vanish in 1918 after WW1 or 1945 after WW2.

They trickled down - subtle, systemic - shaping how we raise children, how we love, how we silence ourselves.

From Imperial Germany to the Third Reich, through the GDR and postwar West Germany, these values endured - shifting forms, but never truly leaving.

---

🎞 The Children of Obedience

Watching Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon on a bitterly cold, snowy winter evening in Vienna in 2009, I saw it all again.

Set in Imperial Germany before WWI, the film shows how emotional repression, rigid morality, and authoritarian parenting didn’t just damage children. It prepared them for fascism two decades later.

Corporal punishment.
Religious shame.
Emotionless “good children.”

This wasn’t fiction.
It was a warning.

Here you can watch a haunting glimpse of these themes:

🌍 When There’s No “Right” Kind of Child

The legacy goes deeper still.

Children born outside of marriage were once shamed, hidden, sent away. A stain on society. Their mothers, punished. Their humanity, questioned.

Not just in Ireland. Everywhere.

This is why I wrote my book, Being Eclipsed: Women under the Care of the Patriarchy, to explore how Irish (and European) women have been erased, diminished, and controlled - often under the name of care.

This didn’t happen in some distant past. It happened in the lifetimes of people still living. In Germany. In Ireland. In the UK. In Spain. In Italy…In so many places around the world.

And when a society tells a child - from birth - that they are unwanted, it should not surprise us when they grow up questioning their worth, or when they fall prey to those who do not have their best interests at heart.

And what about the children who grow up in loveless homes? Not because their parents didn’t care, but because their parents were never taught how to show care? How to express warmth without fear, punishment, or shame?

🧬 Generational Trauma Is Not Abstract

It’s in the child who flinches.
The adult who can’t cry.
The silence after a mistake.
The over-apologizer.
The overly independent one praised for “strength.”
The over-eater.
The one who starves herself.
The one who numbs.
The one who leaves.
The one who takes their life.

This is how it echoes.
Not always in words - but in bodies, in coping, in absence.
In what was never safe to feel.

When love is withheld, children may survive - but they don’t learn to thrive. They don’t grow, explore, or feel safe to become. Instead, they may seek comfort in the arms of those who resemble the very ones who failed to protect them.

This isn’t softness. This is truth.

Every child - all children - deserve to be welcomed, wanted, protected.
Not just those born under the “right” circumstances.
Not just those who fit the mold.
All of them.

🇵🇸🇮🇱 No Side Wins When Empathy Dies

That’s why I write - not because it’s easy, but because staying silent was harder.

And when it comes to the world, I see the same dynamics playing out.

Too many people think they’re informed because they follow the “right” journalists. But true understanding requires more than headlines.

It requires listening.

“If your worldview doesn’t include Israeli trauma, Jewish children under threat, or Gazan civilians silenced by Hamas - you’re not informed. You’re reaffirmed. And that’s how empathy dies.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Kira Stein calls this empathicide. The term describes the deliberate or unconscious killing of empathy - often in service of cruelty, control, or rigid ideology.

You can read more about it here.

Empathicide happens when fake empathy is weaponized - not to unite or bridge - but to divide.

Empathy that divides rather than heals.

🧭 Justice Without Hate

Empathy that divides isn’t empathy. It’s manipulation.

Justice that ignores some children isn’t justice. It’s bias.

I don’t want to win a debate.
I want children to live.
All children.

To grow.
To laugh.
To be safe from bloodthirsty ideologies.

There is no “them.”
There is only us.

---

🌱 The Only Side I Take

So if this makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why.

If you think I’m too pro-Israel, ask:
Have I really listened to all sides - or just the ones that reflect my pain?

Because I’m not taking sides.

I take the side of life.

Of humanity.
Of truth.
Of healing.

Of every child - born or unborn, wanted or unwanted, Jewish or Palestinian or Irish or German or any other - who deserves a world that holds them gently.

🕯 Final Words

Let us remember:
We are all someone’s child.

And too many forget that.

Amnesia is humanity’s greatest downfall.

But not me.
Not here.
Not now.

I’ll keep remembering.
And I’ll keep standing -
Even if I stand alone.

Thank you,

DD 🙏🌻