I've been reading about raising children, as I want to be good at working with kids (and maybe become a parent someday). It also helps lay to rest some of the ghosts from my own mischildhood.
I used to focus on the parent's role, maybe because my own were so irresponsible. But I've also come to think society prepares us all quite poorly. Its conservative elements would keep us in the dark about sex, deny us proper birth control, rush us into marriage on the promise of god-touched love, and squeeze us into circumstances with too little time for work, child, sleep, and free time.
Even in less obviously politicized ways, though... I mean, don't other cultures raise kids more communally? Don't they have ways for kids to participate or at least coexist when the adults are at work? Instead we dump all the burden of child-rearing on one or two people's shoulders and then make it socially unacceptable for kids to exist (which inevitably means noise and fidgeting, to hell with being "well-behaved") in most of the places where said parents can work, socialized, and be entertained. And even if you go to, like, the park, adults get so judgmental towards parents and their kids.
I remember when I started to see my teachers as real people with feelings. It intoxicated me at first, the realization that these invincible grown-ups could laugh at my jokes and miss me and want to go out for drinks and be my friend. You know, like us kids do (give or take the drinks). But what empathy had to be missing from my life that I had never seen adults this way before! But, of course, children learn from watching grown-ups...
It's so frustrating. Everything is broken. I guess I'll just keep building little by little.
The book I'm reading, by the way, is Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. Recommended.
