Effective Communication

If you're familiar with my writings, you'll know that I'm a strong believer in the traditional family as the cornerstone and very foundation of any healthy, stable and progressive society.

See, for example, my article If Marriage Is Dead, We're All Dead, which is basically a rant against the conclusions of a so-called "research" study a few years ago, published in a very respectable scholarly journal, that fathers are wholly dispensable to the functioning of a well-balanced family unit.

In this context, I was intrigued by a recent piece by Nicole Gelinas in the New York Post which an acquaintance forwarded to me last week.

Apparently, people have been complaining in New York state that the powers-that-be haven't been allocating enough money for education. A group of activists have been fighting in the courts for ten years to wring more money from the state government for the public schools in New York City

But Gelinas points out that far too many kids in the city come to school handicapped by a significant deficit of another kind - one that can neither be measured in or fixed by dollars.

"All the money in the world," she writes, "can't negate the stubborn fact that schools must work with the raw material they've got: the children."

In other words, too many of the kids are coming from dysfunctional, fractured and warped family backgrounds filled with stress and strife. By the time they get into the school system, educators already find themselves at a severe disadvantage. Their young charges are no longer the pliable vessels they should be to receive the wisdom and instruction their teachers desire to impart to them.

Apparently, "little kids come to school with anger-management problems so deep-seated that, at ages 9 and 10, they're already dangers to themselves and others. Pregnant teachers must insert themselves into vicious fights between pint-sized children....Other kids are prematurely burnt out or acutely, clinically depressed..."

According to the writer, local public-school teachers are adamant that lots of their kids are smart and creative, but they live "in noisy, polluted apartments where its impossible to grow or think amid a cacophony of honking horns and blaring music. Further, "the kids must deal with their mothers' and grandmothers' endless parade of new boyfriends, new apartments and new jobs." Apparently, single moms still head more than one-third of New York City's households.

And we can be pretty sure, unfortunately, that this kind of tragedy is hardly confined to New York City or the U.S. The phenomenon is widespread in many countries.

Healthy kids from healthy backgrounds shouldn't have problems learning how to read or do basic math. As always, the Family is King!

For the poor and underprivileged, a little money never hurts.

But if we want to be parents, we have to exert ourselves to give our wonderful offspring what all the state funding, indeed all the money in the world, can't buy.

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On the topic of our responsibilities as parents, you might find this read on the site of value: When 'Everybody Does It' Comes Back to Haunt You.

Labels: family life, parenting

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