How Do You Get Through To Them?

A member of my family now has two children by two different girls; the first when he was 16. I wonder the exact same things as the OP.

I don't think anything can be done other than to try to educate them about the consequences.

You'll never completely eliminate it, though, because in many areas (especially those with a large Hispanic population) it's not as frowned upon as it is in others.

It's why my town will always have a higher than average teen pregnancy rate. I had the Hispanic director of the local health department tell me that several years ago.

I think it's in part because we practically train little girls from infancy to want to have children themselves.

^
Even so, with the way that the world is these days, who in their right mind would WANT to rush out to have a kid? Like shootER said, there are som areas where it's not so frown upon to become a young mother. In the Oakland Bay Area, people would ask my mom back in the 70's and 80s how many children she had because teenage motherhood was just that rampant.

They don't think that big, though. They don't even seem to think of the baby as another human being they're responsible for - it's like a puppy to them it seems like. They've been brought up all their life to fawn over how cute babies are and that they should want one of their own, and sure enough, they want one, like seeing someone else with a cute puppy and wanting one, too.

It's millions of years of evolution colliding with modern civilization. It's Third World supply versus First World demand. Up until a fraction of the total time humanity has been in business, it was a struggle just to reproduce fast enough to keep from going extinct. We are hard-wired to pump out kids. Those who can't alter their behavior to adjust accordingly will be burdened with too many mouths to feed. Those families tend to pass along their Third World mentality and thus over time out-breed the First World until the Third World economy collapses because the money takers outnumber the money makers. Also the productivity of the takers that become makers is generally substandard (especially in an entitlement society) leaving even less to go around. Just my personal opinion, feel free to disagree.

I notice Liet completely avoided this response to his post. It's the uncomfortable question that social activists never like to address.

You don't even think before you post, do you? People who actively want to solve these problems believe in strengthening the family. Devaluation, as you put it, comes from parents having to work/commute too many hours to afford time for parenting, school budgets cut too low to involve life skills education, and zealous support of the notion that a parent always knows best, regardless of how much harm this does to the child. In short, as Liet already noted, it is the libertarian approach that devalues families.

Yep, that's my reading of things, too. As for the mom's comment, I take that to mean "no sex for you!" No doubt, this being Florida, and she being an ignorant ho, she will confiscate the condoms and assume she has done her job.

Wow. That's a pretty scary statement. Who is the arbiter of what is best for the child? The state?

When are you going to figure out that doing this:

-- isn't going to get you anywhere?

Then such people should recognize that it's time to change course. The solutions they believe in are clearly not working.

Every day has 24 hours in it.

Hmmm... no.

As opposed to who else knowing best for some magical reason?

Liet didn't so much "note" it as he asserted it. But your editorial spin is noted.

These are fantastic organizations, and what they do works. Also very promising are peer support programs within the school. The problem is one of scale. How many girls have been involved with these or similar groups? Most have not. In some cases that is an intentional opting out, but in many cases, there simply aren't the resources to make this kind of programming universal. This is why I tend to dismiss the notion that private funding can solve all problems. It already doesn't.

That said, the problems are very much about knowledge and self-esteem. we know how to manage this problem, we just don't place enough effort behind what works.

Don't read too much into it. I'm talking about things like health care (eg prayer instead of treatment).

Ultimately, yes. And it is scary, because the limits are whatever the state wants them to be.

But the only alternative is to let parents do whatever they want with their children: beat them to death, rent them out as prostitutes, kill them before they're even born (sorry, that one is already allowed), set them to work in the mines, prevent them from going to school...

There is, unfortunately, no good way around the principle that the state must be allowed to interfere in what parents can and cannot do with and/or to their children. And once that principle is allowed, there is no good way to define how far it should be allowed to go. If parents want their children to be vegetarians, should they be allowed to? If parents want their children to accompany them to church, should they be allowed to? If parents want to tell their children when they're little that Santa Claus exists, should they be allowed to? If parents want to tell their children that there is no God, should they be allowed to? If parents want to teach their children that unions have done more harm than good over the last fifty years, should they be allowed to? If parents want to teach their children that socialism is a good political system, should they be allowed to?

There are people right here on this board who would argue that every one of those things harms a child in some way (not the same people for each item, of course). How do you define what is "harm" and what isn't, or what is an acceptable level of harm and what isn't? Ultimately, only by what the government puts in place: If the lawmakers vote that something is not legal, then it is no longer legal, and only by a massive movement of the people can that be changed. And even then, that ultimately means that if a large enough majority of people think something is harmful to children -- or too harmful to children -- they have the right to force their opinion on those parents who hold to a different opinion.

This way lies tyranny, but I see no good ways to define how far down that path you can go before it becomes "tyranny" because one man's tyranny is another man's way of "protecting the children." I fully understand -- and share -- your concern, but the only alternative to "the state" being the ultimate arbiter of what is "best for the children" is even worse, it seems to me.

Very thoughtful post, Async.

I quite agree with you. My concern is that, at least here in Canada, many child protection and similar welfare agencies have become overzealous in their mandates. There needs to be lines drawn as to how far the state can intervene, but where that line is actually drawn will likely still be a subject of debate 100 years from now.

Async is a statist who would see the U.S. become another Canada.

But yeah, it's necessary, and disconcerting at the same time.

Two points:

1. As we've seen with laws targeted at victimless crimes, what is legal is not only not in keeping with what is ethical, it is more and more often completely the opposite.

2. No agent of the state is any more enlightened or in any other way "better" than a private individual. A government job does not mean that someone "knows better" than anyone else. The opposite -- that government representatives and employees are somehow wiser and kinder than regular people -- has been the attitude in the U.S. for decades, and we've only seen academic achievement go down while juvenile criminality goes up. It's become abundantly clear that the government does not know what's best. So, yes, leaving child rearing entirely in the hands of parents can have some bad consequences in a minority of cases. That should not in any way be taken as license to turn that role over, in whole or even in part, to a system which is already clearly failing to do any better but which, for the most part, is doing much worse.

It's not so much about knowing better, as much as taking an interest. The agent of the state is just an individual, who we have explicitly charged with looking after things you and I and Async don't personally have time/energy/expertise for doing.

Parents have time to raise their kids. What they may lack is the inclination, and what these wasteful programs offer parents is an excuse to indulge their disinclination to raise their kids.

Oh -- found this:

Thank you.

I would love to be able to "draw those lines" but they are ultimately nothing more than the opinion of the majority. And as the opinion of the majority shifts, so will the lines. But since the majority is not always right, we are stuck with the inevitable fact that, sometimes, "the state" will decide things "for the good of the children" that are ultimately not what is best for the children. And I really, really, really don't see any way around that.

Remember, Async is part Canadian...

I do: We keep the state out of it entirely. Don't even let them have so much as a toe-hold.

That means no laws against child prostitution, for example, as long as the parents are in agreement. No laws against killing your children, for any reason or no reason at all.

Either you are trolling (as usual), or you are very, very silly. Either way, your credibility would go down even further, if it wasn't already near zero. It's a shame, really, because I know you are not as stupid as the kind of posts you make would tend to indicate.

But if that's the way you want to be seen on Wordforge, it's all right with me.

I beg to differ.

Thanks for the clarification.

If it's cultural, there isn't much you can do about it, except wait for individual girls to look around and say "I want more than this." But if there's an extended family of aunts and grandmothers to help raise the baby, is that such a bad thing?

It's when it's a lonely, isolated girl who'll go with any guy who asks her because it's her only human contact that it's deadly.

Excellent post! But I'm not sure it's actually the definition of harm that raises these problems. We need to define what is harmful all the time, even with adults: Our law has decided that you can't rape me and I can't beat you, but I can certainly tell you that there is no God and you can certainly tell me all about Santa. I think the real crux is that we don't know how to attribute decisions to children. In many cases, they are unable to consent now; but not all decisions can be delayed. It is then that we don't know which decisions to allow parents or other institutions to make in their stead. So really, the trouble is with out conecpt of freedom or self-determination, and only secondarily concerns our definition of harm.

I'll bet you do.

Which means that opinions about what "the state" should or should not do are, ultimately, just that: opinions.

That's why there will always be differences about what is appropriate where government is concerned. Many people like to take the simplistic approach of "our side" against "their side" but in fact the situation is much more complex than that. And there is little hope of it ever becoming simpler.