To play or not to play. That is the question.

Yu kno what impresses me? The fact that ya'll have opinions and try hard to stand by and validate them, without getting into a firefight with each other....very rare indeed......and very necessary. That's how humans should work out issues. Kudos!

Okay, I'm really gonna try and keep this one brief this time cuz I think all of the major points have been re-hashed enough. I'm not even going to review Kit's response again for my retort. The immediate, direct, hands-on responsibility of child rearing lies with the parents. Period. No debate there. However, its not enough. Molecularly speaking, thats exactly what parents are in the compound of society, molecules. An atom though, is only as strong as its weakest covalent bond. The Cleavers can be happy as clams spinning in their comfy little Martha Stewart decorated Hydrogen atom. Everything is just nifty-keen-neato-spiffy-fantabulous until the Chlorines move in next door. All of a sudden there is an enormous potential for a nasty chemical reaction. Gee, too bad those nice Hydrogen and Oxygen folks that were looking at the vacant properties didn't decide to stick around. Things would be runnin' smooth like crystal, clear water. Too bad the atomic society hadn't taken the time to educate the chlorines about the potential. Now, this analogy has the serious potential to imply segregation on many levels, and that is NOT AT ALL where I am trying to head with it. All the super-duper parenting in the world isn't gonna mean diddly if Joe Bozo gets hopped up on speed and just happens to get it into his head to 'jack little Wally Cleaver's safety-tested, air-bag installed, side-impact beamed sedan. Wally's still lyin' face down in the gutter with a slug in the back of his skull, and no amount of good parenting by the Cleavers is gonna change that. So, who's to blame? Who's ultimately accountable? Wally's parents? Crack-head Joe's parents? Dope-dealin' Doug's parents? The car salesman who talked the Cleavers out of the bullet-proof glass option because it meant a back order? Maybe Joe's parents were tragically killed when he was a baby, throwing him into the foster-care system. Maybe Doug's folks lived next door to the Cleavers and followed their lead to a tee. Sometimes BAD kids DO come from GOOD parents, just as many GOOD kids come from TERRIBLE parents. Your argument basically states: Good parents = good kids; Bad parents = bad kids; Therefore all of the bad seeds in society are the result of their respective bad parents, and so on and so forth. If GOOD parents can still raise BAD kids, then what happens in the mix? Society happens. Society is the missing variable in your equation. It is the great unknown. The ever undefinable, unquantifiable, indecipherable "?". Society is the whole, whereas the parents, kids, etc. are but the parts. Parents are just a subset of the greater whole of society. I still see no convincing argument against modifying the collective attitude of society as a whole. Even if all the parents in the world did their jobs perfectly, if the greater set of society does nothing to change its attitudes and accept responsibility for its actions, then the cause is as lost as ever. Based on your arguments, if I never become a parent, I never have a responsibility to anyone on this planet except myself. Period. I can act with impunity against the whole of humanity, because they do not fall under my realm of responsibility, and subsequently be held accountable by no one but my own conscience. I can do what I want and say what I want, and although my actions may be judged illegal or immoral, anyone who follows me and is dragged down into the mire by my side, is not my responsibility. They are there because somewhere along the way, their parents dropped the ball. All those people died in Waco, Texas because their parents screwed up. All those people died in Jonestown, because their parents screwed up. Everyone on Gary Springer is there because their parents screwed up. Monica Lewinski has her own fashion line of clothing because her parents screwed up. That's cr@p! Society screwed up...a long, long time ago. And unfortunately it wasn't in a galaxy far, far away.

This really was supposed to be short...

I'm still staying out of this discussion, but I want to thank all of the participants for bringing some enlightened opinions to the mix. It has been a real treat to lurk in this thread for the last few days. Of course, I think this has been the longest answer to a simple, one line question in all of recorded history, but hey, that's part of the fun that is the RMFF.

Geez, I had to go back and READ the original question. Oh well, if its any consolation, I didn't really derail it until the 25th post, so all things considered, it could have been much messier. I'm still pretty confident that nobody's been cheesed off yet either. So, yet another milestone.

So, Bravo, I guess the consensus is this:

You gotta do what you gotta do, and that decision will most likely be made based on what your parents have or have not provided for you at some point in your life. You ain't gettin' no help from society, cuz it ain't their problem.

Ok- this should do it for me. This was fun though.
Im not saying Good parents = good kids or bad parents = bad kids. Children of bad parents can use their folks as lessons & try not to be like them. I know many people who have done just that and I think it worked to their benefit. Also, good kids move away from their good parents, get influenced by others & do bad things. I dont feel the need to watch out for them, only to protect myself from them. There will always be people who do bad things & people who follow them. Of course, we can watch out for each other by being careful about what we say, and maybe even reduce the number of those people who do harm. We can be "the village". My only problem with that concept is where we draw the line. Jerks like me may say something stupid at the grocery store & if some kid hears it, I hope the parent can explain that I am a bad, bad man.

The bottom line, Bravo, is to play and have fun and not to worry about what everyone else is doing.

bla bla bla bla bla bla

Actually, if you look hard SS, that's exactly what's going on. Good kids almost always are the product of good parenting. If you judge by the exceptions, and not the norm, then your view will always be skewed and incorrect. And just because a nice car sits in the driveway, doesn't mean that the kids are good. And just because they live in a hovel doesn't mean they are bad. But the facts are that most kids that would bother to get high on crack and pop some other juvi, are almost always the kids of a broken home, a "money home"(aka Columbine), a lousy father, or some other abusive home situation. Of all the kids I grew up with, I can count the bad ones from good homes on one hand not using.....any digits!!!!! If you bother to not gloss over the individual scenarios, you will invariably find that virtually all bad kids have an underlying current in their home lives that lead them astray. For instance, lets get down and dirty.......the Columbine shooters were outcasts, right? The jocks hounded them unmercifully, right? There's your social failing, right? But virtually every kid I knew(under the same circumstances, and I saw a lot of that, because I was one of those cruel victims due to my asthma)would never have taken guns to school and starting killing everything that moved. That's where the lack of parenting turned those kids into killers. Instead of love, attention and discipline in metered amounts, at home they recieved money, at least one gun, shooting games, no attention, a private garage which was never investigated by said parents, and a festering social wound that was never worked on. All of these things are the direct domain of the parents, and none of them are the domain of hindsight! Every good parent knows from the git-go that you keep a close eye on your kids, you never give them firearms(unless they are at a proper range with strict controls & absolute guidance), you investigate any unknowns within your house, you questions your kids until the truth comes out, and then you administer judicious amounts of love and discipline to them while you deal with the school problems with an iron fist, and you stand on that admin's desk until the problem is corrected. And as to the Cleaver family scenario, to show you just how rooted I am in reality, let me give you another, far more personal example. My father taught me from age six to shoot guns. Before any serious firearms training(which I later recieved from him)my dad took me, my sister and my mother to a open field out in the middle of FLA's nowheres......he first took my sister's favorite doll, and placed it about ten feet in front of her, and proceeded to help her gingerly and safely hold his .22 Ruger automatic, pointing it carefully at the doll. With earplugs and big shooting glasses on her little 4 year old head, and a silly grin on her face, he squeezed the trigger for her, and the doll exploded...all but the head. After clearing the weapon, and locking it back in it's case, he retrieved the doll's head and gave it back to Terri saying very quietly "This is what will happen to you if you ever get shot." Then he gave her a big hug, told her it was all right, that he would get her another doll as soon as she promised to never go near any guns without his or mom's permission......she blubberingly promised him that then and there. He then turned to me, & I was knew what was coming.....my prized Tonka Dumptruck was in the Caddy's trunk. He pointed to the trunk, my mom opened it, and I reluctantly got it out. That steel toy, I thought, would fare better than Terri's doll....it had to! I placed it out in the field where my dad told me to, and by the time I got back, my dad had his monstrous .44 Mag Ruger in hand, pointed at the deck. He quietly told me what to do, to hang on tight, squeeze the trigger slow, and lean into the weapon. With him just off to the side of me, helping to steady that huge black gun which I could barely hold, I squeezed the trigger.......despite the earplugs and the glasses, my ears cried out, my eyes slammed shut, my locked elbows buckled, a

It sounds as if you were a very fortunate child, with devoted, loving parents truly focused on your development and moral fortitude. Just imagine if you will though, a world in which parents didn't have to waste their childrens' youth with redundant lessons of good vs. evil. Your parents made a lasting impression which stuck. What if society actually reinforced those notions? What if the efforts of parents like yours were actively supplemented by the values of society? Again, I say nothing to discount the importance of effective parenting. In fact, I have wholeheartedly embraced this notion from the outset. My supposition is that if the greater whole of society acted in a responsible unison, would that not only serve to enhance the effects of the parent's involvement? Why make the jobs of parents more difficult? If society had its poop in a group from the get-go, parents wouldn't even have to waste the time spent lecturing and worrying about drug use, unprotected sex, etc. Then we could all focus on the wonderful, beautiful, exciting aspects of life. Idyllic, perhaps. Idealistic, absolutely. Conceivable, definitely.

Teaching a child is never a waste, just as spending time with a child is never a waste.

It is a waste when that time could be better spent. If a parent no longer has to teach something to a child, because society has made it a non-issue, then to do so would be wasteful. I'm not going to lecture my kids about the hazards of not avoiding carniverous dinosaurs. Why? Because evolution has made it a non-issue. Dinos no longer exist, therefore I do not need to WASTE my time, nor that of my child with the hazards of straying too close to their watering holes. They are extinct, and therefore serve only a historical purpose in the life of my child. Certainly, I would discuss the dinosaurs with my child from an educational standpoint. But, I wouldn't need to drill into the kids brain that they are dangerous to humans. If society comes together to make issues such as child abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, etc. extinct, then they too will serve only historical value. There would be no more practical application.

With all this extravagent gene work goin' on, yur not gonna warn yur kids about DINO's!?!?

FLOLFLOLFLOLFLOL!!!!!

"drugs? sex? alcohol? but every does it!" lol so there, it's not even an issue!!!