A generation of parents who have no idea how to parent. That’s the current landscape. Unfortunately for the young of the society, as struggles got harder for women, all they could imagine themselves accomplishing well is as is a parent. Men unwilling to have children are demonized as not wanting to pass on their lineage or legacy, but our fathers mostly abandoned us. Whether it was actually or emotionally, we’re all Lost Boys in a world that didn’t want to give us any tools to handle it, with parents who wanted to keep us as far from capable of doing so, so much so that they’d gladly omit, hide, and outright lie to those us our whole lives.
Then the inevitable happens: failure. We were never put in a position to succeed nor actually able to, but we somehow managed to scrape by, by the skin of our teeth. Our parents see our early teenage fortes into the adult world as blunders and we see them as adventures. But at some point we really fail badly and they see that as a reflection of their parenting. Unwilling or unable to accept that they screwed up in preparing their kid for the world, usually, they will simply look down on you as throwing away the gift they gave you, which to them is something other than just life. You were their legacy, as their parents taught them they were, and those grandparents who were terrible people that our parents vowed never to be, they failed to pass on any success as they’d never seen it to emulate.
So we just don’t want to procreate. We’re just another life and one whose worth and merit is small compared to the characters we read and the news reports we hear. Where many saw their only good in life would be making another human whose potential might be better than anything they ever did, we see the failure rates and the stress of such a notion and just opt out. We have nothing worth passing on and are just selfish enough to want everything that we have or will have to ourselves (and the women we will certainly be divorced from in the future)
While much of this may seem like pessimism, its actually pure realism. We want what we want and we know we aren’t prepared to do what it takes to be parents, and maybe, just maybe, there’s something genetically or psychologically wrong with our lineage that is probably best left ending its reign in the genepool with us.
But moreso than that, we can only be good at what we see or hear of. Our parents were surely nothing to copy or embody as far as parenting goes and more than likely the only others we who parent are the unlucky bastards who knock a girl up on accident before they’re legally an adult. Spending five minutes with a teenage parent shows just how tragic that life will be for the child. This isn’t to dismiss all teenage parents any more than saying that the majority of republicans are seriously delusional and in need of fact checking. It’s very simple: if you’ve never touched a stove or cooked in anything but a microwave, and suddenly are tasked with preparing a multiple course feast for dozens of award winning chefs, how well do you suspect you’re to do?
One might argue that parenting can only be learned by being a parent, however, using the cooking analogy, yes, the final products you’ll never know without the actual act of cooking, however, knowing recipes, what foods others have prepared, how and when to use which pans with different foods, and how to work a knife are all nearly crucial even before any food gets on the burner.
Just the same, what positive and negative attributes you have in yourself, how your patience or temper works, what your habits and routines are, and making those the best you can are all crucial even before one decides to get reproduce.
However, most people see the ease of the act of procreation as indicative of the ease of nurturing human life and consciousness. Everyone can fuck therefore everyone should be capable of raising children. If you take that mentality and apply it in any other aspect of life, or learning, you’ll immediately see how unreasonable the thought it. But too many people figure they can just wing it and be good. And even go as far as to tell those without children that there’s no reason or need to prepare as the only way to learn it is by fucking it up with your own kid.
But how rudimentary is that? We’ve arguably been raising children for as long as we’ve been a specie, and yet, we’ve not really gotten any better than just winging it. Though there are books upon books on parenting, the only ones worth their weight are usually focused specifically on the more understandable psychological and physical aspects. All of the rest of the books are people writing about how well they winged parenting and at best are people with degrees that think not only were they clearly lucky enough to have raised their kids properly, but they’re so well versed in it that they have surefire methods to help you raise your children. But really, at best, how many children do those people raise in their lifetime? 1? 2? Maybe 3 at best. More children than that are born every second, but clearly your sample size of 3 out of millions is indicative of success.
So what is it exactly that bothers me about all of this? I guess it’s the charlatain nature of it, coming from every parent and expert on the subject (and now by this nonparent). Everyone who says they know don’t know anything besides whats worked for them. So I have sort of talked out of both sides of my mouth here saying that theres too many people winging it and too many saying they’ve got the answers. However I posit that they’re actually both in the same category: just guessing and hoping it works. Obviously the latter believe they’re so successful as to be able to pass that wisdom on to others but one method of throwing spaghetti at the wall is ultimately as successful as the other.
So, what I am trying to get at is simply that we need to come up with something far more universal than that, something we all agree upon as very necessary and important building blocks of human consciousness. We’re obviously not too averse to the idea of this as we come up with 12 years of classes we feel all children should know, though, we do seem rather averse to actually updating those things or teaching them anything practically useful in day to day life.
Simply put, I could list a million things that all people should know, but most of them will be misperceived as teaching or indoctrinating morality, which every parent will rally against. But what truly everyone should be able to agree upon is that everyone should know how to learn. You could never learn everything that there is to know, every equation, important historical date, or scientific theorem, but you can certainly find where it is to be located if you find a need for it.
Before the last decade such a thing was hardly very easy or possible and even still everyone doesn’t have a computer or internet, but, more people than ever do and more information than ever is instantly accessible. Schools should decentralize what is taught into what can be found. Only through personal discovery can interest can real learning occur. Imagine the majority of schooling consisting of teachers asking students random questions such as the mass of Jupiter, the grandmother of napoleon, the fiftieth digit in pi. This would be how learning would occur. One who never heard of Jupiter, napoleon, or pi, would have to read all about those things in search for their answer. The test would always be essays on what you learned in class. Homework would not be compulsory but would instead be automatic, learning would not end in the classroom because you’re not teaching children things you’re teaching children how to learn.
