REPOST: RAISING A CHILD? HIRE A CARPENTER!

Here's a piece by Jeffrey Shaffer that was on the Huffington Post entitled:"We're Being Bad: Are Mom And Dad To Blame?"

Here we go again, on the nature versus nurture debate! My position? Well, first of all, it's both - nature and nurture - and yes, there are constitutional and soul factors (and soul-age factors) at work in a child's emerging personality, but of this there is no doubt: parents are the least qualified of all adults to raise children!

You need a license to drive a car, a degree to teach elementary school, time as an apprentice to become a carpenter, but to become a parent, all you have to do is get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, and voila! Instant parent, almost unilaterally in charge of another human being's mental, emotional and physical development and well-being, even if you have absolutely no clue, even if you're a completely off-the-scale borderline personality, even if you're the Octomom! And as if the lack of qualifications wasn't a big enough problem, there's the psychological reality (what Freud referred to as the "child is father to the man" syndrome) that parents inevitably dump transferences, projections and identifications onto their children's shoulders, unless of course, they've done a lot of serious self-work before they have a child and... well, don't get me started on how often that happens.

Oh, and in case any objecting parents want to claim that "love" is a qualification for being a parent, I refer you to famed psychologist, Bruno Bettleheim's landmark book, "LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH."

It's not.