Flahed out

I’m pissed off. Very pissed off. I’ve just been reading an article on teenage drinking on the Irish Independent website. As is fashionable at the moment in some unimaginative elements of the Irish press, all of our problems are blamed on alcohol. Never mind that it was much less of a problem before the advent of “convenience parenting”.

Convenience parenting is a term I coined this morning to describe the phenomenon of irresponsible parents who seem to think it’s a good idea to dump their children in front of the television or computer, and forget about them until meal times. Listen… if you don’t have time to bring up a child properly DON’T BLOODY WELL HAVE CHILDREN!!!

Bringing up children responsibly means spending time with them, teaching them right from wrong, encouraging them to spend time outdoors with friends, engaged in sports or other forms of social activities. Children from a young age tend follow their parents example. Would you like to see your child turn into a lager-lout who spends all his/her time in front of television watching the latest soccer match? Or would you prefer that he/she is out playing football, hurling, camogie, rugby (or any number of other sports) with friends? Or engaging in volunteer activities?

Yes, alcohol is problem. Alcoholism is nothing to be scoffed at. But alcohol is NOT the reason for teenage violence, teenage rape and other aberrant behaviour. Let’s grow up, stop blaming the latest fashionable scapegoat for our problems and look at our own individual lifestyles. Or don’t you care enough about your child’s future?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 at 6:30 am and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.