When it comes to family, especially your own children, choosing them over material desires should be a no-brainer. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious these days parents have decided that the latest and greatest SUV and 80 inch plasma tv's are more important than their duties to their children.
America is based on consumerism...eat it up, use it up, throw it away, buy more, spend more, abuse your credit, die bankrupt and alone in a rat-infested nursing home (cuz lord knows after the way you raised your kids, they won't be changing your shitty diapers!). Having the most possessions, while more than likely having the most debt, is how we gauge wealth. We borrow more and save less. Spend spend spend!!!
If you want to live this way, and you are either single or a couple who has no intention of having children, by all means, ruin your financial future and die in squalor. I will giggle myself all the way to the bank. But if you are planning on having children in the future, do us ALL a huge favor, plan your finances first. Without taking this *critical* step as a parent, you have done your kids and the rest of society a monumental disservice. There are two reasons that children are being raised by television, video games, and daycare workers making $10 an hour...
One, you are so completely arrogant and needy and totally lacking in any parental skills, you actually believe that by having massive amounts of high-priced crap (which do nothing but keep you chained to a lifetime of debt) your kids are going to magically have this fantastic childhood that will prepare them for the demands of adulthood. You think that by filling your house with expensive, neighbor-envy-worthy items, you are showing your child how much you love him. You are a great parent who will spare no expense to ensure that he has an I-pod, cell phone, x-box, guitar hero, laptops, bicycles, motor scooters...so he knows that more than anything you LOVE him.
The reality is, your kid thinks you suck. You suck because you aren't giving him what he so desperately needs...a fucking PARENT. All of those nifty electronic toys are not going to show him how to be a man, how to succeed in his chosen profession, how to eventually grow to be a great husband and father himself. He is growing up alone, his idiot friends are his life teachers, and he has a self-indulged, expectation of entitlement attitude that makes me want to scream! He has no idea what the real world is like, he thinks that just by existing, he should have everything he damn well pleases, and has no concept of working for what you want. These horrible children have no sense of community or responsibilty toward their fellow man, and they are quite confident their shit don't stink. Thanks a lot Mom and Dad of the year...stellar job!!
I grew up with two parents. My mother stayed home until I was in first grade and then worked part time for a few years after that. My dad worked a regular 8-5 job downtown, and was home by six every night. We had rules, we had chores, we had allowances, and we had responsibility. We also had the time of our lives. I look back on my summers as a kid and I think to myself, will my children get to experience anything that kick ass?? Once school was out, summer was a never ending free-for-all on our block. (Back then, on any given block, there were at least 20 kids out at all times, and parents felt perfectly safe knowing the other moms, dads, aunts, grandparents, neighbors were keeping an eye on your kids). We would get up in the morning, have breakfast while watching the Bozo Show or whatever else wasn't the morning news, and then we threw on our clothes and headed outside. We would start off with playing some of the usual games, tag, running bases, stickball, anything that got our little bodies sweating. As more kids poured out of their houses, we would get organized. We played army, street patrol, cops, anything you could think of that involved strategic use of our block boundaries. We had water balloon and squirt gun fights (mine and my brothers' was often an old Windex bottle filled with water), we would go to the park across the alley and play space invaders, we had contests to see who could sprint the farthest, climb a tree or hop a fence the fastest. We would take the dollar our mom left us and walk to the end of the block and get sno-cones from the drug store, we raided each others houses for popsicles and kool-aid. Once we were allowed a couple extra blocks in our boundary, we rode bikes until our legs turned to mush. Summer nights were spent outside, parents gathered up on front porches, all of us counting down the minutes we had to finish up ghost in the graveyard before the sun went completely down, signaling that we would have to go inside soon. Moms and dads would start calling us in from the porch or frontroom window...we would try to negotiate just fifteen more minutes...and then it was bath and bed. We got up the next day and did it all over again. Summers seemed to stretch on for years when we were little, and there was never a lack of something to do. We were fully capable of entertaining ourselves, and we did it without any electronic device whatsoever.
As you have surmised by now, we didn't have a lot of money. We lived in an apartment, had one old ass car, my dad took the train to work, and we clipped coupons and re-used anything we possibly could. I took a lot of hand-me-downs for clothes, we got toys on birthdays and holidays, and that was about it. But none of that mattered. I look back and remember that I had a dad who was always home for dinner (imagine, everyone eating together every day!), who was always up for a game of wrestling, or playing Life for the billionth time, who always read me a book before bed, who took me to the library every Saturday and did magic tricks and face painting just for fun. I had a mom who made my lunches, and spent hours putting fifty braids in my hair so I could have 'waves', and took me to the park and pushed me on the swing and hung from the monkey bars with me, who let me do her hair and dress her up for 'dates' with my dad. I could fill a book with the amazing memories I have from my childhood, and my heart gets full whenever I think about them. I remember feeling so loved, so cared for, and so important.
My parents sacrificed a lot of things I am sure they wanted...a car that wouldn't break down on them, vacations in the summer, dinner at a restaurant that didn't have coloring pages for placemats..they sacrificed these things because family was more important. Their children were more important. It wasn't easy on the finances for my mom to stop working and stay home with us, but they managed.
Which brings me to my second reason children are being raised as self-indulgent monsters completely lacking any moral compass or compassion...women who want it ALL. They want the big house, the great car, the career, and of course, the money. They also want the husband and the children. They don't want to be saddled to the archaic stereotype that women have to be home in order to have a family. No, they can use daycare, nannies, and of course, bunches of money to take care of the kids. These fuckin women astound me. Do they not understand that it isn't about just having kids, it is about RAISING them? And the job of raising a child should be, by far, the most important and most time-consuming job there is. If you are spending 10 or 12 hours a day at work, how can you possibly be putting in the time necessary to raise your children??
I don't even give a shit if it is the mother OR the father choosing to stay home, one of them needs to keep their ass in the house and make sure they don't raise any more kids that I would like to put through a wall because they can't stop behaving like little bastards in public in the desperate hope of getting some attention from their crappy parents. If you are both career-minded individuals, and neither of you are willing to give that up, then sorry, you need to reconsider your family planning. I am so fucking sick and tired of women who think that feminism was born so they could pursue a career, squeeze out a baby, hand that baby over to someone I wouldn't pay to raise my fucking plastic fern, and then go back to their career as if their lives have not COMPLETELY CHANGED. I know plenty of guys that would be thrilled to be stay at home dads, but I also know they are not the norm. Most men still earn more, and most men don't have the desire to be the primary caregiver. If you married an idiot like that, well....that's for another time. Again, if your husband is earning more than you, perhaps you need to put your desire for a family ahead of your career goals and take off the next five or six years. The simple fact is that you can't, no matter how much you whine, have it all.
Most of us are middle-income folks, paying our bills, saving what we can. If we want a family, corners have to be cut. Perhaps it means moving into a house with a lesser mortgage, or perhaps renting. And in this ridiculous real estate market, renting is not a bad idea at all. Perhaps it means cutting out the 'extras' you take for granted...eating out, excessive shopping, gadgets you don't really need, gas-guzzling cars you can't really afford, etc. Yes, it is an adjustment, yes, it is a sacrifice. But it is for your CHILDREN! What in the world could possibly take precedence over the well-being and caring of your own flesh and blood?? If people got back to the basics, stopped over-indulging their kids with needless crap they won't even care about next year, there is no reason they couldn't be stay at home parents.
The experiences I had in my childhood are absolutely priceless...loving parents who taught me respect, discipline, compassion, the value of money, the value of earning what you want, and how to stand on my own two feet. I learned that I was more important to them than anything else in the world, and I could count on them 100% if I ever needed anything at all.
Ask any kid today if they would give up their 50" flat screen and xbox for that.
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