[WS:] My wife is in special education and works a lot with parents of special education students, and from what she tells me it appears that it is a mixed bag. Some of the parents are immigrants working several jobs to make the ends meet and simply have no time, energy or the means to deal with problems of their children - back in their home country kids were expected to behave and if they did not they were whacked - but here it is called child abuse and the kids learn quite quickly how to play that card to get their parents off their hair. Other parents have emotional or cognitive issues themselves and are simply unable to provide nurturing environment for their children. A still different group thinks that leaving their kids to their own devices is the right thing to do, they have learned to take care of themselves and their own needs first and think that the kids should do the same. It is a result of their socialization.
The only example of what in my mind comes close to the label "monsters" involves parents whom few people would describe as such. Both were high achieving professional people - the so called yuppies - who adopted a child hoping that he would be a high achiever too. When
it turned out that he was not (he was a rather normal but "laid back" kid, according to my wife) the parents made every possible effort to dump the kid on the state, and eventually un-adopted him. And of course everything these monsters did was perfectly legal.
Wojtek
On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 4:25 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> What actually interests me, and nobody seems to write about this, is what the parents are thinking. I mean those who do this kind of thing. What they're thinking and feeling. That would be interesting. Calling them "monsters" is completely uninteresting.
>
> Why? Some years ago, an Oakland man beat his three year old boy to death because the toddler could not be made to read. The consesus was that the father was a monster. But those who should know better now tell us that five year olds should learn to read English. I don't deny some can. But the vast majority cannot and should not. And because they are made to, as a matter of policy, they are likely to think of themselves as failures and incapable of learning, starting at the age of five.
>
> There is then also a lot of institutional monstrosity.
>
> Joanna
>
>
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