04-02-2023, 08:28 PM
(03-28-2023, 10:26 PM)Nately120 Wrote: I don't have kids, but I know if you do too much for them people say you are a bad parent, and if you don't do enough for them people say you are a bad parent. I'm from a rural area, so for years people my age would complain that parents these days are way too involved in their kids lives, because when they were kids they were allowed to go off on their own and actually experience things. I feel like the whole "parents need to be involved" thing coming from these same folks is in response to the recent political assertions that grooming and indoctrination is everywhere.
I had a bit of a "both sides" feeling when I spent a few hours at a lake with my buddy and his young kids and his wife and she had the kids in UV blocking shirts, and hats, and we had 3 adults watching 2 kids in 1 foot of water. I thought...geez, this seems pretty extreme. And then I looked over and saw a bunch of kids around the same age with no parents terribly close with no protection practically trying to see which one could drown the others first. I guess the universe balances out.
Anywho, how many Americans need to use a gun to shoot someone else or themselves before we stop acting like an American would have to be ultra nuts to do such a thing? These shootings happen so often that we don't even mention them unless there is some aspect that makes it stand out from the mundane shootings, and yet we still want to just look at it and say "Crazy...flat out crazy."
Americans shooting stuff just doesn't seem crazy to me, anymore.
I used to think that "better parenting" was a good argument for when these types of things happen, but id say within the last two years I've kinda ditched this. Not that the argument has no validity but I feel like most people use it as a knee jerk reaction, but I've come to realize the argument is flawed for several reasons.
1. It assumes the parents weren't "good" parents.
2. It assumes that the individual is mentally stable.
3. It assumes the individual is receptive to "good parenting" even if the individual is mentally healthy.
4. Lastly, it assumes "good parenting" would have actually prevented the event from happening.
1. To the first point, I don't think it's fair for us who are outside looking in to be declaring that people are "bad parents" or that they could have been "better parents" when we know almost nothing about these people's lives. I mean heck, 99% of the time we don't even know who their parents are, yet we like to stand on our soap box and preach that if their parents were better, then this wouldn't have happened. Why do we believe this? We weren't there when these people were being raised, yet somehow we convince ourselves that we "know" what kind of parents these people have/had.
2. To the second point, we don't know the mental health of these individuals. Nevermind the fact that the majority of us aren't even trained psychologists anyway, "better parenting" doesn't guarantee that a mentally unstable individual won't kill someone.
3. To the third point, just as with the second point, "good parenting" doesn't guarantee that a mentally healthy individual won't kill people either. You kind of relate to this point at the end of your post, which I agree with. Just as you said, people don't need to be complete nut jobs to commit murder. I also don't believe that "bad parenting" is a prerequisite for mass murder. Parents teach their kids all the time not to do bad things like drugs for example, yet you will find innocent Sally under a bridge cracked out from the very thing her parents taught her not to do.
4. Which brings me to the last point that "good parenting" doesn't equate to "peaceful harmony". This is a fantasy land way of thinking. And that's not a shot at people who use the "better parenting" argument, because again, this used to be a huge belief of mine. I just think the argument is a bit unrealistic. We don't really know these people's lives and blanket statements like "better parenting" ignores the nuances of it all.
And to be completely honest, I think the same could be said about the "more mental health access" argument. Not that I don't think that's a good thing, but both arguments are similar in the fact that they make a lot of the same assumptions about the individuals life and what becomes of it based on what they had access too.
