Posted on 08/30/2007 9:06:05 AM PDT by qam1
places like Chuck E Cheese are like hell for me.
the NAACP thing ~ sounds like a good idea. I sold my home and moved out because of “Urban Development” and section8 vouchers taking over the neighborhood.
I mena the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong wit hbeing childliike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.
A lot of parents have children and then decide to get involved with unsuitable people who negatively affect the future and ruin the child’s life.
” mena the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong wit hbeing childliike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.”
I mean the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong with being childlike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.
How come more and more of my behavior is being controlled by government as if I were a damn child?
Abigail Adams --> That’s a very interesting insight! You are right, it would place a burden on the kids. Kinda like they have to keep tap-dancing—doing well in sports, getting good grades, giving the parents stuff to brag about—in order to keep the parents occupied and happy.
Have been thinking all afternoon about this and have concluded that there is a lot of truth to your comments. We stood by 2 basic precepts with our kids.
#1 ~ A parent's first responsibility is to protect their child from the world.
The second is to protect the world from their child.
#2 ~ It's the parent's job to comfort their child, not vice-versa.
Hopefully, when they're grown they will return the favor.
While it's important to instill confidence in the child's ability to win and do well, living vicariously through them as if they are an extension of yourself will certainly wreck a marriage.
No, people who don’t have children because they want to have their career/vacation/house/jet skis first. Those who put kids ‘on hold’ because they want material things instead is selfish. It’s about priorities.
Everyone is given by God a natural drive to procreate. Many who choose not to are suppressing that natural impulse. I find that wierd.
>>We do the responsibility part, but I’m known to be a bit childlike<<
Childlike is good!
Childish is stupid.
I am childlike in many ways. I have lots of simple fun.
My sisters are childish and most of their grown children ignore them and love me.
The last baby born was named after me.
I work with children all day long as an English teacher in a high school. One thing is certain: a fairly large minority of students in my class come from families with parents who are unwilling or unable to act like adults. I used to joke that I understood being a teenager, since I was one for 20 years (*cymbal crash*) - a true enough expression, considering my wayward youth in the late 60s and 70s - but I’m now seeing men and women in their 40s and 50s (and one memorable a**h*l* in his 60s) who are for all intents aged teenagers, with all of the problems of teenagers, such as lack of self-control, narcissism, and neurotic self-doubt. (My old ninth-grade English teacher would go crazy trying to diagram that last sentence.)
In my case, having a son powerfully imposed on me a sense of maturity and age that was missing before his birth. No wonder a lot of us don’t want kids.
“Everyone is given by God a natural drive to procreate. Many who choose not to are suppressing that natural impulse. I find that wierd.”
When God was giving out that “natural drive” he must have missed me. I don’t have it. It takes quite a bit of courage to search your soul and realize you don’t have that desire, and then to make the right decision based on that knowledge. It would have been selfish for me to try to conform to society’s expectations and have kids that I didn’t want, making those kids and myself miserable.
Sure, it seems weird. I feel weird. But I am a Christian, read the Bible and pray daily. My husband and I spent several years praying and soul-searching about this. God knows how he created me, and he did not give me the desire to have kids. In fact, I often thank him for the fact that we have no kids!
The reason for my choice was NOT about careers or vacations or a house or a jet ski. We live in a small house, haven’t been on vacation in several years, don’t own a jet ski or any other expensive toys, and I am not working right now. My choice was based on prayer and the desires of my heart.
Just because you don’t feel the same way I do, or don’t understand how I feel, does not make you right and me wrong. Different strokes, you know!
Ooops, looks like they've done a great job of teaching feminism, liberalism, environmentalism, no God, abortion as a right, and it's all about me.
Same here in MA. As I explained to two of the young ladies on our street who are in high school, and were encouraged by the League of Women Voters to get out the vote, if the Prop. 2 1/2 override fails it's not because folks don't want them to have good schools, it's just that we don't see a good accounting of where all that money is going. We see good programs moved aside so they can have 'diversity' classes, and a lot of kids are put into "Special Ed" classes because they can get more State and Federal funds for those. The school dept is very administrator heavy, and teachers continue to get higher degrees so their pay will go up.
This most recent override effort was the third in 6 years, and in the last 15 years the town has built a new elementary school, at the cost of 12.5 million, when it was supposed to have been 9 million, and a high school that started out at 40 something million and went to 65 million! We joking call it Shrewsbury University! The builder claimed that the cost went up so much because they found 'ledge' on the property. That means that there were rocks in the way. HELLO? It was on the top of one of the highest hills in a New England town; of COURSE there were going to be rocks. He shouldn't have gotten one dime extra because it was the job of the Architect and Builder to determine the proper placement of the buildings and access BEFORE construction ever began. The first winter they were in the building, the heating units went berserk and the resulting heat melted the ceiling tiles in the auditorium. So much for all that money buying quality.
Then, of course, once the old high school closed, because it was no longer suitable for the kids, they promptly remodeled it for use as another middle school! They've been spending money hand over fist, then are totally flummoxed by folks who don't want their taxes raised even more for their new 'programs'.
The problem is that the school departments don't worry about the cost of all this construction because they know the State will reimburse the city about 65% of the cost. It doesn't occur to them that the State is getting it's money from the same place the city is getting it; US!
Freerider ping!
Boomers like me were affected, too, in that when we had our little ones, baby sitters were nearly impossible to find. On top of the "baby bust" you got the abortion holocaust; it was a demographic stack-nuke. You were born right in the middle of that.
Hahaha!! Hey, I just watch The Military Channel, Fox, Cartoon Network and The Golf Channel. Wifey watches the popular crap and I yell at the commercials....
MA sounds a lot like NJ! :-( Well, I guess that’s no surprise. But your experience with school taxes and mine are so similar: Our township built a new middle school over budget to the tune of $12 million. The township fully expected to receive state funds to offset the cost, but the state denied them! :-0
During one vote for the school budget, we encountered schoolkids, too, as they stood outside the polling place holding signs saying things like, “We need music.” (I guess they were told their music programs would be cut.) My husband joked that he should’ve brought a sign saying, “We need our home.” The property taxes were escalating so much that people were desperately trying to sell their homes. They were literally being taxed out of their homes.
Anyway, as long as we’ve lived here, the voters in our township overwhelmingly have voted down every school budget proposed. And, each time, the school board has voted to increase it, and our taxes were raised, anyway. As it turns out, our votes are merely a suggestion. The board can choose to ignore our vote. Usually, the board proposes an outrageously high budget, obviously knowing that we’ll vote against it, so they can pass a lower budget that is still too high but claim they lowered it.
After almost 20 years here, we're getting ready to leave MA to move back home to MS, and we're going to the Gulf Coast, so we're gonna be trading high taxes for high insurance rates. On the other hand, the property taxes will be about what we're paying for home insurance now. ;o)
Fellmeth also sees children being jammed into extreme poverty by the growing trend of out-of-wedlock births -- which now stand at 37 percent. The Pew report found growing acceptance among younger people for childbearing outside marriage.
But he doesn't see the connection between these two statements? Maybe the middle class doesn't want to shoulder other peoples' burdens that they have deliberately made for themselves.
>>Here in New Jersey, we’ve taken to voting down school budgets because we’re voting against high taxes. We’re not voting against children.<<
Exactly, same here in California. We’re sick of seeing the teachers association whining for more funds to fix our dying schools, not 12 months after we voted them a big fat budget that was supposed to fix everything if only we would think of the children.
Personally, I’m not going to have children until I can afford to not have them raised by someone else. 50 years ago it was a different world, where both partners didn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to just get by.
>>That’s a very interesting insight! You are right, it would place a burden on the kids. Kinda like they have to keep tap-dancing—doing well in sports, getting good grades, giving the parents stuff to brag about—in order to keep the parents occupied and happy.<<
In some situations this may be a burden, in others it may simply teach the child that they are the most important being in the universe.
I think it is good for kids to not be the central thing in the house, at least not always.
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