The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 7 - Parents in America Need to Start Doing Some Actual Parenting

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

Let's talk about why parents need to teach their kids about modesty, class, and respect for authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the show, everybody. Thanks for watching. So let me just say to start with here that I am very sympathetic to parents because I am a parent. I've got three kids. I know how difficult it is to be a parent. Or I should say, we back up for a minute because parents always like to say, well, being a parent is the hardest job in the world. I've said it myself. That's true with a qualifier. To raise a child to be a good person in this degenerate, disgusting culture, that is the hardest job in the world for sure. That is a 24-7, never sleep, round the clock, relentless, stressful, heartbreaking, strenuous job that it just never, never ends. And it involves every fiber of your being must be invested in it all the time constantly.

if you want to raise your kid to be a good person. So that's the hardest job in the world. But just to raise a kid in general, if by raising a kid, we mean, well, that you have them in your house and you feed them food and you put the TV on for them and you make sure they're wearing some kind of clothing

and maybe you take them on a vacation every once a while. If that's what we mean by raising a kid, well, then no, that's not the hardest job in the world. That in and of itself is not a difficult job at all, actually. Literally anyone can do it and anyone does do it. So that in and of itself is not hard. What is hard is raising your kid to be a good person. I fear that the problem is that many parents in this culture aren't so much worried about the moral formation of their kids. They're not worried about raising their kids to be good people. They're more worried about, well, they need to be a good

student, they need to get good grades. We got to get them into a good college. We got to make sure they get a good career. There are parents who aren't worried about any of this stuff whatsoever. But there are plenty of parents who are worried about that. But in terms of the state of their child's soul, well, they don't concern themselves as much with that. And that is just bad parenting. It's not just bad parenting. That is awful parenting. That is non-parenting. That is, you may as well not even be parenting. You could just make a robot with a computer algorithm that could do that. The hard part is the moral formation.

And I fear that a lot of us just don't worry about that. I bring that up just as a means of introduction to this topic, which I think is kind of an illustration of a larger problem. So every year it seems like we get maybe, I don't know, 10 or 12 national dress code. outrages. It's always the same thing. A teenager goes to school dressed inappropriately or hardly dressed at all. And the school is forced to reassert its dress code policies. And that, of course, is per se that's a horrible, oppressive thing. And it persecutes the poor child. And she runs home,

she runs home to her mother and tells her mother and the mother calls the school and alerts the media. And then the child, who, by the way, is so embarrassed by all this and humiliated, then goes on social media and tells everyone in the world because that's what you do when you're embarrassed about something. You tell everybody. And then that's how it becomes a national outrage. This happens, like I said, probably 10 or 12 times a year. And it really ramps up when we get into the warmer weather. So we're starting to see now.

And we got our first dose of this this week with a national dress code outrage. I think it's our first of the year, one of many, I'm sure, before the year is up. I'm not going to go into the specifics of this story. It doesn't really matter. I'm just using this as an intro as a means into this larger conversation. I mean, in this case, it was the girl. She went to school without undergarments on, and that was a problem for the school, understandably.

They handled the problem in kind of a clumsy, weird way. And so then the daughter went home and told the mom, and the mom and the daughter are now saying that she's persecuted, and it's terrible, and she's been sexualized, and so on and so forth. Now, it is true that schools are very often clumsy, as I said, and awkward and weird in how they deal with this stuff. But I don't fault them for that because they shouldn't have to deal with it at all. And there really isn't any non-awkward way for an adult to tell another adult's kid that

she's not wearing enough clothing. There is no way to do that, no way at all, that will not be embarrassing to everybody involved in the situation. There's just, once you have as an adult, as a parent, put another adult in the position where they have to have that conversation, you have put them in a lose-lose situation. There's nothing they can do. So the schools, as they're looking at this issue, they have two general avenues they can take. The first avenue is let's do nothing and just accept the fact that our hallways are going to resemble a downtown bar at 1 a.m. on a Saturday. We'll just accept that and whatever. Or we can try to impose some basic standard of decency and decorum and dignity in our school.

I respect the schools that take the latter approach. I give them a lot of leeway, even when they do it awkwardly. I can generally be pretty hard on the school system, I admit, but I acknowledge that they are in an unenviable situation, in almost impossible situation, where they're constantly having to do things that parents won't do, and they're constantly having to have these conversations that parents won't have with their kids.

kids. Sometimes the schools go too far. They take too much liberty. And so, for instance, they'll, you know, they want to talk to the kids about sex, like in kindergarten now, because they say, well, the parents aren't doing it. That's something that you got to leave to the parents. And if they don't do it, they don't do it, but that's not for the schools to do at all. Except for teaching the kids the basic biological, scientific facts of sex when it's appropriate for their age group in science. But beyond that, to go any more into sexual ethics or telling them when to have sex and, you know, just that's not for the schools to do, especially government schools. But basic decency, basic modesty, well, if they don't have a

conversation about that with the kids, and the parents don't have a conversation with that, about that with the kids. Then we're back to the schools looking like a red light district. And that's not really an acceptable outcome. So the schools have to do something. Now, we were discussing this a couple days ago in my Facebook group and I received quite a few messages from teachers who tell me that kids regularly come to school. These are their words, not mine, dressed like hookers and streetwalkers, and there's nothing they can do about it. And one thing that all these teachers echoed to me is that those of us who are not in school and those of us who don't have teenagers, we probably don't really understand how bad it is,

how crazy it's gotten with the outfits and just the inappropriate, ridiculous, as they say, hookerish outfits that these kids are coming to school in. Now, maybe it's not like this in every school, but some of these stories that teachers told me, I mean, it's, I, you know, I graduated high school, I don't know, how old am I now? I graduated high school like 15 years ago, around there, 15, 20 years ago, 25, I don't know. But for me, it wasn't so long ago that things should have changed that much. And it was pretty bad when I went to school, but it's apparently so much worse even now. but if the parents are alerted to the problem, and this is the case, you know, not just with dress code stuff, but just in general, if you listen to the teachers, this is what they say.

You try to talk to a parent about a problem involving the kid, and the parents will rush to their little darling's defense and become very indignant that anyone would dare give their poor child a lecture. How dare you? It's none of your business. To which the school should reply, well, when you send your kid into public half naked, it is our business now. You've made it our business.

I wish it wasn't, but now it is. That's your fault. Be a parent. But of course, the real source of their indignation is embarrassment. They are not embarrassed over the conduct of their child like they should be. They're embarrassed and they feel personally chastised that a school employee had to mop up after their negligent parenting. They realize on some level that they're doing a terrible job parenting. They're not really parenting at all.

And so the schools had to do it for them, and that makes them feel bad. And that's why the parents who, like I said, not just with wardrobes, but when a kid is being disruptive, acting out, and the schools have to talk to a parent about it, when the parent gets defensive and says, no way, how that, my kid didn't do that. You, the teacher doesn't like him. It's all your fault. He's being persecuted. Not all parents respond that way.

That's not how my parents responded when I went to school. when I got in trouble. But the parents who do respond that way, they're not defending their kid. They're defending themselves. That's all they're doing. It's just selfishness. It's all about them.

They're defending themselves. And they're saying, how dare you? Because if it's true that my kid's doing that, then that means that maybe I'm doing something wrong at home. And I can't face that fact. So no. But this is what you get.

Parents, when you leave the parenting to the school system, it's embarrassing for you. And I imagine it must be embarrassing when you've got to come in and have a meeting with a teacher, talk to a teacher on the phone and hear all these things

that your kid's doing wrong. That's embarrassing. But if your kid gets a lectured by the assistant principal over her miniskirt or whatever, don't be indignant at the school the assistant principal was just doing something that you refused to do. It should have been you giving the lecture, but you didn't do it.

So they had to do it. It would have been better at coming from you, but you didn't do it. So they did. That's your fault. Be indignant at yourself. Be embarrassed about yourself. Be angry at yourself. If you're not going to do your job, then the school system is going to pinch hit.

And the school system has to do a lot of pinch hitting because there are a lot of parents who just aren't doing their job. And I think the school system oftentimes does a bad job of pinch hitting, but it's an indictment on America's parents that they even have to step up to the plate at all because they shouldn't have to. Here's an idea. Maybe we should instill in our children a sense of dignity and self-respect. Maybe we should teach them modesty and we should teach them to be humble. teach them to address with class and with maturity. Maybe we should teach them to stop seeking attention. Maybe we should teach them to respect authority.

Teach them to be adults in a civilized society. This is the whole point of parenting. If you're not going to see to your child's moral formation, then what are you doing? What exactly are you doing? I often hear parents say, well, I mean, I don't want to force my child to be a certain way. I don't want to force him to fit into a box. I want him to find himself. He doesn't know how to find himself. He doesn't know where to look. He's confused. He's a kid. He doesn't know who he is. He's a, he's a child. He doesn't know anything. He knows nothing about about anything.

That's your job to tell him, to show him to go. guide him. Don't say, oh, he's got to find himself. He's got to figure out his identity. He's got to express himself. He doesn't know any. He's confused. Don't you see that? He's bewildered. He doesn't know which way is up because you never told him. That's your job. So yes, you should be, you should be getting your child to conform with, with, he should be conforming with basic standards of predicate and decency and courtesy. He should be conforming with some kind of moral structure. He should be conforming with the rules of the family. He should be conforming with the rules in the school. He should be conforming under the authority of those who are above him. He should be

conforming with the idea that he should respect his elders. Yes, he should be conforming to all of those things. Those are boxes that he should be fitting in and you should be putting him in those boxes. job. Again, if you're not going to do that as a parent, then, and I say this with all due respect, but as a parent, you're basically useless. You're not doing anything that there are specific things that society needs parents to do. And in this case, if you're one of those, you're not doing any of those things. So what's the point? What are you doing? You may as well just ship them to a boarding school or something at that point. Because you're not the whole parenting deal you've just checked out on. He's going to find himself. I mean, people say this now

about their, you know, people say this now about like their four-year-olds. Oh, he's got to find himself. He's got to figure out his own identity. He's four, you nutcase? What are you doing? He's four years old. Got to find himself. Can't find that. He can't even tie his shoes. He doesn't know anything. Yeah, you got to tell him. He's a boy. This is what boys do. This is how boys act.

Again, that's your job. You're a parent. All right. Got a little worked up there. I just, it really, this is the thing. This is the thing above maybe anything else in the society that irritates me the most. These parents who just categorically refuse to do their job. Refuse to do it.

One other point. One other point I want to make. Okay. And I know this is a thing that gets me into trouble. But when we're talking, you know, just going back specifically to the dress code issue, one of the things that you hear sometimes is that one of the reasons why we should have dress codes and why we should teach our daughters to respect the dress codes is that it can be very distracting for boys in the school if the girls are coming in dressed like they're going

to the beach, right? And when someone makes that argument, we tend to write that off and say, that's a silly, sexist, patriarchal argument. It's not my problem what your boy does. If your boy can't control himself, it's not my problem. It's not my daughter's problem. He's got to deal with it. That's a terrible attitude. And it's a terrible attitude to instill in your daughter.

It is a terrible, obnoxious, selfish, ugly attitude. It is not sexist to point out. out that your daughter's skimpy outfits really are extremely distracting to the boys in her school. They are. If you've never been a teenage boy and you've never been the parent of a teenage boy, then you really do not understand the overwhelming power that a boy's hormones have over him at a certain age. And I know that girls have hormones too, and they've got their own issues.

with that. I'm not downplaying that at all. But those are different issues, and it's not the same. And the fixation on the opposite sex, on sex in general, this is something that is so much more pronounced for boys that it is for girls. That's just a biological reality. There are exceptions, but they are just that exception. For the most part, it is so much more powerful and pronounced boys, and they can't control that. They can't, you know, we can try to teach them to control their actions, but they can't control the fixation. They can't control what their mind is doing inside their head.

It's not an exaggeration to say that it is very nearly impossible, very nearly impossible for a, for a pubescent boy to focus on his work while his girl classmates are coming to school barely clothed. It's, it's, you are asking him to do something that is practically impossible for him to do. It would require just, I'll tell you this, let me put it this way. It would require more self-discipline and maturity and moral courage than you probably have right now as an adult. So you're asking him to exhibit a kind of control over. his mind and his faculties that you yourself do not exhibit. So this is just a fact of biology.

Maybe you as a parent should teach your daughter that her attempts to get attention are harmful, not only to herself, but also to her male classmates who have almost no choice but to give her the attention she's demanding. it's like a biological imperative that they're going to give that attention. And so she shouldn't be out there seeking it. It's selfish. I mean, it is obviously selfish in more ways than one.

Just I want you really. I mean, I don't think we empathize enough with boys in this culture. Imagine what this culture is like for boys. And like I said, I remember how it was for me when I was a kid not all that long ago. And it was very difficult. But it's even, it's got to be 10 times working. even now that it was for me. You're a boy in 2018.

There's porn everywhere. There's sex all over the TV. There's sex all over the computer. And then he goes to school and the girls are dressed like they're going to the club. And he just can't escape everywhere. Now he's got his hormones raging. He's gone through puberty. And everywhere he turns, it can't turn anywhere where it's not there.

I mean, you have any idea how difficult we've made it for a boy to be virtuous and chaste, let alone productive in this society. And so the response of a lot of parents of girls is, ah, that's their problem, whatever.

I mean, how disgusting of an attitude is that? Why don't you have a little bit? I mean, look, just stop thinking about yourself for a second and just for a moment, if you can, and try to empathize with these boys. They didn't choose to be this way. And they didn't choose to live in this culture, either. that is constantly preying upon their weakest impulses at a point in their life when they have

not developed the maturity and the discipline to overcome those impulses. As I said, as adults, we're not pre-pubescent boys anymore, so we don't have the same impulses. We don't deal with the same struggles that they do internally. but what I'm saying is the amount of self-discipline that we are requiring boys to have in this culture. It is a greater self-discipline than even most adults exhibit. And that's not fair. It's just not fair. So, I don't know.

I mean, that's not the only reason why we should have the dress codes. but that is a reason. I don't think it's an irrelevant reason. I think it's something that we should all be concerned about. And maybe, I mean, we focus so much on the plight of girls in society and what they go through and the societal expectations and everything. And that's great to focus on that because that's an important issue. I have a daughter as well.

So I'm worried about that. But we just neglect altogether. We just scoff. What boys go through, we just scoff at it. We don't care. We're like, just let them deal with it. It's their problem. like I said, it's just a disgusting attitude. It really is. But that's maybe a topic for another day.

I mean, I will talk more about that some other time. But we'll leave it there for now. So thanks for watching everybody and have a great day.