Good parenting and why it is so important
Most of us would admit that society seems to be on a generally downward slope. We have all sorts of social ills that the federal government likes to throw money at, yet it gets worse. Crime, poverty and drugs are just symptoms of what I believe is the real problem, bad parenting. All the money is going towards treating the symptoms, and look, it’s getting worse. If we can do a better job parenting, many of those symptoms would be lessened.
We learn more from our parents than anyone else, honestly. We learn our eating habits, learn how to interact with people, and learn how to be a member of society. If your parents are racists, chances are you are a racist. If your parents are homophobes, then chances are you are a homophobe. If you parents are catholic, chances are you are catholic. I even realized recently that my jokes remind me of the kinds of jokes my father tells. Why is that? It’s because we are around our parents as we grow. The role of the parent is to teach the skills to be a member of society. That is not the job of the school system.
For eons (before structured schooling) we learned everything from our parents and other elders. We were mostly farmers and learned how to work the land, how to interact, how to survive from our parents. When we as a human society became more educated (early 1800’s) we realized that there was a lot more ‘base’ knowledge we needed to teach our young children for them to be a productive member of the present society. Now our kids needed math, science, economics, and history just so they could function and move us along as a species. Parents were no longer able to convey all that information to their kids, and so we invented a structured school system to provide that base knowledge. With the notable exception of learning how to play nice with each other, school is for the transfer of factual knowledge to our children. History, math, and science is comprised of that base information, but how much of that do you use on a day to day basis as an adult?
Not whining when things don’t go your way, saying please and thank you, giving of your excess to those in need, speaking nice to strangers and how to cook food are all essential life skills that are learned by watching your parents and are used by us every day. We spend billions of dollars on the educational system, our kids are getting dumber and we have nothing (that I can see) to support good parenting. Those parenting classes for people expecting a child are for teaching patience with small babies, they are not about what I call parenting. Sure, babies are learning, but the things that kids see and remember from age 5-18 are what will shape them as adults, which is the purpose of parenting. You are training them to grow up and make good decisions and be productive members of society, not a drain on society.
In today’s culture, parents seem to be spending less time with their kids. The high divorce rate makes single parenting a serious issue. With only one parent raising the child, there is even less of this most important instruction taking place. Let us consider eating as a seminal example. Kids today are spending more time in front of the television than any previous generation. Billions of dollars are spend on advertising to kids. McDonalds, Kool-aid, Burger King, and the like are showing kids how food can be fun and exciting but do not tell you how harmful it is. Guess what, last time I checked, most 8 year olds do not have the financial means to buy dinner at McDonalds, their parents do. The parents have the choice to make a good dinner, to eat something healthy. What are we teaching them when we go out and have a happy meal (yikes! Look at the name!) when they are 7 years old? No wonder they grow up eating that crap and getting overweight. That coupled with the baby-sitting functionality of the television just creates an overweight and ignorant society. I read somewhere that if we don’t get a handle on teen obesity, we are going to have a serious financial crisis just from treating the problems of obesity as a society. Does personal choice mean anything to these people?
So parents are falling down on the job. Many of them will blame television, but last I checked, it was parents who were letting the kids watch TV. Many parents will also say that the ‘education’ of their kids is the responsibility of public education. That is a load of crap.
If your parents are well-educated, most likely you will also grow up to be well educated. Yes, part of that has to do with biology, but is also has to do with a emphasis on education. If your parents value education by supporting it at home, practicing good life choices, then you will do the same as you get older. Why is that correlation between what your parents do and what you do not so obvious? If we want to break the string of societal problems, we need to support parents to chance the cycle. Break out. But gosh, that’s hard. Many parents say that they want the world to be better for their kids. If that is the true, then we need to support those same parents and give them the tools to make it a reality.
Why is society getting worse? Divorce rate? Unwed mothers? Mothers too young? All of these are suspect, and many of them have been blamed. I bet there are studies out there that have made connections between these measurable qualities and the downfall of society. Rick Santorum (ultra conservative senator from Pennsylvania) believes that we should focus on the family which I am not a big fan of. Why? Well there are lots of two parent household filled with hate, bigotry, abuse, and other bad karma that are even worse than a single parent who is loving and caring for their child.
Maybe someone should write a book called ‘It takes a Parent’.