More Thoughts on Melissa Harris-Perry's Ad

I realize that there are single parent situations where that one parent is working two or more jobs, and there are families in which both parents work. What am I going to say in their cases, that the children should be ignored by everyone and fall through the cracks? No. 

On the other hand, what if you have children in a family like mine? I work, my wife stays home with the boys and cares for and educates them. Do my wife and I need to "break through this notion of children belonging to their parents"? 

Suppose we adopt a notion that my children belong to the community. Can the community take a vote and decide that my children will attend the public schools along with the majority, and could such a vote be used to overrule the decision my wife and I have made to teach our children at home? If my children aren't really mine, but belong rather to the collective, then the answer is yes. The collective must have the say if they have the primary responsibility.

Children need more than just time with their families. Children need their parents taking responsibility for them, more rather than less, in the time they're spending. They need parents instructing them, providing for them, protecting them, guiding them, being examples for them. That's way better than parents just sending their children off to public schools wherein they're lost in a sea of peer pressure, bad influences, chaotic standards and relativism.

One of the problems with parents ceding responsibility for children to the community, which the wording of Melissa Harris-Perry's public service announcement is clearly advocating, is that you have parents opting out. This already happens, sure, whether the MSNBC host is encouraging more of it or not. But we can't just spot the trend and say, "Let's just go with the flow and tell all the parents to opt out, since a lot of them already are."

Is this egalitarianism in disguise? Do we feel so sorry for children growing up in homes with only one parent that we, not wanting them to feel inferior somehow to children growing up in homes with two parents, will just find a way to bring those children with two parents down?

Such would be philosophically consistent with liberal views on wealth distribution, where Margaret Thatcher once pointed out, "He would rather the poor were poorer, so long as the rich were less rich." 

If we focus more on reducing the gap than on doing what's best for all children, we might very well advocate for this dichotomous view wherein the community always raises children better than their parents. But think of the implications. 

I keep thinking of the psychological phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility. It's the same effect which causes a large crowd of onlookers to do nothing while a man is shoved onto the tracks of a subway; the collective inaction allows each person to tell themselves that it's not their problem, that someone else will get to it. We cannot as a culture do that en-masse with our children. It will have disastrous results, not unlike what happens to the victim of that subway train.