According to the carbon literacy course I just took, 1 American does not equal 50 Congolese people. I’d explain what the certified instructor said, but you’ve got a fixed position on this.

Where do I start? Shitty schools. Poor maternity and paternity care. The fact that it’s perfectly legal in many places to hit kids...

Well, that’s the thing, American culture makes much noise about how precious and special the children are, but doesn’t live the values or enact the policies that actually care for children.

I think part of the problem is that people like you and me, and our parents, still remember how we were independent and free and unprotected, and we survived. It’s still in our recent cultural memory. The safety improvements of the past 40 years also came with increased laws and regulations that chafed the right wing…

Slacktivist over on Patheos had a good post about just this kind of thing, spurred by those “Drive like your kids live here” signs. Not “kids live here, drive carefully” or “drive carefully because other humans live here”... we have to remind people to treat each other as though they matter as much as their own…

I remember my mom would leave my sisters and me in the car when she’d go to the store. We had a game we played called “patience” in which we flipped over the front bench seat to the back seat and back over again as many times as we could, saying “patience” the whole time.
Good memories (this was early 70's).

I think it doesn’t. Absolutely nothing about Western society shows that it remotely gives a shit about kids- particularly in the USA.

Yep. I’ve always cared deeply for kids, and it went from deep care to fucking righteous rage at how kids are treated after I had my own kids. My kids have a great life. I work hard to provide for them. Every kid deserves what my kids have. They deserve good school’s, safe places to play, healthcare, good food and a…

I’m not at all saying it will be easy. Hell no. Moving mountains would be easier. But to start moving mountains, we gotta start pushing. If we say, damn that’s a mountain, no way we can push that, well, that’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So how do you propose to do that? I’m not saying that it can’t be done. It can. But children are our must vulnerable population yet they get treated like shit on the regular. If we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to protect them before, changing minds on that front is moving mountains.

But...why does that matter with regards what we should do now? We don’t need history to tell us whether it’s okay to care about children in a cultural context. Even if it’s never been done before, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start now.

I really don’t think a lot of parents who ‘care’ actually care. It’s performative parenting, done for a select circle of people and done as much for personal ego (I am a good parent!) as for love for the child itself.

The “I don’t have kids so why should I pay school taxes” people are my least favorite people.

Of course I do but as a whole children have never really been a priority ever.

Serious question: have we ever given a shit about kids? Child labor was still a thing in this country not that long ago. And it still exists in numerous other countries today! Penn State, the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal, the Magdaleine laundries, British children shipped to Australia, etc.

I think you might have a shitty family, more than anything else.

Grew up in Baltimore. Weren’t really allow to go off and explore wherever unsupervised as there was an active drug market and the occasional shooting around our neighborhood back then.

If the “death panels” were ever to come to fruition, my only hope would be that those found to not be able to employ or experience empathy would be the first to go.

Are you ok with no giving a shit about other kids that may not be lucky enough to have you as a mom and need help and services? That is the question here.

There was a good commentary on a local news site about the fact that an attempt to get a town to hire summer lifeguards was met with angry “Watch your own damn kids” by the assholes who think of all taxes as theft.