bad parenting: not just a u.s. problem

Read a somewhat disturbing blurb in the recent WEEK issue that also had a few lines that made me laugh. It's worth posting in its entirety:

Ireland is swarming with unfit parents, said Ian O'Doherty in the Dublin Irish Independent. You can't walk down a street in Dublin without hearing some woman screeching at her child to "fooken shut up." Recently I was waiting in line at a shop when the tot behind me told its mother it had to "do me toilet." Rather than take the child to the bathroom and lose her place in line, the woman yelled "hold on to your bleedin' kidneys." My colleague overheard a mother tell her kid that if he didn't quiet down, she would stab him. You may say that rearing children is a private matter, but that doesn't wash in the Ireland of today. These abused kids are surely the "muggers, junkies, and murderers of tomorrow." The state is "negligent in its duty of care toward children when it allows people like these to raise anything more evolved than a chicken." It is indefensible that "you need a license to have a dog or television, yet any drooling halfwit can drop as many kids as they want and the state will pay them for it." As a society, "we need to develop the balls to say enough is enough--having kids is a responsibility, not a right."

Despite his apparent nanny-state leanings, the guy makes a point that applies in this country, too. There are too many idiots out there who, for various reasons, are raising their kids so poorly that the children have little chance of ever knowing how to go about life being anything other than a bum or a criminal. My first response is there must be something that can be done about this, but I wonder if it's too late to fix the problem, at least within a generation or so (and fixing it after that would require the previous generation waking up to its own stupidity, so that would certainly appear to be a sucker bet as well). What kind of law or government intervention can fix it at this point? Any such meddling would be the sort of social engineering that has been wrought with failure throughout history. The government can't be expected to solve a problem it's incapable of solving.

The problem is tied up in the greater issue of the moral decay of society as a whole. And that has been a long time coming. Parenting is the sort of thing that requires a strong sense of personal responsibility and care for others, combined with an acceptance that one's life is not one's own. These character traits among the populace are derived, of course, from a solid moral underpinning of society, not from the newest government fix-it fad. So I don't suppose it should surprise anyone that we who are supposedly highly advanced and "progressive" find ourselves without the necessary means to combat the problem. Thus we keep crying to the government to "do something" on our behalf, while government continues to demonstrate again and again that it is utterly inept at confronting such issues and will only fail no matter how much money or how many policies it throws at them. Oh well, civilizations as well as individuals reap what they sow.

Just for good measure, I'll throw in the Best Quote Ever by Any American Political Figure: "Our constitution is intended to govern a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." That can be said of any political system, really. Without some higher sense of duty (religious or otherwise, but that's a discussion for another time) that promotes altruism and is followed by enough people such that it has the effect of a stabilizer and compass for the society, government just becomes a game of strong-arm tactics and who can tickle the people's ears the most. And, well, look how well that's worked throughout history. The path we're on has been well-traveled for sure. (As a side note, I think that historical bit is covered in some detail in Vox's The Irrational Atheist, which I really need to get around to reading.)