Tag Archives: world

Adjust the kid to the world

In most cultures I know, a kid is born into a society that is set up a certain way and must adjust to it and respect its rules. In kid-obsessed America, in turn, the world is adjusted to the kid with all the disastrous consequences.

In respectful societies, politeness is required from everyone, no exception. Children, from the youngest ages, are taught and trained the rules of polite behavior in the society. Wherever they are, they must adjust to the customs and rules in force in that society. When, for example, a kid is taken shopping, it must respect other customers. There is no running wild, yelling, screaming, or bumping into people allowed. Any unacceptable behavior would be curbed and punished by a parent, a relative, or an older kid, and in these rare cases of parental failure, the disruptive kid would be removed by the staff, to an immense shame to the parent.

The same applies to public transportation, street, theater, cinema, philharmonics, opera, museums, and a plethora of other culture-related places. The same applies as well to cafes, restaurants, other people’s homes when visiting them, parties, gatherings, waiting rooms, and many more. All of these places have their rules that apply to both adults and kids the exact same way. When yelling is forbidden or inappropriate, it applies to adults and children alike. When sticking one’s snotty finger into a cake is a serious faux pas, neither an adult nor a kid should do it. If holding silverware wrongly is bad manners, there is no exception for kids. When a child is too young to be physically able to comply with certain rules, it should not be taken to a place where these particular rules are in force. Too young to eat politely? It should not be fed publicly. The vast majority of children in respectful societies are able to comply with all the rules of politeness at a much younger age than their American counterparts.

In kid-obsessed America, people fail to adjust the kids to the world. They adjust the world to the kids instead. The results are deplorable. They do not teach children how to behave politely in public places or in other people’s homes. They do not require polite behavior either. Instead, they adjust the places to the kid. Certain businesses are the best examples.

I was shocked when I entered a car dealership in New Jersey to see a huge playground right in the middle of the building’s large open space, with no soundproof walls, actually, with no walls at all. There were kids there making outrageous noise and their parents doing nothing about it. To make it worse, the place was situated right next to the employees’ cubicles. I was appalled to observe how disrespectful it is of a business to put up a facility that encourages disruptive behavior and to expose customers to it. However, to expose office employees who cannot leave like offended customers can, and make them work in these conditions is much more disrespectful. They have to think, focus, write, and answer phone calls in this atrocious noise environment. It is very unprofessional to neglect the customers, the employees, and adjust the business to the rude kids’ whims. The kids should be adjusted to the situation that requires respect for the customers and for the people working there. They should be required to stand still and quiet next to the parents in respect of other people, or be removed immediately.

I saw the same idea in many banks, in many locations, distant from each other, which leads me to believe that it takes place all over the country. The only difference was that the playgrounds in the banks were smaller. Regardless of the size, however, the behavior they encourage is unacceptable for a place like a bank. Both customers and employees have to focus when thinking about money transactions, listening to or giving financial advice or reading an agreement they are about to sign. It is highly disrespectful of a bank to adjust its premises to rude, disruptive kids while it should respectfully serve the customers and require the parents to adjust the kids to the world, in this case to the purposes banks exist for. It is also shocking that the customers brainwashed by the kid-obsessed culture do not protest and do not require order to be imposed.

Play areas with toys exist also in waiting rooms in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms. This is even more unacceptable than placing them in businesses like car dealerships and banks for a simple reason: sick people go there. Wherever sick people are, silence should be strictly required and enforced. It is unacceptable to encourage kids to yell and scream in medical facilities where people are in pain, and the play areas certainly encourage this kind of rude behavior because it is a given that American kids are not trained to play respectfully, i.e. quietly. More than anywhere else, the kids should be adjusted to the world they are brought to in such places. They should be taught not only basic respect but also compassion for suffering people.

The idea of playgrounds in bookstores is equally appalling, although for a different reason than the same idea in hospitals. Bookstores as well as libraries are places that by definition should cherish an intellectual atmosphere, silence, and reflection that is associated with books. They should require respect for reading and knowledge and instill this respect in the younger generations at the earliest age possible. Silence should be strictly enforced, which applies to both adults and kids. All kids should be adjusted to the rules that for generations applied to bookstores and libraries and unconditionally required all people to be quiet and respectful in the facilities. Playground type structures that encourage rude, noisy behavior should never be placed in venues associated with knowledge and reading.

Kid-obsessed Americans have this ridiculous idea that a kid should be kept entertained in public places. This is wrong because in this kid-worshiping society kids’ entertainment is always associated with making outrageous noise. Kids should be above all taught, trained, and required to respect. A respectful kid is able to stand or sit (if there are no adults standing) still and quiet in a waiting room, a bank, or a bookstore for as long as the parents require and need to do their business. There is nothing wrong in bringing a book or a quiet toy, but the emphasis should be put on proper training that teaches the kids to stay respectfully still and quiet in public places regardless of having any entertainment. Moreover, the above examples clearly show that having entertainment for kids does not lead to their respectful behavior. To the contrary, it leads to disrespect and unacceptable levels of noise in places where silence should be a rule.

It is different in Europe, where places like restaurants, gyms, and beauty salons with playgrounds exist. These, unlike the businesses in America, are geared and marketed towards people with kids, which is what distinguishes them from other restaurants, gyms, and beauty salons marketed to the general public. These businesses found their niche and cater to a certain clientele, providing additional services, i.e. babysitting in a separate room while the parents are having an adult conversation over dinner, are exercising or having their manicure or hair done. These places clearly advertise their goal and services, and it is impossible to confuse them with general ones. Catering to people with kids does not mean that kids can be rude and wild. I know a case of kids being removed from a restaurant for people with kids for acting as rudely as an average American child. They were adjusted to the world and removed for violating the rules of politeness.

People should never adjust to kids on public transportation. They should never give up their seats for a kid (unless the kid is disabled). The kids should be adjusted to the world which requires respect for adults, especially the elderly, and give up their seats for adults. Passengers should strictly request the kid to stand up or for the parent to remove it from a seat whenever there is not enough space for adults. If parents want to bring kids on public transportation, they must adjust them to the world.

Drivers should never be required to watch particularly for kids released wildly on roads just because their parents are too lazy to supervise or train them. The kids should be adjusted to the world in which roads are for vehicles, and they should either watch for cars approaching or stay within the parents’ property. Most societies in the world are set up this way and only in kid-obsessed America signs “Caution: Children at Play” exist as proof that Americans adjust the world to the kids.

The kids should be adjusted to the world and strictly be required to respect the rules. The world should not be adjusted to the kids and by no means should it be adjusted to their rudeness, disrespect, and lack of manners. Kids adjusted to the world grow up to be polite

adults as one must never forget that ill-mannered kids (the ones to whom the world was adjusted) grow up to be ill-mannered, entitled adults. Customers should not hesitate to require to impose order and remove rude kids. They should also not be shy and boycott the businesses that adjust to kids’ rudeness. They then should inform the manager or CEO why the company lost their business. There is nothing that gets the business’ attention better than loss of money other than bad publicity, which usually also results in loss of money.

The unconditional love myth

Childfree people in America often get nagged by those with kids about unconditional love. People who have kids imply in a very intrusive way that if their interlocutors choose not to have a kid, nobody will love them unconditionally. “Who will love you unconditionally?” or “You will never know what unconditional love is” it goes. But do American parents really experience unconditional love from their kids? Their behavior shows that they not only do not, but the kids’ love, if any, is strongly conditioned by bribes and concessions from their parents.

Seeing American parents kowtowing to their kids throws a shadow of doubt on their unconditional love statements. Do they really believe it, in spite of their behavior that proves the contrary? If so, they must be really naive. Do they not see that what they call “unconditional love” actually depends on constant bribing and catering to the kid?

It is very easy to observe anywhere in public places that American parents are scared that their kids will not love or even like them. They do not make any demands for proper and respectful behavior for fear that their precious snowflake will not like it and, in turn, not like the parent who made the demand. They beg the kid instead of giving clear and strict orders and put themselves at the mercy of the spoiled, bratty kid. “Please, please, would you please, you are hurting my feelings, please do not scream this much, do not hurt my feelings, please, please, please” is their way of telling a two or three year old to stop ear-piercing screaming in a public place where silence is a standard required behavior. “Keep quiet”, “stop it” or “quiet, right now!” with a strict, serious face (and an immediate smile after the kid complies) is enough to get a normal, well-trained kid to comply, and this is what millions of people all around the world successfully do. However, Americans not only lack those skills, they are also too insecure and have a constant need to kowtow to the kid for fear it will not love them. So, where is the unconditional love?

American parents do not require the kid to eat what they decide is good for it but give it too many choices, often unhealthy, and let the kid that is too young to make such decisions eat whatever it wants, just because it wants to. Wherever food is served, it is easy to notice frequent scenes of this kind. I also remember an article published quite a few years ago about a woman from California (actually occurred before the more recent case in San Francisco) who started an action to ban within the whole town a fast food meal choice that included a toy just because her two year old kid was harassing her (her own term) to buy it. This behavior is not only a terrible lack of child-rearing skills and the spine to say “no”, but also the mother’s insecurity that the kid will not love her. So, is this the unconditional love?

Americans stuff their kids’ mouths with candy bribes whenever they can and at a single kid’s whim. They fulfill kids’ orders obediently and immediately. They buy tons of toys just because the deity kid requested them, played with them for a short time, and after dumping them in a far corner to be forgotten, made requests for new ones that the insecure parents obediently bought. Even worse, if the parents buy a toy the king or queen does not like, they get yelled at, thrown insults at, and jump into the car to get the right one, terrified that the little dictator will not like them. Companies play marketing tricks on parents’ insecurity by offering more and more toys and tons of plastic add up in landfills, ruining our common heritage – the environment – just because someone who has a kid does not want to say “no”. So, where is the kid that loves unconditionally?

Love normally includes respect. American kids, however, disrespect their parents severely, and the parents let them do it terrified that they may not get “unconditional” love if they bring the kid to order. I heard kids, starting at a very young age, disrespect parents in public places with unmentionable insults, “stupid” being the lightest of them. I have heard young kids talk back to their parents in such a shameless and aggressive way that a normal parent in any other culture would react immediately with proper punishment. I have read outrageous stories of very young kids abusing their parents verbally and physically (no, not teens with criminal backgrounds, but preschool and early elementary school kids of middle and upper middle class parents), with parents doing nothing to counteract it, just complaining about it. I was appalled to see kids actually beat their parents in public places with no reaction on the adults’ side. So, does unconditional love really involve verbal and physical abuse?

In so many societies around the world, parents teach and train their kids strictly. They make demands and requests, they make the kids work, they punish the kids for any attempt of disobedience and disrespect, they are never at kids’ whim, to not kowtow to them, do not obey kids’ orders (kids would never dare to give orders to adults, they may only kindly ask), they would never let a kid talk back to them, not to mention a kid hitting an adult. Those kids do not have expensive toys and happily rely on what they invent to play with. They do not have designer clothes, some of them barely have any hand-me-down clothes at all. They do not get candy bribes, extracurricular classes, or expensive vehicles with permanently unemployed mothers to drive the kids.

Yet, these kids are happy, polite, and respectful. They love and obey their parents, respect them and, in the lack of reliable social security systems, take good care of them when they get old (nursing homes in these societies are scarce or nonexistent). It is a result of parents’ wisdom in loving and disciplining the kids accordingly. It is the child rearing skills passed on from generation to generation, leaned by living one’s life in a participating society, without succumbing to any fads of “parenting styles” but also the confidence that results from these skills. These parents are not insecure or terrified that their kids will not like them. They are sure of their kids’ unconditional love which indeed has no conditions or requirements just as their parents and grandparents were sure and confident.

Love is not about bribing. If a bribe is needed to get something, it is corruption, not love, and by no means is it unconditional. Worshiping and bribing kids, putting them on a pedestal as the center of the universe, and kowtowing to them is harmful for both the kids and the society as a whole. It spoils the kids, makes them extremely rude, self-centered, and entitled. Just look around, this deplorable result is clearly visible (and especially audible) in all sorts of public places. Kids must be disciplined wisely, by responsible, confident adults not terrified or insecure that the kid will not like them. The unconditional love will follow as a result of the proper child rearing process.

Why are Americans unable to raise children?

Americans totally fail to raise their children. This is a fact that can be easily verified by spending a few minutes in any public place in America. Their kids are extremely rude, noisy, entitled, self-centered, and very unsanitary. These characteristics are so common that many people who have never lived in other cultures and were not exposed to polite, well raised children nor to a successful child-rearing process think that they are inherent to all children. No, they are not. They are a result of a parental failure and the easiest way to corroborate it is to spend some time in those societies that yield polite and respectful kids, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, and compare.

In most societies around the world, people grow up in overcrowded housing developments exposed to relatives’ and neighbors’ kids every day and participate in raising them every day, just as their parents and grandparents once did. As kids are omnipresent, they interact with them a lot while still being kids themselves, they watch the adults discipline and punish younger children and repeat their actions in similar circumstances, learning this way how to raise them. They know when to discipline and punish a child and how: they also know how and at what occasion to praise it. They know what the desirable standard of behavior is as they were brought up to this standard themselves, and they see younger children being consistently brought up to the same standard. They know what behavior is unacceptable as they were disciplined and punished for this behavior and they see younger children being consistently disciplined and punished for exactly the same.

In these societies there are no “parenting styles”, “parenting experts”, or “parenting classes”. People learn all child-related skills while simply living their lives, and usually they learn it before puberty. They do not over-intellectualize the child-rearing process and apply what they have learned while participating in raising other “village” children. Yes, it does take a village, and in village-like, participating societies people have child-rearing skills and lots of experience before they actually have a child of their own.

American kids grow up in the luxury of separate homes, with their parents only, and are deprived of this valuable experience. They are not exposed to child-rearing processes, and the few of them who have much younger siblings usually witness their parent’s struggle and fail. Their contact with children is limited to occasional part-time babysitting in high school, or on holiday visits to their relatives. They are completely deprived of the valuable lesson of witnessing, participating in, and learning from a successful raising process. They start learning how to raise a child only when they have their own, and so often fail terribly.

As if this was not enough, they see outrageous children’s behavior in public places and entitled parents’ hostile behavior defending their offspring’s “right” to be rude being common that a pattern appears in their minds that this is normal, as this is the only way of dealing with kids they can observe. They witness the disregard and contempt Americans have for a participating society without being aware that rejecting the participation leads to failure in raising kids.

When their own children come into this world, they are lost. They resort to “how to” manuals of doubtful quality written by self-proclaimed “experts” who never participated in raising children except for their own and failed, and who never lived in or even visited a society with polite and respectful children. They resort to “specialists” in “child development” or “child psychology” spawned by universities after a few years of theoretical studies, who run their coaching sessions or write their books based on studies with a small sample group instead of lifelong experience in the cultures successful in child-rearing. They spend a lot of money on “parenting classes” and books or magazines of doubtful quality that are designed or written by theoreticians presenting latest fads of “parenting styles” that change every time the wind blows. By the way, did someone ever check how much all that “parenting style” market is worth? I bet there is huge money behind it. The results of following it are deplorable – American kids, extremely rude, selfish, and entitlement-minded are totally unable to live in a society and to respect the society they live in.

American parents should learn from the societies in which kids are really polite and respectful, like the sub-Saharan African ones, but instead, they dismiss these societies with the contemptuous labels of “poor” or “primitive”. Why reinvent the wheel? The wheel is already there, passed from generation to generation, in a consistent, unchanged form and yielding great results. The American attempts to design the child raising wheel, meanwhile fail and become farther and farther from the desired one, resembling a square rather than a wheel at this moment.

American parents need to wake up, rethink their behavior, and start learning from successful societies instead of learning from “experts” of doubtful credentials who earn a lot of money prescribing recipes for a parental disaster.

The big “be fruitful and multiply” manipulation

When people announce that they do not want to have children, they are often confronted with a statement: but God said “Be fruitful and multiply”. I am pretty sure many childfree Christians were exposed to this problem whether hearing this phrase as a reproach made by someone else or even considering by themselves if their choice is right in the light of their God while remembering only this short part of it.

People who use the phrase “Be fruitful and multiply” to scold or undermine someone else’s reproductive choices always omit its further part. Actually, the exact phrase of Genesis 1:28 reads as follows: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Fill the earth. Subdue it. Have dominion. Sounds familiar?

There seems to be little consensus today regarding when exactly was Genesis written. The Book of Genesis itself does not state it either. Its authorship is arguable. Assuming, however, that Moses was the author, the date of composition for the Book of Genesis would have to be between 1446 B.C. (the date of the Exodus) and 1406 B.C. (the death of Moses), according to Bible.org.

The data on world population in 2000 B.C. varies between 27 million and 35 million, while for 1000 B.C. it is estimated to have been about 50 million. Let’s assume that the world population in 1400s when Genesis was written was approximately the same as the current population of California (just above 38 million as of 2012), or Argentina, Algeria, Poland or Sudan, eventually half of the population of today’s Egypt, Germany, or Iran.

According to the United Nations (as of June 13, 2013), current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to reach 8.1 billion in 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. These figures are based on the so called “medium variant” projection, which assumes a substantial decline in fertility rates. According to the “high variant” projection, however, the world population in 2050 could be 10.9 billion.

When the world population was around 40 million, the calling “be fruitful and multiply” could not have done much harm and was even justified. However, using the phrase in today’s planet that carries over 7 billion souls and intentionally leaving the rest of it  omitted, prevents the person on the receiving end from realizing that this part of God’s plan (whether you believe in God or not) has been exceeded by way too much. The world is overpopulated and humans have too much dominion over the other creatures and their environments. If anything, the complete phrase should lead people to ponder whether they have overachieved this plan and need to modify their behaviors to sustain life on the planet for many future years.

As of 2013, we face the problems of deforestation, CO2 emissions, global warming, unsustainable agriculture, water and air pollution, resource depletion, species extinction, and other serious environmental issues resulting from overpopulation and environmentally irresponsible behavior.

There is also a personal level to this problem: following the calling with its second part omitted may make some people unhappy – these people that did not want to have child, but gave in to the peer pressure of the “be fruitful and multiply” manipulative advocates. On the global level, however, it means a further serious devastation of the already devastated environment.

When Americans hear “overpopulation” in relation to “environmental problems”, they point their blaming fingers at the developing countries, especially African ones, where the birth rates are higher. Very few of them would consider that in their kid-obsessed country fewer, but extremely spoiled kids do more harm to the environment than a larger number of African children raised in modest conditions. In child-worshiping America people buy tons of plastic toys, disposable diapers, use a lot of fuel to drive the kids in monster-size SUVs, waste the food their fussy kid does not eat, buy brand new clothing, while in developing countries there is little waste, kids have to be creative in inventing their toys and ways of playing, they recycle clothes, walk, do not waste food and are still happy and respectful. This does not mean that the birth rate should continue being this high, but it is not only the developing world with multiple children per couple that is to blame for environmental problems. Child-related overconsumption in America is worse in this regard.

Today, instead of “be fruitful and multiply”, the calling for all, Christians or not, should be: Be responsible and use birth control, stop cutting down rainforests, lower CO2 emissions, stop mass scale plastic manufacturing, and biodiversity depletion, have respect for the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and for the trees of the Amazon, and for heaven’s sake, stop the kid-related overconsumption. The Earth is filled to the limits, subdued way too much, and human dominion has done a lot of harm.