Tag Archives: Parenting

News

MUST-READ: How government-run day care impacts families

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Using your money to limit your choices

Here’s a good editorial from Andrea Mrozek in the Ottawa Citizen, explaining how the bloated Liberal government that I blogged about recently is using a “public option” to stamp out stay-at-home moms and private child care options.

Excerpt:

Lisa MacLeod, MPP for Nepean-Carleton, found out the hard way that Ontario’s new all-day kindergarten will be somewhat less flexible than families were led to believe.

Her five-year-old was denied the opportunity to remain in half-day programming, because the school was chosen for full-day kindergarten. Alarming, yes, but not surprising. Province-wide, taxpayer-funded early learning programs spell the end of choice in child care.

You may remember Lisa MacLeod from this post in which I talked about her defending free speech in Canada.

More from the editorial:

[…]So how exactly is the Ontario Ministry of Education legislating choice out of existence?

For starters, simply by introducing a monolithic taxpayer funded plan — legitimate and regulated child care providers can’t compete. When the government subsidizes a service, it means others are put out of business.

All-day kindergarten also takes five-year-olds out of existing centres. These children are a day-care’s bread and butter. Care of five-year-olds is substantially cheaper than infant care, which runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Since no child-care centre could possibly charge parents the true infant price, they have balanced their businesses by charging less than the real cost for younger kids and more for older ones. The older ones who will now enter the “free” state centres.

Families with a spouse who stays home are, as usual, totally pooched. Their taxes will rise for a service they don’t ever choose to use.

And she concludes:

Families understand budgets in a manner that governments clearly do not. When your money runs out, you understand that it’s not the time to book a vacation or add a latté a day. But in the last budget, McGuinty revealed a deficit of $19.7 billion and introduced new program funding of a billion dollars over five years for all-day kindergarten. Let the deficit rise, especially considering the real cost of all-day kindergarten should see that billion dollars almost double for one year alone.

In the end, the government will be the monopoly provider, giving you one solo choice. They don’t delicately tailor programs to meet personal needs. The Disneyland imagery of a better world courtesy of universal early learning programs has got to go — it’s not true in the research, and it’s not true in the reality on the ground. The truth is that government is substantially curtailing your choices while spending your money like a drunken sailor, for little to no proven returns.

They call that “equality”. Everyone has the same outcome, regardless of their personal choices.

You can find the PDF of her editorial at the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada’s web site.

Commentary

Parents need to take reponsibility for their children’s prosperity

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Here’s a post from Caffeinated Thoughts. It’s about parenting, faith and prosperity.

Excerpt:

It is my job, as a parent, to raise and protect the children that God has given me. It goes beyond the obvious needs of food, clothing and shelter and into an even greater need of “Train(ing) a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6.  Raising a child involves love, discipline, education and looking out for their needs now, as it will affect them when they are old. If parents in America only provide for a child’s physical needs, forgetting to nurture the whole child, then American parents have done nothing more than what a wild animal does for its offspring. My work as a parent goes well beyond the obvious and must be intentional in training, raising, and nurturing them into moral, ethical and God-fearing adults who will in turn also raise a generation who live and do likewise.

I must also fight for the ethical and moral rights of my children in the political arena, as they are unable to do so for themselves. As [Thomas] Paine stated, “We ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.” He was looking at his posterity realizing that the condition of the country in which they lived needed a drastic overhaul and unless the adults stepped up and took the initiative, the children would suffer for it.

I like this post because it mentions protecting children’s relationships with God as well as their future economic well-being. I think that most people look at their children and think that their faith will be fine, and that their standard of living will as good as the parent’s, or better. But if we want to give those good things to our children, we need to be careful about how we teach them and how we vote. We can’t just “hope for the best” and expect things to work out – 80% of the young people who attend church through high school fall away from their faith. And the unemployment rate for young people today is over 50%.

Podcasts

Are two mommies as good for a child as a biological mother and father?

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Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She protects men and children

Another podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. This one is a must-hear for men, especially men who feel threatened, unappreciated and fearful about the way that their importance is minimized by the culture.

The MP3 file is here. (11 minutes)

Topics:

  • A new study claims that two women are better for a child than a opposite-sex parents
  • The author of the study thinks that mothers and fathers are interchangeable
  • She doesn’t think that a biological mom and dad are better for children
  • The headlines claimed that two moms are better
  • The research seems to argue that heterosexual fathers are worse for children than mothers
  • The study claims that children benefit when there are no heterosexual men in the home
  • The study claims that gay men are better parents than heterosexual men
  • The study argues that gender roles are a bad thing
  • The goal of these scholars is to abolish distinctions and roles based on sex
  • Th study implies that heterosexual men can be marginalized and excluded from the family
  • This is made worse when courts are able to declare who is a parent and who isn’t

A caller to the show talks about how damaging fatherlessness is for male and female children, too. She refers to what we can see today in the inner city where fathers in the home have been replaced by checks from the government. Dr. Morse mentions that this is also occurring across all races among the lower income classes in the UK. She is concerned about the damage that can result if men lose their traditional role in society, and in the family.

Dr. Morse also wrote an article with more details here (this is mentioned in the podcast).

Excerpt:

Instead allow me a few quotes, from “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” to illustrate my point that fatherhood itself is at stake in the same sex parenting debate.

[…]“If contemporary mothering and fathering seem to be converging,… research shows that sizable average differences remain that consistently favor women, inside or outside of marriage.”

See what I mean? Men and women are identical, except women are better.

“Gender nonconformity” used to be considered a negative trait, something, which if found, provided an argument against same sex parenting. But listen to Stacey and Biblarz turn “gender flexibility” into a positive trait.

“12 year old boys in mother only families (whether lesbian or heterosexual) did not differ from sons raised by a mother and a father on masculinity scales but scored over a standard deviation higher on femininity scales. Thus growing up without a father did not impede masculine development but enabled boys to achieve greater gender flexibility.”

“If, as we expect, future research replicates the finding that fatherless parenting fosters greater gender flexibility in boys, this represents a potential benefit. Research implies that adults with androgynous gender traits may enjoy social psychological advantages over more gender traditional peers.”

[…]The bottom line is not really that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, but that masculinity is a bad thing.

Can you imagine if the left gained power and this “research” became the basis for laws? What if these views were pushed on impressionable children in the public schools? What if people who believed things like this were nominated to high positions (let’s call them czars, say)?

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