blog0430
Do Something For The Kids
We make people take driving tests before they can get behind the wheel. Kids have to get physicals to qualify for sports teams. Teachers are rewarded for completing added classes, police officers are encouraged if not required to enroll in programs from drug abuse prevention to rules on high speed vehicle pursuit.
The list goes on about how we at least attempt to improve the skills for our important service-providers but the most important one of all is left out to dry and that is being a parent. I know the old cliche that there is no handbook for the most important role on earth but perhaps we can do something. I propose that parents be re-licensed every three years and that failure to gain an updated license can resort in heavy fines and possible jail time.
I know many, many people who were not raised appropriately and grew up to be unhappy, unfulfilled or worse. They maybe not have been intentionally harmed although some were very much victims of parental anger and ignorance. I mean the kid who become a bully because he watched as his father bullied his mother or the sullen child who seems never to comment because he got the clear message at home that he was not very bright and ought to just keep his mouth shut. Or the teenager who can’t find the resolve to ask out a classmate on a date because his brother and sister always teased him or worse about his weight. Or the child who is attracted to children of his own sex but would rather die, and too often does die, than have his secret known because he got the implicit and sometimes very explicit message that homosexuality is wrong and homosexuals are sick. Or the high school senior who taunts African American classmates or Puerto Rican classmates or Asian American classmates or worse because he has learned the lesson at home that white Americans are superior and that people of color are quickly turning the country into a cesspool and den of mongrels. Or the 16-year-old girl who has given birth to a beautiful baby boy and quits school or gives up the child and either way suffers deep and lifelong wounds when life might have turned out differently if she was able to communicate with her parents. Or the child who has found cutting himself as the only relief to the excruciating pain he feels at home, either through being ignored and having the message beaten into him physically and emotionally that he is worthless. Or the 15-year-old boy who often arrives in school half drunk or high after years of watching his parents drink to excess and smoke pot excessively. Or the 18-year-old boy who regularly belittles and assaults his girlfriend after he has internalized the message from his father that women are fairly worthless except for sex and that men must be dominant. Or the recent high school graduate who hopskotches from job to job, unable to remain for more than a few months and he too has learned from his father that no boss can tell him what to do. Or the child who constantly dozes off in class because he has trouble sleeping at night while listening to his parents shriek at each other night after night after night. Or the girl who attends college, gets a degree in business and lands a good job and feels utterly unfulfilled as if she is wasting her life away because she watched as her father made lots of money and each night returned home from work so uninspired as to make his child and wife weep, even though his compromised life means the family can rent a bungalow down the shore every July. Or the 18-year-old boy who narrowly passes his courses and narrowly gets accepted into a nominally-effective college when his real love, his real passion and ability is art and whatever promising artistic talent he had as a boy was snuffed out by parents who knew that he would never go anywhere as an artist and let him know that in no uncertain terms. Or the child whose inquisitive nature, his natural hunger for new ideas, his persistent curiosity has been slowly but surely minimized by well-intended but altogether destructive parents who leave him a smoldering shell of the once promising boy or girl.
How about installing monitors in all homes to film how parents relate to their children and mandating classes on parenting for all those who are seen to be lacking in parental skills. Possibly a human monitor could be assigned to troubled families to intervene with compassion and education and if that doesn’t work, with temporary removal of the child and returning them only when the parents have proven their abilities. We could require bad parents to wear signs identifying them as bad parents whenever they left the home, whether to the supermarket or the movies and everyone could see these parents for the bad parents they are.
I know none of this is possible because we all have the rights to ruin our children as we see fit but it is a shame and perhaps there’s a way to make parents accountable for the scars they inflict, the flames of passion they extinguish, the unbounded joy they deny their children. Teachers, religious and community leaders are all on the front lines and perhaps these leaders ought to be more aware and more willing to confront families where lives are being frittered away unnecessarily. Perhaps the government has more of a role to play in providing greater funding for life saving and critical child care and pre-K classes and in fact that is a significant part of President Biden’s American Family Plan which would provide free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds while limiting child care costs to no more than 7 percent of income for lower- and middle-income parents. The plan would allow the United States government to soar above Cyprus and Romania in the percentage the government spends on child care and pre-K.
Do something.