Modern Parenting Kills Human Civilization

I was sitting in traffic the other morning, waiting for the school bus in the opposite lane to finish picking up these kids and get the hell out of the way. The bus was picking them up in front of their house. Finally, after an eternity of waiting for these simple ass kids to find a seat, the lights shut off and the bus started rolling again...for about 10 feet, before the lights came back on and picked up the kids who lived DIRECTLY NEXT DOOR.

Now, I'm not expert on kids, other than having been a child before and having known lots of people who are or have been children, so I can say that these kids, be they six or even as low as four, could have handled walking to the neighbor's house so they could reduce the number of bus stops from "absolutely unnecessary" to one. I don't know what kind of world these kids' parents think we live in, but I'm pretty sure that there's not a mine field or a botched drug deal happening in between their houses that they don't know about. If there was, I'd like to think that these kids would have been smart enough not to go over there.

See, it's bad enough that kids are getting picked up in front of their houses at all. Sure, this was a busy street, so I'll cut them some slack, but why can't all the kids on that side of the street meet in front of one kid's house? At the very least, these kids will learn a little respect for speeding cars. Now, if they learn this lesson, that's good. They'll have put the intelligence of American children back where it was 20 years ago. If they don't learn this messon, they're probably Rain Man and need those special drugs to keep them from acting out in public. You should know which one you have on your hands one or two times into this experience.

Since I was once a kid who's never been hit by a car, I think that makes me qualified to speak on the subject of what kids can and can't handle. When I was six years old, I was crossing five lane highways, so I don't understand why these kids couldn't be trusted to walk an extra 20 feet by themselves. If anything, letting kids experience a little danger is a good deterrent to the other kids. If they see one kid get hit by an 18-wheeler or mauled by a pitbull, they all fall in line. You won't even have to wait for the nightmares to stop before your problems with them playing chicken in the street or trying to take food from the neighbor's Doberman are solved. In my case, it only took one look at Bobby Joe's half-eaten rib cage before I learned that no one should own a dog hand-crafted by Satan himself and one look at the hole in O.J. Simpkins' leg where his bone broke through killed the discussion on whether or not I'd be following him off the roof.

Kids are a lot like dogs, in that dogs experience what's safe and what isn't safe by smelling it. Kids have a similar method, except they eat it or get hit by hit. If they throw it up or it leaves a pop knot on their head, they know not to try it again. And today's overly sensitive parents are taking these valuable teaching tools away from their kids. Time was, when a boy reached a certain age, his father would leave him in the woods just as the bears were waking up from hibernation. The distraught mother understood that if the boy lived, he would be a man when he hobbled back to the homestead. It's the same thing we should be doing with our kids now, except instead of facing down a bear, we should be forcing our kids to walk to the damn neighbor's house to catch the bus instead of making the bus hold up traffic for 15 minutes because you can't bear to watch your kid walk an extra 20 feet without having a nervous breakdown.

I really don't see how holding your kid's hand through everything that can possibly happen is going to help their development. Letting them walk down the street usassisted will do wonders for their realization that they're not indestructible. In their mind, they might be indestructible, but testing their theories on that subject suddenly isn't high on their list of priorities. The second degree burns on their palms will be a not-so-subtle reminder that playing in front of the oven isn't a good idea. From letting them play too close to the ant hill in the back yard to the possibility that they were almost kidnapped, these are the things that shape a kid and keep them from doing even stupider things when they get older, like stapling their nuts to their legs for money.

Of course, I'm not saying that all kids should fend for themselves as soon as they could walk, because that can only lead to an Time Magazine piece on the epidemic of kids killed by sticking forks into the electrical socket. The kids can't be blamed for that because it's not common knowledge ammonia burns, fresh out of the womb. Kids do need guidance from their parents, but these is such a thing as smothering your child. They need to learn to solve problems on their own and the only way to do that is by screwing up. Screwing up (or skinning my knees down to the white meat) is what ended a potentially disasterous skateboarding career before I could do some real damage to myself. If my parents were like today's parents, I would still believe that a fat black kid could compete at the X Games without having a YouTube-level incident. But thanks to my parents being at work when I tried skating, my unbroken ankles and I will never know if that's true.

Essentially, hurting myself brought my dreams that I could do anything crashing back down to earth, leaving the skin from my knees on that fresh asphalt. I spent the next eight years playing Nintendo.

Just imagine if birds believed in modern parenting techniques. Instead of throwing their kids out of the nest, whether they've picked up this flying business or not, birds would have to start driving bird cars, because they were too afraid that their kids wouldn't learn to fly before they hit the ground. See, the bird's method of teaching is a little harsh, but it has to be done: Learn on the way down or die trying. The bird is one of nature's stupidest animals and it's got parenting figured out. Their theories on pre-chewed food keep their kids from losing sleep over all those punk sanitation concerns. We don't need to go that far, but we should look at substituting "letting our kids walk to the bus stop" for "pushing our kids out of a three story window," and we're right back to cementing our claim to be on top of the food chain. As it stands right now, we're in danger of overtaking the goldfish on the list of animals with the least amount of balls.