Curse at them, instead.
My friend Tara introduced me to a book I hadn’t been aware of before today. Go the F—k to Sleep, a parody bedtime story, is apparently what our generation considers parenting humor. In the interest of research, I listened to two minutes and eight seconds of this drivel in audiobook form before I gave it up for a waste of time. I don’t need to hear the whole thing to know the score.
Here’s my thirty-second review: It’s not funny. It’s not even clever. It’s just an entirely inappropriate expression of an entirely inappropriate frustration that today’s parents feel toward their children. I spend a good deal of my limited entertainment time weeding out unfunny “comedy” from my Netflix queue, so I’m not surprised that people find this humorous. People find a lot of things funny that are really just vulgar and stupid. This book is a symptom of cultural decay. It is utterly lacking in value, except as a diagnostic clue.
Not ten minutes after I commented on Tara’s post about this idiot book, I saw this article about a Texas mother who earned herself five years of probation and parenting classes for the horrific offense of leaving red marks on her child’s bottom. The woman’s children are living with their paternal grandmother until such time that the woman proves herself to be a “fit” mother again.
(Slightly off-topic: Something tells me that that mother/mother-in-law relationship was never very good, and the mother-in-law was delighted to find a way to use the family court system to show her (ex?)daughter-in-law who’s boss. Family courts operate outside the law, so unscrupulous family members frequently find ways to use them to settle personal vendettas, as some of my own relatives and thousands of fathers have sadly learned first-hand. Anyway…)
The money quote from the “justice” in the case:
“You don’t spank children today. In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children. You understand?”
So now, even though spanking is not illegal in the state of Texas, tyrants in black robes get to steal your children because they prefer their own culture (the holy culture of liberalism) to yours. And we wonder why children think they don’t have to listen to their parents! Parents today are shamed and even punished for disciplining their children in ways that have been known for centuries to be both humane and effective.
And so we’ve come to this sad state of affairs. Powerless parents all over the country, every night, are silently (or perhaps loudly) cursing their children because they can’t get them to behave the way every child in a decent home used to behave. A generation of parents that feels it doesn’t have either right or duty to apply percussive force to the bottoms of their children is a generation of helpless parents. No wonder they’re cursing! I’d be upset too!
I have absolutely no sympathy for parents who refuse to discipline their children, and then curse and despise their hapless brats for being what they’ve been trained to be.
Don’t Spank Your Kids is a post from: Get Along Home