RE: [split] Ethics - parental responsibility re: children
March 3, 2022 at 11:45 am
(This post was last modified: March 3, 2022 at 11:48 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Worked the other way with us. We sold stuff to our grandad. $1/bushel for corn. $75/hog. He'd pay us better than minimum wage to help him do bodywork. We were fortunate - though this was florida back in the good old days (lol) so whenever I wasn't in the swamp on my gheenoe I was on the bay on my little cabin cruiser - and we were pretty much paupers compared to random sheiks and ny hedge fund managers kids snowbirding.
I think my mother always felt as though she had failed to adequately provide. A buddys dad paid the tuition so I could attend private school with his son, my best friend. Another ponied up so I could go to spain with the rest of my class - likely oblivious to the fact that I wasn't just his daughters "best friend since kindergarten"..if you catch my drift. He'd end up regretting that. We were basically an institution - the neighborhood having been gentrified massively since the 60's when my family first came down from indiana. We were the welcome wagon - and we were a release valve for the massively competitive jonesing that became the norm. People who would fued all week would end up around a small table throwing back beers and gorging themselves on seafood my dad and I had caught and collected that day.
Point being, is that I can look back and see that it wasn't just my own parents trying to give their kids the best life they were capable of - it was neighbors helping neighbors with their kids too. That's community. Some people and some communities may do better or worse in that regard - and I'm sure that the neighborhood I grew up in isn't as rosy as I remember it - most of the people have divorced, moved out, disappeared into perpetual rehab - that sort of thing. That parents have ethical obligations to children is noncontroversial, and, I think, we tend to exceed those obligations for no other reason than it makes us feel good when we can - even if the kid isn't ours. Find me a child who has never once been gifted a toy. They don't need toys, they'll turn anything into a toy if they don't have them (and mine would prefer to play with their haphazardly constructed toys than anything we buy them, to our endless frustration). Find me a child who has never once known the kindness of a neighbor or stranger. A kid starving to death. Then I'd be onboard with wondering whether having that child was a good decision on the part of the parents. Trouble is, when you find kids in the most desperate of states you tend to find that it's not anything specifically or explicitly about the parents that's landed them there. They go hungry even though the parents work like dogs. They have no toys because there's nothing left after paying their bills even as they work like dogs. There's no community because those communities have been very intentionally torn apart - either for profit or even less amusing reasons.
We might be justified in indicting the world order as creating a situation fraught with ethical danger in the rearing of children, insomuch as it does and where it does, but parents that are ethical failures with respect to their own children are not the norm even in that scenario - and declaring all parents unethical for simply having children must, by necessity, omit childhoods like my own - which I suspect aren't all that rare in the broad strokes...either.
I think my mother always felt as though she had failed to adequately provide. A buddys dad paid the tuition so I could attend private school with his son, my best friend. Another ponied up so I could go to spain with the rest of my class - likely oblivious to the fact that I wasn't just his daughters "best friend since kindergarten"..if you catch my drift. He'd end up regretting that. We were basically an institution - the neighborhood having been gentrified massively since the 60's when my family first came down from indiana. We were the welcome wagon - and we were a release valve for the massively competitive jonesing that became the norm. People who would fued all week would end up around a small table throwing back beers and gorging themselves on seafood my dad and I had caught and collected that day.
Point being, is that I can look back and see that it wasn't just my own parents trying to give their kids the best life they were capable of - it was neighbors helping neighbors with their kids too. That's community. Some people and some communities may do better or worse in that regard - and I'm sure that the neighborhood I grew up in isn't as rosy as I remember it - most of the people have divorced, moved out, disappeared into perpetual rehab - that sort of thing. That parents have ethical obligations to children is noncontroversial, and, I think, we tend to exceed those obligations for no other reason than it makes us feel good when we can - even if the kid isn't ours. Find me a child who has never once been gifted a toy. They don't need toys, they'll turn anything into a toy if they don't have them (and mine would prefer to play with their haphazardly constructed toys than anything we buy them, to our endless frustration). Find me a child who has never once known the kindness of a neighbor or stranger. A kid starving to death. Then I'd be onboard with wondering whether having that child was a good decision on the part of the parents. Trouble is, when you find kids in the most desperate of states you tend to find that it's not anything specifically or explicitly about the parents that's landed them there. They go hungry even though the parents work like dogs. They have no toys because there's nothing left after paying their bills even as they work like dogs. There's no community because those communities have been very intentionally torn apart - either for profit or even less amusing reasons.
We might be justified in indicting the world order as creating a situation fraught with ethical danger in the rearing of children, insomuch as it does and where it does, but parents that are ethical failures with respect to their own children are not the norm even in that scenario - and declaring all parents unethical for simply having children must, by necessity, omit childhoods like my own - which I suspect aren't all that rare in the broad strokes...either.
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