I couldn't agree more with you. This is why I stopped working years ago and stayed home so that my son as well as some of our neighbors kids could come home to a real person. I didn't run a daycare nor did I accept any payment for watching them for the few hours in the afternoon. Several of us in the neighborhood that didn't work rotated schedules. It worked for us in that community.
Excellent post! Other enlightened parents do the same thing in the form of "babysitting co-ops". My wife (@home Mom) and other Moms are talking about doing precisely this.
Now clearly this is not an option for many families, particularly single parent divorced homes, where divorced Mom is working to keep roof overhead while Dad hopefully pays his child support on time. However, many more familes are "together" yet Mom & Dad both work high powered careers. They are praying to the false altar of materialism...more & bigger cars, more & bigger houses, more & bigger everything. Concepts of family/community/church etc. are dismissed as quaint, or the province of losers who can't "get ahead" like them, or both. And complaints about their wayward kids from cops, neighbors etc. are seen merely as an intrusion on their personal lives and their pursuit of external wealth and are dealt with as such. I was not surprised by the infantile behavior of the "parents" in Lather.Rinse.Repeat's post Message 9095578, for example.
Such "families" have no "mother" or "father" except at the most base, biological level. And their "home" is a luxuriously-equipped commune of sorts, consisting of a vain, selfish older male and female child trapped in adult bodies, who happened to procreate other younger but no less vain and selfish children.
All this said, given the profiles I have read of the killer-kids' parents as dual-income high level professional career people, I very seriously doubt their parents would have responded to police inquiries before this tragedy with shock and concern for others. Anger over the intrusion and a desire to "get even" (pursue litigation, nasty phone calls etc.) with those who made the complaints seems the more likely knee-jerk response. |
