Bad Breeding

Walking through town on my way home I have to go through the shopping centre. Obviously walking through there at around 6pm means I see a lot of parents out with their kids. Well that is if you want to call them parents. What ever happened to actual parenting? All around me I see mothers and fathers letting their kids run around and have hissy-fits in the middle of the aisles and walkways.

Now, this isn’t a new thing for me, I grimace whenever I’m in public and I see people exhibiting signs of bad parenting. A six year old shouldn’t be wandering around aimlessly as the parent chatters away with their friends in the middle of the walkway, not watching their child. My mother never would’ve stood for that.

It seems as though parents go from one extreme to the other with parenting. Either they spoil their kid rotten, or they are so overbearing it becomes a problem. Somehow my mom managed a balance somewhere in the middle even though she came from a rather strict upbringing.

Why do parents feel the need to go to extremes?

Watching TV a while back about fat kids and the food they eat it was obvious that the parents were the reason these kids were huge. It’s the parents who feed these kids, not the supermarkets. Parents are the reason why more and more children are becoming obese. Of course the parents blamed the commercials and the companies who produce the food. That’s the biggest line of bullshit I’ve ever heard. Walkers didn’t put those crisps in your shopping cart, you did.

Your child’s health is your responsibility.

Both mental and physical.

If you let your kid run how you raise them, what kind adult do you think they’ll be?

I have an idea on what part of the problem is.

Now, I was raised during the TV Generation. What I mean is that TV was our ‘thing’. The internet barely existed and personal computing wasn’t much of a reality. So we had TV instead, problem was, so did our parents. This is the tool parents used to keep their children in line. It was what a lot of parents used to baby-sit their kids. This wasn’t all bad cause it made us self sufficient and TV didn’t really do us much harm. After all mom and dad both had to work to support us.

These days the same thing happens, but with one very important difference, it’s called the Internet. Parents now are using it the same way our parents used TV. There’s one simple problem here, the internet isn’t TV. The internet is full of a lot of things that aren’t healthy for children. And you can bet they’ll find every single one of them too. Parents should monitor what their kids do on the net, but they don’t. Then when the kid turns up with some nasty porn, or something else the parent doesn’t like, they blame everyone but themselves. This is bad parenting.

Parents need to take responsibility for their kids. What a child sees, eats, learns, these all affect how the child will be later in life. Too many parents put the blame on someone else…

‘Oh that crisp company, they make fatty foods. It’s their fault my kid is fat.’
‘Oh that webhost allows porn. It’s their fault my kid found their site.’

Stop whining and take some control and blame for how your kid is turning out.

We’re told that we aren’t supposed to criticize how people raise their kids. Socially it is frowned on to tell a friend that you think they could be doing something wrong with the raising of their kid. How will they learn though? How can we figure that what we’re doing is right? How we ourselves were raised may not be the best model. Until we can accept criticism on such a subject, we will never learn from our mistakes and will continue to raise children to be like their flawed parents.

Good parenting can’t be taught but opinions can be voiced, hopefully common sense can prevail. Our society is a huge blame culture. It’s never our fault. And parents are the worst for this, both in giving and receiving that blame.

Be a good parent. Take control of your kid and help them not turn into the trash that you are.