Consequences

In one of the courses I teach, the subject of "life choices" is a topic.

It's pretty straightforward: Good choices have good consequences. Bad choices have bad consequences.

If, for example, a child works hard in school, stays in school until he is graduated, and goes on to college or trade school, he can get a job that is rewarding both in cash and personal satisfaction. He may even become a world leader, or a great composer. But if he pays little attention to his studies, or drops out of school, he is forced into a menial, unsatisfying, dead-end job for low pay.

It's not just the occasional big choices that influence one's life; it's all of them. The student who listens in class and takes notes learns more than the one who chooses to look out the window, doodle, or pass notes.

Where you are in life today is the sum of all those choices, big and small, good and bad, that you have made.

All around us, people are making really bad choices: drug use, theft, assault, rape, murder. They do it because they do not foresee or fear the consequences of their actions.

Most of this mess results directly from poor parenting. Some parents, you see, believe that they should do everything possible to shield their children from the consequences of bad choices. Bad behavior has no bad consequences in their homes, and they do their best to see that the same is true outside their homes. They complain to the principle, or sue, if a teacher dares to assign bad consequences for bad behavior. After all, they don't want to bruise the esteem of their little darlings.

Part of that comes from parental ignorance--they don't understand that bad consquences are not necessarily spanking or degrading language. But some people do raise children to understand the choice-consequence relationship without a single spanking, and without swearing at the children, or degrading them.

Similarly, some teachers have fallen for this fallacy. Some judges and some jury members hesitate to assign bad consequences to a person found guilty.

Humans have been on the earth for tens of thousands of years (or as some believe, a little over 6,000), but a large percentage of them are making the same parenting mistakes that their ancestors did. Parenting is something that most people in every generation do. We can teach our children how to boil an egg, drive a car, grow a garden, or even make a computer. Why have so many in society been unable to get parenting right, and to pass the process on to their offspring?

The process is known, understood, and documented, but many people are not using it. Maybe it's because it takes so much effort to do it right. Bad parenting is the worst of bad choices--we all suffer the consequences.