Who’s Responsible?

A police officer arrested a 6-year-old girl who was having a tantrum and hitting her teacher. He ziptied her wrists and booked her on battery charges, bragging that she was the youngest suspect he’d arrested. He arrested another 6-year-old that day, and was fired about a week later after people expressed outrage at his actions.

The arrest shouldn’t have occurred.

But neither should the girl’s outburst.

Schools are in a difficult position. They risk lawsuits if they restrain children who are lashing out, and unfortunately more children are lashing out as mental health problems multiply. Matt Walsh calls this incident “criminalizing childhood,” but I disagree; it isn’t normal childhood behavior for 6-year-old children to hit their teachers. Unfortunately, it appears to be becoming more prevalent. Mental illnesses are up among our kids; so is antisocial behavior.

My sister-in-law and I were discussing this subject over lunch. Owing to redistricting, her daughter’s school will become more crowded, with an influx of kids who have been known to exhibit bad behavior. Naturally, she is worried about the effect on her child’s learning and social development. We discussed other problems, too–most of which boiled down to the fact that schools are expected to provide social services, therapy, counseling, and basic life skills. Schools are ill-equipped to do this; they must operate under certain constraints, they are subject to a great-deal of top-down diktats, and most importantly teachers are not social workers, nurses, therapists, police officers, or the parents of their students.

Indeed, schools are in many ways trying to fill in for parents who cannot or will not provide for their kids in some way. “When I taught preschool,” said my sister-in-law, “I always told the parents at the beginning of the school year, ‘You know your kids better than I do. If you see a problem, please come talk to me about it, because you know what your kids need.’ Even though I spent a lot of time with them during the day, I didn’t assume that I knew everything about how they were doing. That was up to their parents.”

Now, saying that many of our kids’ ills spring from poor parenting is true, but insufficient. “Parenting” itself is, as I am fond of saying, highly influenced by culture. What values, skills, and knowledge are prized? What sorts of relationships are normal? What resources are needed and available, and who provides them?

But then again, how are values, skills, knowledge, and relationships developed but by parenting? We have here a chicken-and-egg problem, in which social and relational failings cause problems in children who grow up to be parents and may repeat the dysfunction they experienced as kids. Children with separated parents are more likely to experience bad outcomes as adults than children who live with both parents, and they are also more likely to separate themselves when they become parents. This becomes a dreadful positive-feedback cycle, in which brokenness leads to brokenness–although none of it is inevitable; the sources I’ve linked to also note that many children of divorced parents do fine in the long run.

It is ironic that we’re seeing this kind of deterioration, given that more is expected of parents than in past ages. We don’t have to just bear, feed, clean, shelter, doctor, discipline, and educate the kiddos–no, we have to spend time enriching them with the plethora of books, apps, and educational experiences available to them. We don’t send them off to plow the fields at 11, but to soccer camp instead. And yet we have children who hit their parents and their teachers; rude, entitled children who don’t know how to behave decently toward others; helpless children who cannot manage money, do laundry, or cook a meal at age 18.

Mind, I see plenty of parents who are taking care to instill respect, decency, diligence, and self-sufficiency in their kids. My area and my kid’s school are filled with children who are generally well-behaved; little snots sometimes, as all children can be, but not violent or antisocial. But as schools try more and more to fill in the place of parents, they enable parents to abdicate their responsibilities toward their children. I don’t want to take away free breakfasts or free lunches from poor kids, but I also don’t want schools trying to teach my kids how to navigate the complexities of social, emotional, sexual, and spiritual development; that’s up to my husband and me. And as long as we do our job, our child should not end up on the news after being hauled away in the back of a cruiser.

The Revolution Is Incomplete

I was oddly cheered by my daughter’s dinnertime report of some teasing she’d experienced at school. She explained that some kids had noticed her being nice to an unpopular boy and had started chanting “[My Daughter] and [Other Kid] sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G….” The same thing had happened to me when I was a child in school, but unlike young me my daughter wasn’t particularly bothered by this rather weak insult. She has assured me that she isn’t going to be mean to the unpopular boy in response to these comments, and she seems to understand that the dumb or rude things kids say are not worth getting upset over.

As we discussed the incident, my daughter wondered, “Why don’t kids ever tease me about being nice to my friend M? I spend a lot more time with her.” She thought for a moment, then said, “Is it because…is it because…she’s a girl, and boys can only get married to girls, and girls can only get married to boys?”

I said yes, I thought it was. “So even though I spend lots of time with M people know that I can’t kiss or marry her.”

And there we have it; despite every enlightened person’s best efforts, the first-grade social scene remains stubbornly hetero-cis-normative. The teasing children have identified my daughter and her friend as members of a subset of human beings called “girls,” and the unpopular child as a “boy”; they have even imported the assumption of heterosexual relations into her relations with the two. The revolution is incomplete.

 

Relevant, If Not Obviously So

This blog is about parenting–chiefly about my experiences, thoughts, and helpful hints on raising children, along with the occasional humorous piece. Every now and again, however, I step into what may be called “relationship territory,” as in this piece, this one about troubleshooting one’s husband, this one, and this one. Parenting is not the main focus of these posts, so why are they on the blog?

One reason is that this is my blog, and I like to write about what interests me; certainly, consideration of the roles and relationships between men and women in contemporary America is interesting. I grew up in a household in which “feminist” was always considered a dirty word, but found in adulthood that I’d absorbed a great deal of feminist ways of thinking without realizing it–specifically, pedestalizing women; believing that men should fix romantic relationships by endlessly accommodating women’s feelings; thinking that one shouldn’t actively search out a romantic relationship because you should have a full and complete life on your own, which may be what God intended for you; and ignorance of some of the causes of lowered marriage rates.

My husband introduced me to Dalrock’s blog, which has just concluded, but whose first five or so years are full of valuable posts that help make sense of contemporary relations between the sexes. I didn’t agree with everything Dalrock wrote, and still less with everything the commenters wrote (especially as time went on), but there are some excellent insights both into the larger State of Things and into my own blind spots. Dalrock eventually ran out of things to say and has stopped posting, but I hope he will maintain his archive. Currently, I enjoy reading Boxer’s blog (note that he sometimes uses crude language and says unkind things about Christians; however, he’s funny, clever even when he’s playing the fool, and genuinely considers other perspectives), Sigma Frame, Gunner Q, and Derek Ramsey’s blog (very thoughtful). Even when I disagree with these men’s posts, there’s often something to be gained from them. ETA: I also like to read The Transformed Wife.

There is another reason for occasionally straying from questions of diapers and schooling into how feminism has affected (infected?) the relations between men and women, and it’s obvious with just a little thought: You need bits from a man and a woman to make a baby, and the baby’s got to be housed in the woman for several months. The baby then has to be raised by someone, and its development is greatly affected by who that someone is and what his or her relations are with others. A child who grows up in his mother’s household, visits his father occasionally, and watches his parents date and perhaps remarry is learning something different about relationships than a child who grows up together with his biological parents. Parental abuse and abandonment matter; adoption matters; being raised by two men or two women matters; growing up with feminist or patriarchal parents matters. Therefore, considering the natures of men, women, and relationships is pertinent to parenting, which does not occur in a vacuum.

Finally, our children will grow up and inherit a certain kind of world. In order to prepare them to succeed in this world, we must have an accurate idea of its conditions and challenges. My sons should be warned about false rape accusations, misandryst family courts, and church cultures that pretend to uphold the family but are really ready to side with women in most cases. My daughter should be warned that men prefer debt-free virgins without tattoos, her fertility has unrelenting temporal limits, and that many men may be gun-shy of marriage because feminism has poisoned the well so badly.

I’m only eight years into marriage, but I haven’t yet found it hard. Life is hard, but marriage has made it easier, and more joyful. Obviously, circumstances such as death, disability, or financial trouble would strain our relations, but we both know we’re in it for the long haul and we’re happy to be so. I’m immensely grateful to be parenting my kids along with my husband, and sharing his goals and vision. My children exist in the context of my marriage, and for this reason I think it’s appropriate, once in a while, to consider relations between the adults who are responsible for making and raising babies.

Late Abortion

A man and woman decided that the child they had together was enough, and wished to obtain an abortion for the son the woman was carrying. A commonplace story, except for the matter of timing; the woman was at least 28 or 29 weeks along, meaning that it would have been hard to find a facility willing to kill her viable child. They ordered some misoprostol from India, took it, and left their born-alive son to die. They put him in a shoebox. Both have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and some other charges.

Pro-life advocates can point out that it is hypocritical to charge a woman with obtaining her own abortion merely because the child’s gestational age is greater, but most people at most points along the spectrum of opinions about abortion will feel some revulsion at a woman disposing of a healthy baby who could have lived outside her womb. A fetus at 28 or 29 weeks looks very much like a baby, and engenders sympathy accordingly.

This story is not the one people tell when discussing the legality of late-term abortions. Most stories of late-term abortions are moving narratives about parents who are excited to welcome their new child, have painted the nursery and had a baby shower, only to discover that the child has something terribly wrong with it that will condemn it to an inevitable, painful death. These stories are generally told when people discuss the legality of late abortion; how dare you condemn these parents who are trying to make terrible choices and who are acting in their children’s best interests?

But just how many late abortions are obtained because of lethal anomalies? (After viability, a threat to the mother’s life is no reason for an abortion–doctors can simply deliver the child if the mother has developed severe preeclampsia, for example.) There aren’t good data to answer this question, but researchers believe that they “make up a small minority of later abortion” cases. One study shows that the top reasons for delay in abortion were not recognizing the pregnancy, being unsure about whether to abort the baby or not, disagreeing with the child’s father about whether or not to kill the baby, or having trouble finding a suitable abortion facility and paying for the procedure.

The authors of this study note that women who obtain late abortions are often young, single mothers, depressed or dealing with other mental health issues, substance abusers, or women fitting more than one of these categories. One mother profiled discovered her pregnancy at just five weeks, but her husband would not allow her to obtain an abortion; after counseling, she found the courage to leave him and kill his child. Now she hopes to raise her (living) daughter as a single mother. The author concludes that “women in our study who obtained first‐trimester abortions and women who obtained abortions at or after 20 weeks’ gestation were remarkably similar.”

Research such as this study isn’t widely publicized any time there’s talk of a bill restricting late abortions. Although the author tries to create sympathy for the women profiled in the paper, this simply isn’t going to create the same tug at the heartstrings as the tragically-bereaved couple who must make an agonizing choice. Instead, it looks like most women who get abortions at advanced gestational ages are obtaining them for the same reasons that women get earlier abortions; they have simply encountered some obstacle (ignorance, finances, relationship) that prevents them from ending the pregnancy earlier.

The women also appear to regard their children in much the same way as do women who get early abortions. Some do fret and waver over the decision, but ultimately the child’s life is subject to the woman’s convenience. The child is not considered to have a right to life, unless the woman ends her pregnancy in the inept, furtive manner that I described above.

The next time that people bring up the inhumanity of restricting late abortions, remind yourself that those difficult cases they trot out in support of their position are a minority. Those parents’ stories are being used to support the murder of unwanted viable babies.

Fairness Through Inequality

Have you seen that meme where you are urged to inoculate your kids against socialism by giving one kid $10 to clean the bathroom, then taking away $7 of that money and distributing it to the siblings who didn’t help? It’s silly and trite, and I doubt anyone’s actually followed this “advice.” (Though I must admit to eating some of my kids’ Halloween candy and informing them that I was giving them a lesson in taxes.) But certainly, if you explain socialism to children as “People who work get their money taken away to be given to people who don’t,” you’ll get (for a little while, anyway) devout anti-socialists.

Fairness is a big deal to kids. They are, predictably, much more concerned that everyone behave fairly to them than they are to be fair to others, just as toddlers learn how to cry “Theeey’re not SHARING with me!” long before they consistently share their own things with others. Man is a selfish animal, so the beginning of a great deal of moral development is selfish too; once you have the principle “I want to be treated like X,” you have the basis for “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

In the home, parents should be the guardians of fairness and justice. Those who have a “golden child” and a scapegoat are rightly castigated, and both the golden child and the scapegoat suffer as adults. But upholding fairness does not always mean that we give equally to our children; a mentally healthy child must be loved, cared for, and nurtured, but shouldn’t be given the same extensive treatment that her sister with bipolar disorder needs. Children with Type 1 diabetes will have more medical appointments than children without. This is common sense, though there is always the danger that the “normal” child will feel (and may be) neglected because the parents are focusing on the child with problems.

Fairness also means giving more to children who earn it. Not more love, security, and necessities–never that. No child should have to earn such things. But going back to that silly meme, a child who does an extra task should be paid for it, and his siblings should not. A child who is well-behaved should be given privileges that his poorly-behaved siblings are not. The family should not be some kind of social-Darwinism experiment, but parents are failing their children if they don’t provide positive incentives for their kids to be diligent, truthful, obedient, and kind.

We cannot prevent our kids from crying that we are being “unfair” to them, even when this is not the case; a child watching her brother buy some expensive toy with money he’s earned may think it most unfair that her parents aren’t buying her a toy, too. But if parents consistently practice fairness toward their children, they should grow up with a more balanced sense of what is fair and what is not, and be equipped to be decent members of society. Sometimes that means giving a lollipop to just one child, which is certainly promoting inequality, but ultimately is upholding fairness.