Bad Parent! Go To Your Room.

I hope the pendulum is swinging. Modern parenting doesn't even rise to the level of passable babysitting these days, much less effective responsible-citizen-in-training preparation. I suspect that part of this problem is that many parents--lodged firmly in a culture of immediacy, hypermaterialism, and instant gratification--haven't gotten too awful far past their own adolescences. Not having spent the necessary time drawing their own boundaries, they are ill-equipped to help Junior establish his. Take for example, the book The Teen Code, written by a teenager, in which parents are advised that teens are going to drink, smoke, experiment, and copulate, so just deal with it. Examples in the book abound of parents who simply surrender to their children so as not to be found unlikable by their progeny or unenlightened by their peers. But another problem is the institutionalization of devastating developmental theories. The idea that the little dears are born sparkling clean and free of error has resulted in policies that assume if something is wrong, it must be the parents' fault. The answer is to give the child more freedom and more autonomy and everything will work out fine--this despite the fact that if you push pre-adolescent autonomy to its logical conclusion, the tike will be lucky to find food in a dumpster and shelter in a cardboard box. The idea started out innocuously enough: Aquinas thought the the mind was born tabula rasa and ready for information to be imprinted upon it. Locke applied that societally and politically, and then it found it's way into Freud's psychoanalysis. Mental reception to ideas transmogrified into innocence. Compare that to Calvin's notion of utter depravity, where the rugrat is born sinful to the bone. Anyone who has raised their delightful offspring knows, at least on an intuitive level, the truthfulness of Calvin over the idealism of modern experts. The institutionalization of this misguided approach is shown in out-of-control Social Services departments that remove children from the home simply because the parents are having trouble paying the electric bill, as recently happened in Raleigh, North Carolina. Or state statutes that allow minors to get an abortion without parental consent, even though Mum and Dad would have to sign off on getting a cavity filled, much less getting that much desired Express credit card.

So yes, parents do need to get a backbone and actually develop their children. But this idea that children should be given more autonomy needs to challenged on an institutional level, as well as a personal one.