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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bald Eagle who wrote (6324)	2/22/2001 9:00:23 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

but how do you stop people who are not responsible enough to be good parents from producing children? Society sends messages. Look at how quickly, when society finally made up its mind, it became totally uncool to smoke. Society needs to change its message on producing children. How often do we all meet a young couple and, just making small talk, ask when they're going to start a family? The message is that of course they're going to have kids. That message isn't as strong as it once was. I remember the time before feminism when it simply wasn't acceptable to not have kids. That's just the way it was. There was no conscious thought given to deliberately not having children unless you had the calling to be a nun. There are many more choices now and more acceptance of those, but people aren't necessarily making them. I think that we need to change the message so that unsuitable people are less likely to produce a family. Seems to me that the first step is to air out the criteria for suitability. If you have lots of unresolved issues from your childhood or anger control problems, maybe kids aren't for you. If you're not willing to make sacrifices or don't have a support system or a suitable environment for kids, maybe you shouldn't produce any. Duh! I can easily picture a quiz called "Are You Parent Material" in Cosmo or Redbook or Seventeen or Playboy. First question: "Are you just an overgrown kid yourself?" Oprah can take up the issue. Characters on popular TV shows can model the decision making process and provide roll models of childless people. Maybe Planned Parenthood could offer classes on how to make the decision to have or not have kids. Schools could expand those classes where you carry an egg or a sack of flour around to simulate having a kid. And individual people can quit automatically saying "Oh, how wonderful!" every time a friend talks about starting a family. Some alternate responses might be "Oh, so your husband has finally gotten his alcoholism under control. Good for him." Or "Gee, you guys must be doing well. We only have about $75K left in savings since we bought our new house so we're going to have to wait for a while." Or "Oh, you'll be using a sperm bank. Does that mean that you've decided to move back to your hometown where your brothers can provide male role models for your kid?" Or "Since when did your employer start offering health insurance?" Once people get thinking that maybe they have no business having kids, or more kids, there needs to be a way, short of sexual abstinence, to support that decision. That means readily accessible birth control and back-up. And support for adoptions. And training for parenting. I think society also has to lose it's bias toward keeping families together at all costs. I'd get kids out of bad situations and terminate parental rights much more quickly than we apparently do now. Karen