Another missive from our pal, Pete.
THIS FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS TODAY: "The United States ranks near the bottom for infant survival rates among modernized nations. A Save the Children report last year placed the United States ahead of only Latvia, and tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia."
Latvia?! Shocking? Yes. Shocking. But why is this so, and more importantly, why do we deny it?
I have been writing from a number of different perspectives on the egotistical attitudes overlaying the insidious inadequacies of parenting in the United States. We chronically and tragically do too much of the things children don’t really need, and not enough of what would really benefit them. Yet, our hubris is off the scale. In the worst traditions of American consumerism, we act as if spending the most of any industrialized nation on cool strollers and hip clothes for kids, along with private schooling, nannies and viola lessons, makes us competent parents. Meanwhile we simultaneously remain ambivalent about fully embracing universal health care and alternative – i.e. – preventative – healing practices for our childrens’ physical and emotional well-being.
Furthermore, we absolutely refuse, with a fervor that can only serve to confirm the resistance, to look at the ways in which we use our children for vicarious purposes, seeking to prop up our own fragile self-esteems and personal deficits. I have "listened to" numerous angry tirades on this blog when I suggest that parents should re-examine their reasons for not having fulfilled adulthoods (i.e. – vibrant sex lives and gratifying careers), because they have kids. The negative reactions have totally outweighed the positive reactions to my suggestions that having children past infancy sleep in bed with parents is not good for the kids, and of course, parents have really clammed-up when I’ve challenged them with evidence of the dramatic harm done to kids by labeling them with bogus diagnoses like "ADHD" and giving them drugs as a solution rather than – again – re-examining parenting (and its derivative – teaching).
Last night, I was at a dinner party with a group of parents bemoaning the sullenness towards the parents of their children after they became adolescents. "Doesn’t it basically come down to genes?" was the hopeful cry of many of the guilty-but-not-that-guilty parents, trying desperately to let themselves off the hook. "No, it doesn’t." was my not-too-well-received answer. Genes are merely switches inside of us, of which we have many. It takes chronic assaults, often subtle to the untrained or disinclined eye, to turn on a gene for mental illness, or physical diseases, for that matter. While children are not at all born as "blank slates," the "nature-versus-nurture" debate will only be resoved when we realize that it is both.
What has any of this got to do with our unconscionable infant mortality rate? Everything, because as long as we let doctors, pharmocologists and politicians tell us what we want to hear, instead of learning what need to know to help our children, and challenging ourselves in the ways that make us most uncomfortable, our children will suffer.
Disagree? Blog me at: http://fullpermissionliving.blogspot.com
As I was saying… here’s a little addition to my “missive from today’s Huffington Post by Bonnie Fuller:
“Once again, Britney has succeeded in a mission that, though unintended, is actually providing great relief to millions and millions of women across North America — and I’m one of those women. It’s not that I and women like me don’t care about the plight of little Sean Preston and Jayden James. We do. Obsessively so. And we’re relieved that the unlikely dad of the year, K-Fed, has primary custody.
Nevertheless, every time that our girl Brit cluelessly tries to whitestrip her toddler’s teeth instead of brushing them or runs a red light with the court-appointed monitor and her two sons all strapped in her car, working moms across the continent can set back our own personal guilt-meters about our mothering skills.
Yes, we may feed our kids pizza for dinner, miss mid-week soccer matches and fake that we actually baked brownies for the school fundraiser.
But we have never, no never, used our kids as paparazzi bait — and we have practically taken college-level courses to make sure we strapped our babies into their car seats correctly. We even installed the car seats facing the right direction in the first place.”