Quote: (09-20-2014 08:32 AM)OBJ Snakebite Wrote:
I know that some of you here are actually married and have children. To me the point of marriage has always been children.
But how do you raise a child when government does this ? When child protective services (CPS) will arrest you for letting your kid play unsupervised?
More importantly, how do you raise a boy to become a man in this environment?
I'm married and have two boys. One is a baby and the other is still a toddler. They're the greatest things that have ever happened to me, and also the hardest challenge of my life.
I'm not that old but it's astonishing how different things are for kids now compared to when I was a boy in the 1980's.
I walked to school by myself from the age of 4. Parents didn't drive their kids to school in my town, they let them make their way by foot or bus.
At Halloween, the streets were full of children and you rarely saw an adult outdoors. We children owned the night. We'd go into dozens of our neighbour's houses, sing them a song or tell a joke or say a poem to earn "our Halloween", then fill up our plastic carrier bags with mostly monkey nuts and tangerines, and the odd chocolate bar or sweetie.
In the summer holidays, it was
expected that you'd go out and play all day, only coming home for a meal or a sandwich. We stayed out till it got dark, nearly midnight at the height of summer.
We knew about pedophiles, or "bad men", but parents weren't paranoid about them. We could roam for miles. Nobody thought it was wrong or dangerous if you carried a pocket knife for whittling sticks into makeshift toy rifles.
Nobody wore a helmet when riding a bike or skateboard.
If you got hurt playing sports at school, and I saw 11 year old boys getting broken bones playing rugby, it was seen as a learning experience to toughen you up. Not a drama involving safety lessons or lawsuits.
Bullying was common but you were expected to learn to stand up to bullies and hit back. Nobody suggested you try to reason with them! If there were more of them than you, the answer was to get your bigger brother to help fight them. If you didn't have a big brother, get your friends to help you fight it out on the playground. Unless it ended in a trip to the hospital, grown up authority figures generally didn't want to know.
Playground taunting was mercilessly cruel. If your family was poor, or you had some sort of disability, or you were too stupid or too smart, you'd be teased. Adults didn't expect kids to learn "sensitivity", the motto you learned was "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".
Parental discipline was real. Fists, belts, and shoes were the favoured tools to show a wayward boy the error of challenging his Dad's authority. You could expect to be hit by any adult family member who caught you up to no good, and your parents would thank them for their vigilance. This was the norm, not "abuse".
There was about an hour or two a day of childrens programmes on the TV. If you were lucky, you might have an old black and white portable television in your room. Parents didn't see it as their duty to entertain kids. You made your own amusement. It was an adult world that children were expected to grow into, not like today where kids are endlessly cossetted and pandered to.
Raising boys to be men is harder today. I have a few ideas I'm going to try out though:
* Never, ever take the side of teachers or other authority figures against your child. If my kids act out, I'll deal with it at home. But I won't help the school system build a disciplinary file on them.
* Let boys be boys. Playing rough, fighting, and mischief are normal for boys. They need clear boundaries, not medication or feminine lectures on being sensitive to each others' feelings.
* Don't leave education to school hours. Challenge the kids through debate at the dinner table, teaching them to question what they think they know, and to articulate logical rebuttals based on facts. Introduce them to books. Let them help when I'm doing man stuff like using tools.
* Teach them game when they're old enough to learn. And lead by example by being a Patriarch. It's my house and my rules. I love my wife and expect the children to respect and obey her, but I'll be damned if I'm going to behave like one of those pussywhipped Dads you see on TV. The family is not a democracy, it is a benevolent dictatorship and I'm
Il Duce.