Where I disagree is that I think the two are inverses of each other. You may go through school and not be learned, but when a prerequisite for a job is a bachelor's degree, the guy who schlepped his way through a C-average matriculation is going to get a foot in the door and the guy who worked full time and went to night school and still made the dean's list every term, but his loan money dried up with six classes still to go, is not even going to get a call back. Why? No degree. Degree required.Dastardly said:
The disconnect goes both ways: you can be one without the other. My point is that the person holding the diploma will get the nod over the person who does not. In an experiential task like parenting, the one who has the kid is going to get the nod over the one who does not. Right or wrong, these kind of things can be prejudged in advance of any effort to assess competency.
Where I disagree here is that children are so highly individual that, while clinical methods can give insight on a normal range, real-world results don't shy away from defying that norm. Even with my own two boys, ages 3 and 2, there are stark differences emerging in their personalities and in the way they absorb and process information.
The elder has a very active imagination and will pretend to be any number of things he saw on TV or read in a book or played in a game. Any long slender object to him is immediately a sword because he can play Wii Sports. Some may see that as a downside (GAMES CAUSE VIOLZENZ!!11!) but because he absorbed it from Wii Sports, his view of swordplay is that it ends when someone falls into the water with a splash and bubbles, which he recreates in great detail. He doesn't associate any harm with his actions, just like children will chase each other around and rough-house without doing any actual fighting.
By contrast, the younger tends to ape what the older is doing, even when he doesn't understand exactly what he's doing. The older will say "look, daddy, I'm a caterpillar!" and the younger will smile and laugh as he squirms on the ground cause that's what brother is doing. But left to his own devices, I see him exploring how objects work and interact with each other spatially. At the pool this week, a floaty ring fell into the pool and started to drift away from the edge. The 2yo took a long noodle and used it to hook the ring and pull it back to the edge where he could reach it safely. I'm not sure that would even have occurred to the 3yo.
The point here is that there's not a formula that says, this is how to shape your child's development, that I can apply even to my own two boys in the house and expect the same outcome. One is always pushing pushing pushing to try new things, one kind of hangs back and takes things in quietly, then surprises everyone by surging forward in his development after some catalyst or another. A study won't tell me that, any more than it will tell me how our experience with the first can only partly inform our efforts with the second. And the fact that this knowledge can only come from the parenting experience itself, because it is the only source of reliable data regarding how THIS CHILD learns and grows, is why I balk at the notion that the only qualification by which a parent can claim authority is their awareness of their own reproductive instincts.
I think you meant to italicize the phrase MORE effective, not just "effective". That's kind of my point, is that not every technique has equal results because kids don't develop in a vacuum. Some of those parents may have been trying for a good length of time with no results, only to have you tell them something some other guy said three years ago, and they're still here with the same problem, so thanks for nothing. I know that on a broader note, it irks me when people recommend options I have already exhausted or are not available to me, and act like if I just do that thing, then my problem will be solved.
Again, it goes to the point that there is a whole lot of work going into parenting that never manifests itself in a classroom or comes out in conference, and for some of those people, there are probably two dozen other things they're wrestling with that are every bit as difficult, or more. Telling them "being a parent is hard work" wouldn't really endear yourself to them any more than telling them "based on the training I received which offers no specifics to your child, combined with the limited number of hours I spend with your child, I have determined that doing this will solve Johnny's little problem, and if you were actually a good parent, you'd do what I say." And I'm just saying this as the hypothetical parent who might take comments in a certain light, as well as a not-hypothetical person who often struggles to communicate his intentions clearly to other people.
Again, I view "have to have" in light of the distinction between clinical knowledge and experiential knowledge. We took marriage classes but the experience of being married has informed us more on how different life is in this state. We took pregnancy classes but again, real-life experience suggests that you could have just about anything connected with your pregnancy and as long as you're not bleeding out your ears or suffering from gestational diabetes, the doctor will tell you, oh, that's normal, don't worry about it until you start bleeding out your ears. My wife read every book she could get her hands on regarding the formative years of the child, and started panicking every time the first baby wasn't doing this at exactly this stage of his life, and wasn't eating these foods yet, but in the end, the parent adapts to the child as much as the child adapts to the parent. Learning is part of the teaching process in the home. And that is why I push parenting pretty much entirely into the realm of the experiential. Being a parent IS the required experience, and it can only come post facto.
This is where the mildly-libertarian conservative in me comes out and agrees that schools shouldn't be doing all this stuff in the first place, but the nanny state that's being built in America is putting you into a situation that neither you nor I think is appropriate to your job. But the individuals are abdicating their families, the families are abdicating their churches, and the essential result of the domino effect is that a society that takes care of its own is being dismantled, both by apathy, and by an interventionist government that claims the power to step in and do the stuff that's not getting done otherwise.
This is why social conservatives (rightly?) consider the family unit the backbone of a healthy society. A family is a micro-community of people working together to build a home, and a church (in a traditional sense) is a community of families working together to build a neighborhood, and a city is a community of, well, communities working together,and so on and so forth. It's a series of concentric circles where interaction within the family informs interaction within a community and the sense of social responsibility that allows people to hold their own city, state, nation together. Now we have, what? Some federal subsidized after-school program of questionable effectiveness that you don't want any more than I do.
This is the founding principle of bottom-up governance, but our nation has been drifting more and more towards centralized and especially executive power, and governing from the top down. I'll not debate the chicken or the egg here, but there's a correlation between abdication of responsibility and degradation of personal liberties, and I'm not comfortable with either, though the (to me, fatalistic) argument is that hey, people are not going to do this, so there's no other choice but to exclude the individual from this or that process.
And I'm saying that the parenting aspect is to you a more visible aspect of a broader picture where the people you made examples of are leeching off society on all fronts and having the same negative impact all the way around. I hope it goes without saying that I don't favor extermination, or jailing people just for being poor, but I will go farther than saying a drug dealer shouldn't have kids, to say that a drug dealer should not be tolerated by society in the first place, kid or no.
I'd be interested to hear the reactions of a few parents when you tell them that becoming and being a parent doesn't cost anything. I'll spare you mine. But noting the number of people here who are not shy about crucifying a parent for taking their child to McDonald's AT ALL, much less every day, I'd say a lot of parents find themselves in a constant state of social assessment, and get to experience all the "joy" of feedback on why they're not fit to raise a goldfish.
If being white were an experiential skill and not a genetically-derived melanin level, I might agree with your analogy.
