We humans are social animals — sometimes cranky, but for the most part we simply want to live in harmony.

In our increasingly diverse nation, social change is a natural, ongoing process. Government often steps in to jump start that slow process, and at times it mandates social change for its own (often partisan) purposes. Well intended or not, government-led social change is difficult, disruptive, and fraught with unintended consequences.

It’s a tough enough challenge for adults. So, let’s leave our children out of it.

But unfortunately, many on the “progressive” Left believe that the way to cement their political views in American society is to plant those views into the fertile brains of the very young.

It’s a frightening prospect, although hardly a new one. In authoritarian regimes — Communist China and North Korea as prime examples — it is standard practice: plant the seeds early, and build a compliant, unquestioning next generation.

That’s happening here, right before our eyes. American public schools, with guidance from powerful teachers unions, are implementing elementary school curricula crammed full of progressive dogma that is far removed from mainstream American thinking.

Last year, the wake-up call for many parents was their recognition that racially divisive messaging — that racism is inescapable and that whiteness is inherently evil — is working its way into early childhood education programs. Such upside-down thinking is wholly inconsistent with young children’s natural inclination to ignore skin color, and it is the antithesis of Martin Luther King’s teachings on racial accord.

Parents know better. Their fiery objections in school board meetings prompted a scolding from Attorney General Merrick Garland, who equated angry parents’ opposition to domestic terrorists, and paved the way to a stunning upset victory by Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia gubernatorial election.

That was just a warm-up. Now the hot topic is gender fluidity, the radical notion that one’s gender is a matter of personal choice, irrespective of anatomy and biological reality.

That brain-twisting new concept is being promoted proudly and loudly in school systems across the nation. Last week, for example, New Jersey rolled out new K-3 curricula guidelines with feel-good messaging that every child can be whatever gender he/she/they choose — kind of like picking your favorite color from the crayon box.

Conservatives are back at battle stations. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is pushing a new state law that would prohibit inappropriate sexual instruction to kindergarten through third grade — the new law, fiercely opposed by the Left, has pushed its way to the top of the heap of Florida (and U.S.) political issues.

Rather than trying to achieve broad consensus on this very divisive issue, red states and blue states are implementing diametrically opposed policies in early child development — with our kids in the political crossfire.

Regardless of individual views about gender fluidity (I think it’s loony), this one is clearly not ready for universal K-3 education. I know this. I’m an expert on five-year-old kids. I was one once. And so was every reader of this column.

I remember it well. In kindergarten, I was in an absolute fog, clueless, unsure about everything. I had to figure out how to get to the school bus stop, a block from home, all by myself (I learned years later that my Mom was watching me from the side porch, but to me then it was like trekking across Antarctica, solo). I had to learn how to make friends on my own, to deal with the pushy “big kids” (third graders) in the school yard.

And there was an entirely new and intimidating adult in my life, my teacher. If she’d asked me what gender I preferred, I would surely have searched her face for some hint as to the right answer. If my best friend (whoever it was that week) had declared that it was better to be a girl, I’d have probably signed up on the spot.

And imagine if my random five-year old answer to her unfathomable life question had then led to profound redirection of my ongoing development, or — even worse — to a regimen of hormone treatments and surgical corrections (mutilations) that would have changed my life forever.

We know that children that age are totally malleable, and that they haven’t a thought about life past the present moment. Why in the world would we want to lay on them that life-altering burden?

Instead, can we simply allow young children to remain innocent for a while longer? Let’s be happy that they don’t care about skin colors and hope they never worry that they were born with the wrong body parts.