Posted: Mar 03, 2010 3:54 am
I'm With Stupid wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Taking care of a dog, or a child, requires a lot more training than learning how to drive a car and the potential for damage is arguably much greater than that of a car.
I disagree. Driving a car is something you can only do with training. It's a fundamentally alien concept, like read and writing. If you don't learn it, you can't do it. I don't think you can say the same about parenting. I think it's far more of an instinctual thing. That doesn't mean that you can't improve your parenting skills, but more in the way that you can learn to run faster. You could always run, training just makes you do it faster.
I disagree with that. I can't think of any parents that have a good enough grasp of basic behavior to be able to efficiently raise their kids. To me, I think it's more likely someone will be able to drive a car successfully than raise a child successfully. Whilst it's true that children are fairly adaptive and can be somewhat immune to the bad parenting techniques employed by the vast majority of parents, this is like saying I can successfully drive a car without training because when I'm driving around alone on a huge empty field I don't crash.
The fact that kids tend to come out of it okay is not a testament to the universality of parenting skills, it's a result of sheer dumb luck.
I'm With Stupid wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:I don't understand what's so bad about competency tests for dogs and children?
Well in the case of the latter, what do you do with parents who fail the test? Forced abortions?
Give them more training, or as a last resort, give them the option of abortion or adoption (possibly with the chance to reclaim your kid after demonstrating your ability to look after and raise children).
Gallstones wrote:Just always keep it pointed away from yourself Mr. S.
I aint no gun expert, but I imagine that would be one of the few things I do know about guns!