Educate young people on how to be good parents
RE: Child Abuse Prevention Month (April): perhaps the quality of family life should be emphasised over child quantity.
In the book Childhood Disrupted, the author writes that even ‘well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development’ (pg.24). Thus, failing at parenthood can occur as soon as the decision is made to conceive and carry a baby to term.
By this I don’t mean they necessarily are or will be ‘bad’ parents. Rather, it’s that too many people will procreate regardless of not being sufficiently knowledgeable of child development science to parent in a psychologically functional/healthy manner.
They seem to treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and nurture their children’s minds and needs. As liberal democracies we cannot stop anyone bearing children, even those who recklessly procreate. We can, however, educate young people for this most important job, even those who plan to remain childless, through a mandatory high-school child-development science curriculum.
While it wouldn’t be overly complicated, it would be notably more informational than diaper changing and baby feeding, which often are already covered by the home economics curriculum. If nothing else, such a child-development science curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such valuable science-based knowledge? After all, a mentally as well as physically sound future should be every child’s fundamental right especially considering the troubled world into which they never asked to enter; a world in which Child Abuse Prevention Month (every April) clearly needs to run 365 days of the year.
FRANK STERLE JR, White Rock, British Columbia, Canada.
... IT is all too easy to create an artificial dichotomy between reducing the human population on the one hand and dealing with green energy, climate change, etc, on the other. We need both.
In a finite space, the increase in one species takes place at the expense of other species. Even if we ignore the wellbeing of other species, the impact on the environment of an increasing human population is bad for us.
Many commentators say that we should worry about poverty and over-consumption rather than population growth. Again, they are not mutually exclusive.
Over-consumption is a problem that needs to be tackled in a number of ways. The most efficient one is to reduce the number of consumers. Poverty is a major problem that requires many kinds of interventions; one of them is to make it easier for those who are being helped out of poverty to have fewer children, as this will help them give better support to the children they do have.
One must not forget that an increasing population puts great pressure on finite resources such as water. With global warming, there is less snow cover to provide water to major river systems; aquifers are being depleted. When the wells run dry, what will we do? With dwindling resources and increasing population ,more conflict is inevitable. Sadly all this is already happening.
JOHN O’BRIEN, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.
Scottish folly
ALL the discussion of Scotland’s hate crime legislation reminded me of G.K. Chesterton’s remark that ‘if men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments’.
V. GRANT, by email.