I am childless by choice and I will remain so, partly because at 36 I feel burned out from taking care of the kids these parents have neglected. When I ask these students why they can't talk to their parents, it's like unlocking a cistern of acidic sour grapes. What comes out is hatred. Kids in America hate their parents! There, I've said it. The ubiquitous chant ("I hate you, I hate you!") of children to their parents means just what it says. No, it's not the unreflective free association of little Billy and his sister subconsciously rehearsing one-liners for a soap opera 20 years down the road.

I think a declaration of war should be made on parents. Don't have more kids than you can afford to nurture and take care of! Who cares about your pathetic need to fulfill something deep inside of you? The problem is that once you eject that child into the world, people like me have to go about cleaning up after your messy needs. Child rearing is like a science; it is a career choice and should be treated as such. If you are not willing to devote everything, and I mean everything, do not have children.

But that's too demanding a condition to make of parents -- I can hear the whining rebuttals. You know what? Life is tough and demanding. Get a grip. A right to give in to the urgings of Mother Nature cannot take moral precedence over the criteria for good stewardship of children, who cannot care for themselves. The crisis in American schools is not about crime or corporate downsizing; it's not even about underpaid teachers. It is a crisis in parenting, which the collective consciousness dares not name because it is too deeply complicit in this state of bankruptcy.

The collapse of serious devotional parenting, which coincides with the rise of families with two working parents, needs to be addressed openly and honestly, once and for all, in a serious nonpartisan manner. This part-time job of parenting has overtaxed our school system, and believe it or not, our universities as well, where teachers are forced to assume the role of surrogate parents and all the problems associated with it.

Hillary Clinton was right. It does take a village. But let us not fool ourselves. The village in any realistic sense is the school, which assists in the socialization process begun by the parent and ensures the continued matriculation of the child into adult life.

But guess what? The village collapsed because it took on more than its fair share and lacked the crucial support of ambitious wannabes who deposited their loads without even thinking: "Gee, how can the village do all these things when I've placed all these restrictions on it, like, don't discipline my child; don't spank his rowdy butt when it needs to be; don't fail him because I'm paying for his education (private or public: I pay my taxes) and hell, I'm not paying for a failing grade; don't demand that he respect you when just last night he threw the cereal in my face; monitor all his playground activities while preparing your lesson plans, if you don't and he falls and scrapes the sheen off his fingernail I'll sue you all?"

These people disgust me. What they want is a moral blank check endorsing their perversions. An individual who is unable to gauge the huge divide between his desires and the means required to achieve them in a healthy way is called a child. An adult who fails to realize this has a cognitive handicap. But an adult who actually executes his or her desires in full knowledge of such circumstances is an unconscionable pervert.

Gays and lesbians, once heroic outlaw souls who bravely took up the responsibility of morally challenging hegemonic notions of conventional sex, family life and relationships, are putting this alleged call of nature into high libidinal drive. They, along with all the other child-hungry breeders, are leading the nation in the multiple-birth craze. Multiple births, once viewed as an exception in nature, are now uncritically accepted as a personal preference and the price of fertility treatment. If you feel the need, buy two, technologically generate three, or four, or even seven. Hey, for your bravery and contribution to the wear and tear on your collapsible uterus we'll throw in tons of free stuff -- diapers, baby food and even a house or two.

The antidotes to this are too numerous to mention. But I have a couple of recommendations to ethically minded people who actually care a great deal about children: From now on, your response to anyone announcing a pregnancy other than their first should be a stern and formidable look. Let the full weight of this gaze fall like apocalyptic brimstone on their gooey-eyed attempts at wonder and innocence. Follow the gaze with the comment: "You have my deepest sympathies," and let the unconcealed moral accountability to which you are holding them reverberate clearly so that your remark sounds more like reproach than condolence.

After the child (or children) is born, send a gift (use your imagination but keep it very respectful), which underscores your initial consternation, along with a note that simply reminds them of the following: The magic of life does not start in utero or during labor or even at conception. Nothing in nature is magical. It can't be. Nature simply is. The magic, or rather the hard dose of realism out of which mature, responsible lives are made, begins in the small, devoted and deeply thought-out steps you take in life to ensure that your playtimes with Nature turn into something stable, healthy and a hell of a lot more significant than 10 fingers and 10 toes.

Tomorrow: The role of psychiatric drugs in the Yates case

Recent Stories