Friday 12 July 2013

Is it socially acceptable to intoctrinate your children with all your own personal prejudices?

Imagine for one moment, a hypothetical situation in which three different mothers went on three different daytime TV shows to share their views about bringing up children.

Let's call these mothers Chardonnay, Chelsea and Reeboka...

The first mother, Chardonnay, expresses the view that she doesn't want her little boy mixing with any black children at school.  She thinks black kids all come from poor backgrounds, where the mothers all have five different children by five different men and the fathers are all drug dealers and gang leaders. In her view these kids are destined to grow up and be in gangs themselves, the girls will probably all be pregnant before they do their GCSEs and the boys are probably already smoking cannabis at primary school.  

Our second mother, Chelsea, tells viewers that she doesn't want her young son mixing with any children who come from families where there's two mums, or worse still she says, two dads, and certainly nothing involving cross-dressing or gender reassignment.  In her view all gay people are abnormal and their children will always grow up with unhealthy messages about sexuality .  She doesn't want her son getting confused about what it is to be a boy or a girl, she says.

The third mother, Reeboka, shares her views that she won't allow her little boy to play with any children from working class homes and families on benefits.  These children are destined to be failures in life, like their parents, she says; instead of doing their homework, like good boys and girls, they're all staying up until 3am playing Call of Duty Black Ops on their Xbox. These low achievers are always obese, because of their poor diet, which makes them look lazy, like their Jeremy Kyle Show loving parents. 

The question is this, is it socially acceptable to indoctrinate your children with all your own personal prejudices? Is this good parenting, are you giving them an advantage in life with this sort of teaching or could it be quite harmful to healthy development?

And would it be ethical for television companies to pay women to go on programmes to share these sorts of views?

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