Child Care and China Patterns

Another title of a book (or essay) unwritten as yet wherein I rant at length on subjects I have little experience with yet feel no less qualified to talk about than anyone else. Maybe I could underscore it with the addendum: Cynical observations of the single male. Why cynical one may ask? Well my slant would be how the focus on child care either being a term meaning mostly who people pay to take care of the children rather than a sort of tome saying what might be expected in the child's development at any age and of course there is the entire return to "mommy hood" that we so much today. I think I could go on for days about this child like obsession of being a mommy to a baby instead of a concerned parent either alone or as part of a team working to do all that can be done to give the child every advantage.

Then there is the China Patterns part. The cynic in me sees this as part of the problem with the modern marriage. Instead of asking, "Should we be getting married so soon and to each other?" people are often focused on what china pattern to register for. What will our place settings say about us as a couple. A fairy tale event must occur with fifteen men in black suits and one woman in white and fourteen in whatever color makes the attending ladies look good but not quite as good as the lady in white. This one day event becomes the sum total of the planned life together and when things start to fall apart a few years down the road because the person you are with isn't the "person you married" people are confused and hurt.

I was listening to the radio a few months back and was appalled to hear that it is more socially acceptable to be divorced at a certain age than it is to never have been married. A single person of the same age is viewed as unable to commit or just as a loser. How psychologically messed up as a society are we when we start thinking that people who are willing to fling themselves full force into a situation where they don't really know the person they are committing to, are more psychologically stable than those who have never made that mistake.

I don't think "Child Care and China Patterns" would sell well even with the alliterative title and the hopeful sort of message that we can do better even though we aren't yet. It's like President Jimmy Carter sitting down and telling people on the television that we have a morals problem. I might have a valid point but people don't want to feel criticized.

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