Passive Parenting

Passive parenting... a critique of a Kelsey Grammer poem.

Don't take offense, but it is this kind of understanding of the role of the parent that is wrong with the liberal progressive movement in our culture. It has profoundly affected individual perceptions on moral behavior and natural truth.

The reticence of the Liberal left to make moral distinctions, set strict behavioral limits, and impart traditional wisdom in the way of orthodox values and moral principles, leads children to ambiguity.

We are not instinctually good animals. Left to instincts, we would behave with moral repugnance. It is through the principles in Jewish and Christian Gospel that we as man are able to sustain and extend civilized society.

Quite to the contrary, children need the imposition of moral leaders (preferentially parents) and guidance in making specific life choices that will be beneficial, or atleast not harmful to further development.

A parent should not be a passive bystander, available only for those instances where a child is seeking comfort for a poor and undirected decision, but an active participant and advocate for a course of action that will ultimately lead to righteous and moral behavior.

Kelsey, and people like him - based on the errant theories of enlightenment philosophers like Jean Jacques Rousseau and influential psychologists like Dr. Sigmund Freud and Dr. Benjamin Spock - believe that a child should be left alone to develop their own individual ideas and understanding of the world based on some genetic or inherent character. The only inherent character a child has is that of the Holy Ghost which resides in his soul, but if the child is not coached on how to be attentive to its promptings, the child will fail to make valuable behavioral and moral decisions.

Kelsey would rather, based on this poem, leave it up to his daughters 'innate character' to combat the influence of demoralizing television programming, gangster fashion and Ebonics, and the liberal socialist culture of the public school system.

The idea that a child develops its character primarily from the inside out is ridiculous. A child seeks guidance and tutelage from birth. It requires feedback from its environment to learn and grow and if one as parent is not providing such, the child will find that feedback somewhere else. In this society of violence, sexual explicitness, strong cultures of drug use and disrespect for authority, sorry, I would choose to hold a little influence over my Childs development.

...But that's just me, the fundamentalist Christian that I am.

Individualism doesn't come from filling the human brain with ideas, notions, and options without any underlying property or principle which discerns a common and beneficent goal suitable for both the individual and society.

It comes as the combined understanding of such in a uniform and cohesive ideology reflective of successful societal prescriptions, historical contexts, and individual standards, and in the ability to make the distinctions that further advance society's cooperative progress.