Jon

Raising a kid is hard work. It requires a radical rearrangement of your life and your priorities. It is exhausting, frustrating, tedious, messy, expensive, and darned inconvenient. True, there are some significant rewards. But, in the end, you, as a parent, have a job to do, you need to do it, and that's that.

As a public service, I present the following (extremely abbreviated) list of actions that constitute failing to do the job:

• Flying overseas for three months a few days after you give birth to your child, leaving your newborn in the hands of hired caregivers.
• Leaving your toddler in his car seat in the car that you have parked outdoors on a sub-freezing night while you booze it up inside the local tavern.
• Trying, through rational discussion, to get your toddler to stop screaming, sit down, and put on the seat belt so the nice airplane can take off.
• Trying, through rational discussion, to get your toddler to stop screaming.
• Trying, through rational discussion, to get your toddler to do, or to stop doing, anything.
• Leaving your toddler in his car seat in the car that you have parked outdoors in a sunny parking lot on a blazing August afternoon while you booze it up inside the local tavern.
• Allowing your eight-year-old to barricade himself in his bedroom and then calling the police, telling them that they need to get your suicidal eight-year-old son out of his bedroom.
• Demanding that your child engage in sexual intercourse with an adult.
• Demanding that an adult engage in social intercourse with your child.
• Failing to keep your kid out of your stash and, conversely, failing to keep your stash out of your kid.
• [Insert your own Michael Jackson comment here.]

In the nature of things, a list such as this can only scratch the surface, of course. I nonetheless hope that these pointers can, in some measure, improve the general quality of child-rearing in America today.