If you grew up in a loving, stable home with parents who read your favourite bedtime stories on a nightly basis, then the Australian Broadcasting Corporation would like you to know that you may have been exposed to unfair advantages not received by less fortunate children.
In a segment earlier this month, an ABC radio program posed the question, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?”
“Evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t — the difference in their life chances — is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,” British academic Adam Swift told ABC presenter Joe Gelonesi.
“You have to allow parents to engage in bedtime stories activities, in fact we encourage them because those are the kinds of interactions between parents and children that do indeed foster and produce these [desired] familial relationship goods.”
While this is all well and good, Swift begins to deviate from the straight and narrow.
“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,” he said.
Is it the responsibility of good parents to level the playing field for bad parents?
Some academics and journalists, including Gelonesi himself, seem to think so.
Responding to the segment online, Gelonesi wrote, “This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion that perhaps — in the interests of levelling the playing field — bedtime stories should also be restricted.”
Perhaps Gelonesi jests, as he admitted to the Daily Telegraph that the segment was a way for ABC to “get attention,” but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t fundamentally misguided.
Besides the fact that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce restrictions on bedtime stories, the idea that parents should consider disadvantaging their own children to make up for those who couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs properly is an unfortunate sign of the “progressive” times.
When asked by the Daily Telegraph if it would be easier to simply encourage other parents to begin reading to their children, Gelonesi said, “we [Gelonesi and Swift] didn’t discuss that.”
Apparently not.
In an age where scolding mothers for allowing their children to eat Oreos, calling child protective services on “free range” children, and affording serious credence to questions like, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?”, is commonplace, it’s miraculous that the concept of parenting isn’t already obsolete.
I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again:
Why not just hand our children over to the state at birth and be done with it?
