Wikinews: New South Wales to introduce 'parenting contracts'
Parents would be forced to sign the contracts by the children's court. They could require parents to attend parenting classes, undergo counselling, stop drug use or stop consuming excessive amounts of alcohol depending on the situation. The NSW Deparment of Community Services would be allowed to apply to the court for the contracts to be drawn up.I want to know how this turns out.
If parents failed to comply with the contracts their children would be removed by authorities.
3 comments:
Interesting concept, its sad to say such a situation exists that parents have to have contracts with their children because they can't be a good parent, but at least something pro-active is being done to correct the problem.
And btw, it really was me bugging you in all those Sushicam posts, just thought I'd let you know if I weirded you out or anything like that ^_^
-Hyper (aka Chris)
Yeah. It's also dangerous to let the government have a say in people's private lives, because where do you draw the line? What if the government starts decreeing how exactly to raise kids, and if you deviate at all your children are taken away from you?
I almost think it would be better to stop the problem at its source, by offering free sterilizations to anyone who wanted them, and removing any financial "rewards" there might be to having a bunch of children when you're too poor to support them yourself.
I knew it was you over at Sushicam :) Sorry for not being as responsive as I usually am.
By going down the path of socially "fixing" individual families, all we're ever going to do is take more and more responsiblity from those families. The more we get in there and try and remedy the "bad situations" we see, the more we're going to be stripping those parents of their rights and power.
Governments are already trying to tell parents how to raise their kids.
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/04/uk_mulls_spanking_ban.html
This is really no different than teaching safe sex, handing out condoms at school, promoting abortion as an acceptable alternative when it comes to birth control.
All these means that people find to help the victims of certain situations which then always bring with them so much bad for all the good that they do manage.
To be more direct in what I'm saying, stepping in and telling a family how it must function alleviates the parents of that supreme power, which in turn can make those parents feel less responsible for what their kids turn out like.
The less direct control you give someone over something, the less they'll be devoted to it - the less they'll be invested in it.
Of course, another consideration would be that in some of those homes, perhaps it would be far more detrimental to remove the children than leave them there with their alcoholic parent or what have you.
Kids need their parents - not a society - deciding how they should be raised. Sure, there are families that aren't working. That's not to be denied. But parents should work harder and do better because they are the only chance that kid's got - the more we tell them that WE ARE WATCHING U HAD BETTER DO IT RIGHT, the more parents are going to feel as though they aren't so different from their children - people that have to make sure they do what their superiors say.
Parents were once kids. When kids are taught that parents can fail, (and not because the parent forgot the school play - but because a buddy was taken away from home because his daddy drank too much) then they keep that with them when they become parents. What we do to parents today will be instilled in the parents of tomorrow. And what might serve as something "pro-active" right now, may well be something that really messes up families the next generation around.
So far as I know, tax breaks and credits for married families, for children, for all of that - it was created and implimented into our government to encourage child-producing families. A country cannot be strong without the people to back it up. It wasn't meant to encourage people to use the system to get money so they could sit around and do nothing, but of course, people found a way to do that.
Here's where we hit one snag - these cuts and credits DO help promote families that produce the next generation, and we still are going to need the next generation if we're going to stay the world's superpower.
For a lot of parents, those cuts are important - vital. We want our children, we wanted them when we got them, and though it's unfair to those that choose not to have children, we do kind of need those cuts and benefits.
It's a system that's been there for so long that it's basically a staple of our society - something we count on.
Again, back to the big sex question, if bad parenting is a result of bad planning by people unprepared to deal with what happens when man impregnates woman, then should we not, rather than wait until after the fact (abortion, parenting rules) be teaching society not to get into those sexual relationships in the first place?
What we need to remember is that today's parents were kids at one point too. How do we rate against our parents? And what did we bring with us from our childhoods to where we are now? How could we have turned out better than we did? What could we do differently with our children?
Do we need get into other homes and monitor parents, while we're basically encouraging (most would say accepting, but condoms at school sounds like encouraging to me) sex (Music videos, movies, internet pornography) to our minors? What other "policies" or ways of dealing with our youth could have the inverse affect of what we intend?
And while we're doing all of this - using the government or society in general to promote these lifestyles - then we have to go in after the parents and tell them how to deal with the situations that society is beginning to create? And if they don't do it as we think they should (spanking, what have you) then we take the kids away?
I really only let my parents babysit my children. The last place I'd let 'em stay the night was over at "society's" house.
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