Parenting, or lack thereof?

So, I was just watching the news and saw something that made me sick. A little girl was killed when she was in her parent's car and happened to accidentally hit the window button. Her mom drove off and it took her mom 40 minutes to realize something was wrong.

WTF?

This is an extreme example, but what is with parents these days? How dumb and lazy are parents?

In another incident, I saw a couple with a little girl at the mall today, the girl was maybe 5, walking along. The kid was way behind them and they weren't really even looking back at her! How easy would it have been for someone to grab the girl? They didn't even seem to care!

You have to be licensed to drive. You need a diploma to fix a car. You need education to do half the jobs out there. So, why not parenting? How does this stuff not qualify for "unfit parent"? Am I overreacting to this mass stupidity by saying that parents should need to take a class? Maybe even pass an IQ test of sorts...

Your child is playing with a knife and an electrical socket. What do you do?
A. Smile at them and say "kids..."
B. Buy them ice cream and make them obese
C. Take the knife away and tell them they're being stupid (maybe not in so many words)
D. Call your friend Sally and tell her about the cute new shoes you saw at Payless

Seriously.

How did the girl die?

The automatic window button got pressed and she was hanging out the window. It caught her neck.

What happened exactly was a guy walking by the car while the mom was nowhere around (inside a building doing something) got the window down and the girl out, and laid her on the seat. The mom didn't think anything of it when she returned until 40 minutes later when she realised her lips were white.

What kind of poor parenting is that?

That's horrible.
I've also heard of a lot of children dieing after their parents leave them in cars with the windows up.
In summer it can only take 15 minutes for the heat to get lethal.
Some people just shouldn't be allowed to be parents.

Exactly. You should have to take an IQ test to see if you're too dumb to reproduce.

Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme, but you get my point.

What gets me is that these people are allowed to continue to reproduce and keep the children they already have. Some say the biggest punishment they can have is having to live with the loss of said child, but that's not necessarily true. I think these people, and people like them, should have their children taken away. Give the kids to a family that will actually care for and watch over them. I'm not saying don't let them see their kids, but make sure they're supervised. Otherwise, people will just keep getting away with this stupidity.

You know, its not just...well, lets say less intelligent people who are bad parents. Some really smart people are horrible parents.

On an entirely different note for a second, your writers haven site, is that for original works?

Yes it is.

I know it's not just the mentally stunted people who cannot parent. But I think that if you cannot do something as...well, ingrained in your DNA as parenting your own children,well, you're an idiot. It's a basic survival thing. It's part of the human need to in a way be immortalized, continue your legacy. If you can't handle that, then...I mean, it's so basic! It doesn't take much intelligence to parent! One of the dumbest people I've ever met (she really isn't all there mentally, to be honest) is one of the best parents I've ever seen. She watches her daughter carefully, makes her do chores, makes her help out around the house, makes her do her homework...

Yeah, you've got to wonder what these people are doing that is so important they neglect their kids for it...

and I think I might join. Looks good.

This post has been edited by Rogue SG-1 on Feb 22 2007, 02:25 AM

Please do

What I don't get is that you see so much of it nowadays. I mean, is it just because the population of the world has increased to the degree that stupidity has multiplied and become more noticable?

I work at a Doctors office, and we have people who come in and expect us to watch their kids for them while they go off and shop in the rest of the mall. "Oh, my little Johnny has an appointment...would you mind watching him for, say, half an hour while I go shopping?" What? No! I'm not paid to be a babysitter, I'm an optician. Grr.

Lol.

Yeah I know what you mean...well, kinda anyway.
People are always in a hurry nowadays, so they spend less time being polite.
THAT I do know for sure.

Gosh, that story is horrible...how could a parent NOT notice, good heavens!

There've been bad and careless parents throughout history. Nowadays though, with mass media news reporting, we hear more about all kinds of accidents and neglect that we wouldn't have done before.

And when child mortality was more common, from poverty, disease etc, the death of a child was less shocking than it is today.

I think a few other things have changed too.

With families being smaller, children are likely to have less experience of looking after babies and toddlers. In a familiy of five or more, the older children would help out with the younger ones, and the younger ones in turn might help with neighbour's babies/friend's younger siblings. Practical experience is ingrained from childhood. With smaller families, there are fewer babies, and less pressure for children to help with siblings.

As for those parents who just expect others to keep an eye on their kids for them...I used to work in a charity shop, and parents would sometimes just leave their kids in the nook where the toys were, and wander off round the shop without them. It's a big shop, of three interconnect rooms, so the children would be unsuperivsed. So the kids played with the toys, sometimes broke them, and often tore the price labels off. Then the parent would want to buy their kid whatever they'd been playing with, and get annoyed when we said we couldn't sell something without its price tag.
I think some of that kind of attitude stems from the beliefs instilled over the last 3-4 decades that everyone has 'rights'. Which is often taken as the right to leisure, pleasure, money and happiness, but without responsibility or work. So parents want to indulge themselves with a little child-free shopping, just as they used to before they had children. But instead of either putting up with the child, or organizing proper childcare, they feel free to leave their kids where 'someone' will hopefully keep an eye on them.

And some people are just plain stupid.

In the cases of utter stupidity/ignorance, though, I do strongly feel that child services should step in. Particularly when said stupidity/ignorance results in the death of or harm to a child. Don't get me wrong, kids get hurt. It happens. And to a degree I think it should happen...broken bones, colds, flu, bruises, these should happen to kids. Kids need to learn to deal with things like that because it does happen.

Actually, to be honest, I think that parents on the opposite end of the spectrum, the overly cautious ones, aren't that great either. Your kids need to see violent things to know they happen and to know how to deal with it mentally. Your kids need to break bones and get sick to learn to deal with it or develop their immune system. I've seen the results of a sheltered child and it's sad. My aunt (by marriage, not blood, thank god!) sheltered her little girl so severly that she couldn't handle a trip to Toronto when she was 16. The kid went for the first time ever and was just an emotional wreck because there were homeless people on the streets. And to take her to Chinatown meat shops? Wow. Kids need these things to become emotionally stable adults.

You know what's sick?

I heard about a case where people left their dog and two very young kids in the car in the heat. They were arrested for cruelty to animals. No charges were filed relating to leaving the kids in the car.

Now, I'm all for animal rights but, I'm sorry, the dog is more important than the kids? Come ON.

And neglect and child endangerment, even unintentional, CAN be grounds to arrest people. But cops usually have other things on their minds.

And social workers at child services are some of the most overworked people in the country; they are just stretched too thin.

CPS in my state is an absolute joke. Their motto seems to be "Lets sit on our asses and scream the oscar meyer weiner jingle with our fingers shoved in our ears"

Our society is obsessed with making sure children can remain with their biological parents. I'm sorry, but if the biological parents are unqualified, they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near their children. Unfortunately, here in Washington, CPS won't do anything until after the biological parents have either A) Abused the child to scar them permanently either emotionally or physically, or B) kill the child.

For example, take the proposed Sirita Law in the state of Washington. Proposed by the foster family of Sirita Sotelo after the young girl suffered "blunt-force trauma" to her head and torso after the court systems rewarded custody back to the biological father. The mother is serving a jail term for drug offenses.

The suspicious death is documented in this Everett Herald article: http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/05/02/02/100loc_girl001.cfm

Since then, a set of proposals called the Sirita Laws have been proposed by the girl's last foster father, who was devestated by her death. The Sirita Laws propose a three-strikes rule for abusive parents (which I would argue are two strikes too many in some cases), as well as other CPS reforms geared towards protecting children in troubled families: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/LegalCenter/s...d=544573&page=1

Note the date on that article. These bills went to our state legislature two years ago. Nothing has happened. The bills have stalled out every time, with legislators "promising" it'll get onto the next ballot.

Ladies and gentlemen, -that- is an outrage.

For more information on the Sirita Sotelo case:
http://www.siritalaw.com/News.htm

This post has been edited by LaneWinree on Feb 24 2007, 03:13 PM

Three strikes to many if you ask me.
And I agree with Mara, kids need to get out and play in the dirt.
I spent my entire childhood trawling through the paddocks and bush-bashing with my brother. We got dirty, we fell outta trees and we learned not to do some things again. Kids these days don't have that, and its bad for them. Worse than a broken arm, anyway.

I live in an area where academic achievement is EVERYTHING and these kids are getting pushed from a younger and younger age to take harder and harder classes. And they lose out on their childhoods in pursuit of that elusive acceptance letter to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Georgetown. It really bothers me. Kids at 2 years old being pushed into all day academically-rigorous pre-school, kids taking advanced math in 7th grade, AP classes their freshman year of high school, 5 AP classes their senior year....(me, I slacked my way through high school without ever taking an AP class got into college-ok, not an academically known college, but college-and managed to get into on of the best grad schools in the country for my masters. So take that, I say.) My best friend has a little girl who will be 2 in May, who is some super genius, and my friend, I love her, looks at me when I tell her she's got a brilliant little girl like I'm nuts and says, "Oh, really? I don't even look in the book any more to see if she's on track! She just does what she does when she does it." THAT is the attitude that too few parents around here have.

Kids need to be kids. If academics interests them, teach them. If arts interests them, teach them. People seem to forget that kids WANT to learn. They're like little sponges and they absorb knowledge.

However. Don't let them forget that they're kids. Let them play, let them get dirty, let them get hurt. Experience with these things is the only way they'll learn to be socially healthy and know how to deal with life as it comes.

I absolutely agree, Mara.

Kids need a chance to discover the world for themselves. Not without supervision, but without someone telling them that getting dirty is the worst thing that can possibly happen. I had a friend for a long time who spent much of her early childhood inside watching animated movies. She never really learned to appreciate the outdoors. I went for walks every day when I was a girl with my babysitter and almost never watched TV. I do watch TV now, but I love being outside just because it's outside and it's free.

Also, I've been both over-protective and neglectful parents. It's hard to say which causes more problems for the kid. I have a very good friend whose father barely lets her use a computer, and won't under any circumstances allow her to spend the night with a friend. IN fact, he barely allows her to go to friends' houses. But on the flip side, she's the oldest of seven kids, and her parents hardly ever notice when she's having a hard time emotionally because, as the oldest, she's mostly self-suffieient and doesn't throw temper tantrums.

There are going to be problems for a family of kids who don't know about the world and whose parents haven't had time to really help them with the hard stuff.

Something like that happened to me. In the community where I grow up, flunking a subject meant to be complete outcast. I don't recall being openly pushed to achieve academic success, but my parents always *expected* me to excel and I worked hard not to disappoint them. And only when I got my degree (with honors, right) and was expected to get PhD as well, I stoped, looked back and thought "where the hell have my childhood gone? wouldn't I have this job now if I had lower grades and skipped school more?" When I have a child I'll make sure he or she can read, write and use calculator. Any additional education - only to the extent the kid enjoys him/herself.

I see younger kids these days who do nothing but work, and they are gonna have one hell of a mid-life crisis one day.
Well, I probably will too, but I'll just buy a fast car, not revert to childhood.

I wonder if reading Harry Potter and watching anime counts as reverting to childhood

You know my dad said something to me the other day that kind of surprised me.

"I'm glad you're not one of those Four-Point students. Those kids are so socially inept they become dead-weight in the real world."

I'd like to step in here and say something on behalf of the "Four-point students"

I was one, in high school and college and despite some problems that come from other things (family drama, anyone) I'd like to think I'm handling the real world just fine.

Kids can have childhoods and still excel in school. It's when they're forced into the harder classes and such that it becomes problematic.

They aren't mutually exclusive.

Well, he qualified that by saying it was the kids who did nothing but studying in their high school and college years. Often, they were forced to sacrifice social lives entirely to appease their parents. They took hard courses, never took extracirricular, never got involved in the community. All they did was study academics.

I know that not all four-point students are that way. The ones who have parents that allow them to do nothing but study are receiving a disservice. Parents need to allow their children to balance academic and social aspects.