That's actually a start. The Scarlet Letter approach. Now if it actually worked on people who didn't give a damn about what other people thought about them or the way they raised their kids.Will Robinson wrote:People are being told to blame others instead of being shamed for not taking personal responsibility. There is a whole industry devoted to creating and trading that rationalized excuse for dogmatic support. It is called progressive/liberalism.tunnelcat wrote: .. All I'm pointing out is what usually happens in American society. People like their freedoms, to do what they want when they want, but then people seem to like to relegate their failures to the public sphere like a community garbage can. ..
ST, there are always going to be those children who are "rebellious". THAT'S human nature and THAT'S why every generation fights the previous generation, especially their parents. You are not going to change that behavior. Sure, we can get rid of the welfare state that coddles the lazy ones, but families will always have this particular problem in one form or another, because that's the evolution of each new generation. As for parents that don't take the time to actually raise their kids, who's fault is that? Sure, maybe some are lazy and self-centered and don't take the time to do their jobs, but a lot of the time, both parents work full time and don't have the time in the first place. My divorced single mother worked hard to make a living and had to stick me and my sister in daycare and depend on public school during the day because she HAD TO, just to make ends meet. It was either that, or stay in a marriage with a philandering husband she loathed. She choose to be a single parent.Sergeant Thorne wrote:You keep using the word "perfect". Perfection has nothing to do with it. I think you might be mischaracerizing the problem. Just because the last few generations have gone a certain way, doesn't mean you can separate the result from various social ideas, and political/artificial economic influences and call it the norm for humanity. People are actually very good at surviving, naturally, and if you take away the poisonous influences (welfare, government child support for single mothers which encourages them to stay single) which prop up unnatural, unhealthy, stifled situations, and on the other hand hold them to just and fair legal prosecution (death penalty for your neighborhood murders), and provide a source or sources of good teaching/training for responsible adulthood (private sector/volunteer/charity/church), and manage to remove the **** ideas filtering down from Hollywood and the political and media upper-echelons about the **** up 21st century family where parents don't have time to raise their rebellious children so the wackos in public education and the kids own peers do it, then you have the makings of a recipe for success regardless of the level of personal perfection they manage to achieve.
The influence of popular culture is a whole other issue. These companies and personalities make A LOT money off of that popular culture, movies, TV, music, so how do you put the brakes on something that makes a fortune off of our kids that's so influential and potentially bad? You're back to that bad old government trying to regulate the content of what our kids watch and see everywhere, so rightly, the parents NEED to do the job. Most of the time, they're too self-absorbed to care about what their kids are doing and watching, and they usually take extreme exception to others telling them they are doing a "bad" job at parenting.
