Chris blogs about parent-teacher conferences. I recommend reading the post — it illustrates everything I hate about many parents today who refuse to discipline their kids. They (or at least the ones I’ve been unfortunate enough to deal with) don’t discipline their kids because they don’t want their kids to hate them.

News flash: Most kids say “I hate you” because they don’t have the verbal skills to say “I am very frustrated with the approach you have taken to dealing with my behavioral infraction.” Your kids are not going to be your friends and they shouldn’t be. If you are relying on them to be your friends, you really need to get out of the house and develop relationships with people your own age.

I also get the “if my kid doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t have to do it” with some of my Confirmation parents. I don’t give a rat’s butt if their kids don’t want to go to Confirmation or if they don’t want to go to church, acolyte, write their faith statement, do sermon notes, or take their Confirmation test — they’re going to do it if they’re in my Confirmation class. I would like to throttle these parents because all they’re doing is turning their kids into slackers who will never have decent employment because they’ll be fired the second they tell their boss that they “don’t feel like coming into work today so [they] shouldn’t have to.” I’ve already lost two kids in my first year Confirmation class because I refused to let them have that attitude. (They were already thinking of leaving the church anyway so it wasn’t much of a loss.) My second year kids whine at me plenty and they’ve learned that whining gets nowhere with me, mostly because I really don’t care if they’re unhappy because they have to do something. I’m not getting paid to teach them and their parents have given control of their religious education to me, so I can really do what I darn please.

I think the parents who have this lame attitude are the ones who never heard the word “no” as kids. From the 1960’s onward, there has been this movement to abolish the word “no” with regard to discipline. Apparently, there’s a misguided belief that giving kids limits stifles creativity. It doesn’t — it teaches them boundaries. This lack of boundaries has created an epidemic and it has made me much more aware of how I’m going to raise my kids when I have them. My kids will not get everything they ask for and they will not be raised in front of the TV. Some TV is OK — using it as an electronic babysitter is not.