A first note: Just about everything in this post is a suspicion of mine, not a strongly held opinion. My suspicions may be dead wrong. Better homes produce better kids, who grow up to be better citizens. Because of this, I suspect that an important way that society as a whole may be improved is to increase support for parent education programs, to educate parents on empirically proven methods of raising children better and avoiding behaviors that are likely to be detrimental. But my general impression is that many of these programs, generally private as far as Im aware, cost a lot of money, and that parents of low economic status are less able to make use of them, and less aware of their existence. I suspect it is in the general publics interests to provide outreach and support for parent education programs and the parents who want to/ought to make use of them. Partly, this is because poor children are probably the most likely to become criminals, or at least to become lazy, and so they could benefit tremendously from better parenting. For this reason, it seems both liberals and conservatives should support such programs, although I could be mistaken. This article provides some information on the topic, but it is quite dated. I dont know how valid this stuff is anymore. http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-1/face.htm I havent been able to find much on what public support for these kinds of programs have. I leave this topic open to general debate, but I am also very curious how much the US government, either on national, state, or local levels, has supported parent education programs, whether by cooperating with them to market them, providing subsidies or otherwise funding them or those who need to attend them, providing incentives for parents to attend such programs, etc.
What percentage of adults do you believe will voluntarily sign up for 'how to parent' programs? My answer will be .5% if they are free and .1% if there is a cost. If you can get past this, just what are you going to teach? It is difficult for me to fathom that there is a text-method for parenting? Parenting involves a million variables! And you are assuming all kids are going to respond equally to one type of parenting? You are trying to solve a PROBLEM which you have not clearly defined? Is your problem 'how to improve society'? If so this is too vague to solve! YOU need to define the problem; crime, high school graduation, college attendance, college degree, laziness, silly PF threads, etc.??
