If you're a good parent, you're doing society serious harm. To ensure equity, don't read to your children, don't speak to your children, keep your child's expectations low. Shame on anyone who tries to give their child an edge in life. That's to the OP, I'll stop reading to my children and offering them encouragement. I'll just plop them in front of a t.v. For the good of society, of course.
Clearly your parents were excellent citizens, and severely neglected to teach you how to reason and think critically, if that's what you take from the OP.
If you have time to watch t.v., you have time to read to your kids. Children's books? They're like a dollar at the thrift store. Not encouraging your children? WTF is wrong with you? Don't blame others for your own failing.
I understand the sentiment. I really do.
I didn't spend a long time working in a program that helped pre-schoolchildren and families in poverty but some things really stunned me.
Our program was housed in a school building. Like other school programs, we had a parents' night and a very good number of the parents turned up. What really, really knocked me on my heels was how uncomfortable those parents felt. Not because they were trying to sit in too tiny chairs and desks but simply to be in a school. In their own school days and before, they had gotten the message loud and clear: school wasn't for them. It was a place where they felt uncomfortable, unwelcome. Dumb. Hopeless. Like life had given up on them 3 generations back.
It was asking so much of them to be brave enough to hope for more for their children. Because when you give someone hope, you also open up the risk of failure. Most of the parents had failed so much for so long and their parents and grandparents before them. School was not for the likes of them. They hoped they'd get one of the factory jobs and that their kids would someday because it was semi-steady work, and most years, there might be a raise: $0.05/hr. I'm not making that up. But usually the company gave out turkeys at Thanksgiving and a ham at Christmas. If they didn't, usually churches did. It really hurt to have to have a charity pick out their kids' Christmas gifts.
A lot of the parents couldn't read. Or couldn't read well enough to feel comfortable reading to their kids. Books were gateways to worlds and worlds and worlds to me from the time I can remember. To these parents: books were marks of failure.
So, it's easy to say: read to your kids and find them books at the library and the dollar store if you can read and spare a dollar now and then. It's easy to say: feed your kids nutritious food if you can afford nutritious food. If you know what nutritious food looks like, tastes like. How to prepare it so that it is still nutritious. If your tastes have not been so molded to sugar and fat and starch before you were 5 that fruits and vegetables aren't just rich people food but taste funny, too.
The program I worked in worked with the entire family and very specifically targeted very basics: nutrition, literacy for parents and children, how to access health care services and educational services for your kid. I think everybody posting here is at least middle class. Those skills and expectations are like breathing to the middle class or working class. They are almost beyond imagination to parents beat down by poverty, poverty wages when they can get them. Chronic illness. Chronic mental illness. A couple of the parents were mildly developmentally delayed. Their kids were presumed to be, as well, but I didn't think so. I certainly saw kids every bit as smart and as creative and as well behaved as I did in the very best classroom in the very best school I ever walked into. And kids who would probably struggle in school. I saw parents who were terrific: engaged, hoping for the best for their kids and equipped mentally and physically to weather this economic hardship and get their kids a better life. And parents who wanted so badly to be able to do that for their kid but nobody in their family had made it yet so.....how could they expect more. School was not for them. And of course some bad, selfish, self indulgent parents who had various boyfriends and girlfriends and drugs/alcohol in the house and fights and ended up in the newspaper--front page, a couple of them. Not different than the rich parents, except the rich ones kept their messes out of the local papers.
Don't judge. People do their best, most of them. Some just look at the things other kids' families can afford and they see the tvs and the video games and smart phones and fancy shoes, etc. Those are attainable. College? Hell, finishing high school is a dream for some of them.
Don't judge. Extend a hand. Could be someday you will be the one in need.
