Responsibility vs obligation

So I ran across this on Facebook, about 20 mins after I gave one of my dogs away.

I 98% agree with this.

Pets are a great way to teach kids responsibility and compassion. Sometimes however it is more responsible to give a pet up than to keep trying to fix them.

We got a second Dog 10 months ago. He was left in an empty home with another dog. He freaks out when you leave him home alone or kennel him. HE actually ate my wall once. HE is afraid of teenagers.

We recently moved and our new home is on a much busier street. It seems like all the progress we had made with him over the last 6 months has come undone. He is getting jumpier by the day

Yesterday he broke out a window and went after the mail man. My other dog followed him through the window. I decided the stress was too much for the youngest dog and gave him to a family member who lives way out in the country. He knows this person and spends a lot of time there anyways.

I felt really bad sending him away. I try to teach my kids that your responsibility to others does not end when it becomes hard or inconvenient and here I am sending my dog away because I just can't handle  him. His new home has a LOT more time to dedicate to him but it still seemed a lot like passing the buck to me.

Now I have found out that one of my Dogs bit the mailman. The dog catcher thinks it will all be ok as I have done my best to rectify the situation and sent the instigator away. I had not realized that he was bit when I made the decision but now I realize I made the right one. My responsibility is not only to my pets but to everyone else around me.

That is also something my kids need to learn. You have to make decisions for the good of the whole, not just yourself

Many parents from Steubenville should be ashamed of their offspring.

I have been following, with a broken heart, the trial coverage of the Steubenville rape case. I am shocked that these 2 young men are being portrayed as victims. They repeatedly raped and humiliated a young woman. laughed about it online and then the media cries foul when they become registered sex offenders.

WTF I don't think I even want to live in this world anymore.

 This article gives a good summary of what the boys did and the media reaction to their sentencing for anyone who is unfamiliar with the case. 

I would like to think  Steubenville is a cesspool of moral degradation but I have a strange feeling it is much like any other town. What these boys did is sick enough but the fact that their (and the victims) peers took pictures and encouraged this behavior is where my mind truly boggles. The fact that some of their parents are trying to save them nearly makes my brain explode.

I have 2 boys whom I love with all my heart. I am very anti corporal punishment. I think children deserve to be treated with respect.

But if I EVER  EVER  EVER!!!  found out they took pictures of something like this for any reason other than to text them immediately to a police officer you can bet your ass I would not be begging the courts to go easy on them. In fact if my kids had a lick of sense (which by this point they would have obviously proved they did not and that I was a horrid failure as a parent) they would be BEGGING the judge for the maximum sentence just so I could not get my hand on them.

We are responsible to teach our children right from wrong. We are responsible to teach them that the right thing and the easy thing are rarely the same. We have a responsibility to all of society not to unleash self absorbed, heartless, assholes on the Jane (and John) Doe's of this world. If despite our best efforts our kids turn out to be predators or soulless deviants we have a responsibility to hold them out and allow justice to be served. If you are not prepared to do so you should not have children.

 Having children is a huge responsibility. Not just in terms of having to care for them but because how you raise them will affect EVERY living being they come in contact with their entire lives

Give your kids a bullshit detector

I was watching the the Joe Rogan Experience and Neil DeGrasse Tyson was his guest. I will admit that I did not watch the entire thing but the little bit I did watch got me thinking.  They were discussing Conspiracy theories and how people tend to believe what others tell them. I see evidence of this in my own life. If you state a fact with complete and utter confidence people tend to believe you.

This is how I convinced my 19 year old brother that eating neon birthday candles would give him brightly colored poop, like an Easter egg.

The more we hear different voices saying the same thing the more likely we are to believe it. Take the whole moon landing conspiracy theory. It has been repeated so loudly for so long that to many it sounds like facts. When you ask people to explain why they think the way they do they just repeat the garbage others have filled their heads with.

So bringing this back to parenting, because this is a parenting blog, we do the same to our children. We tell them the way the world works. A millions whys follow and we try to answer them all. Usually arriving at the destined conclusion of :it just is"

Instead try asking them why, what they think. Sure they will probably be wrong a lot but that is ok. Let them be wrong and make mistakes. The important thing is teaching them to question and to use their own deductive reasoning.

Children are the masters at scientific method. For example they may think that feeding the dogs pop rocks would be funny. So they test their hypothesis by finding some pop rocks and the family pet. Or maybe they want to see how high they can make waves go by sliding back and forth in the bath tub. So they immediately start an experiment to find the answer. At this point mom or dad generally ruins the experiment by demanding they stop splashing and making a mess.

k- why
p - because you are getting my floor all wet
k - No I'm not
p -Yes you are. Just stop or you are getting out of the tub

Yeah we have had that exchange in my home and in most other homes that have small children. It is easy to demand our kids just shut up and listen for once in their lives. Just once believe what I tell you and trust me that I have a good reason for saying and doing what I do. Someday that will  happen, and that day is always sad. The day they start taking knowledge at face value is the day their curiosity starts to atrophy. It is the day the weakening of their bullshit detectors begins.

Take heart when you kids demand answers, and want to know why. When they test your answers against  the laws of physics. The goal of parenting is not well behaved children, it is self sufficient adults. I want my kids to question everything, even mom. After all I am still human and I do screw up