if you can't love children you shouldn't have them

[boglach]

Would the daily fucking fail address the real issues please

To be fair I do think it's very hard for people who haven't experienced abuse to wrap their heads around the fact that fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles rape children.

I'm sorry about what happened to you cloudbase, and about how your family reacted. My mother's reaction was to tell me to get over it.

If you'd like to join this thread please feel free.

Boarding schools have no parallel with children being removed from abusive parents, and it makes a mockery of rational debate to say otherwise.

I wouldn't send my own son to a boarding school, but I know loads of happy, well balanced ex boarders.

I don't want to divert this thread into a boarding school debate, sorry boglach. What I said about boarding schools isn't relevant, it's just a hang up I have.

There are loads of people who probably 'shouldn't have children', nobody is blind to that.

But why try to make this a class issue?

Surely we can say that if you can't afford to support children (and have no realistic prospect of changing this) then your choice to have children is going to be v compromised by the inevitable low standard of living you will have.

Also, if you don't like children, don't feel you could love and protect a baby adequately and provide appropriate and loving support throughout their childhood, you should probably think very hard about the consequences of your choice.

Why does this have to be benefits v middle class? It just sounds so chippy. 'yeah but posh people send their kids to boarding school so they're just as bad' or whatever.

It looks like desperate point scoring, and gets us no nearer to solving the problems - both valid - of child poverty and child neglect/ abuse.

Personally, I'm concerned about both.

And of course, child abuse occurs mostly in the home. That is statistical fact.

But that doesn't mean that my kids or your kids are more likely to be abused in their homes - we aren't abusers.

So while I agree that many people are in denial about this unpleasant truth about child abuse, most of us can say with some confidence that actually, our own children are more likely to be abused by a stranger than by a family member.

Can I assume that on this thread, abuse means sexual abuse?

I'm referring to the whole spectrum of abuse, not just sexual. I think a lot of very well meaning and loving parents are still capable of emotional and psychological damage purely by dint of a lack of understanding of what these forms of abuse are.

In many respects my parents were also very neglectful, both physically and emotionally but without any real understanding that they were being so, because they genuinely loved me. They just weren't capable of being very good parents. I think that's more common than people realise. And at the end of the day, very few parents deliberately set out to abuse their kids. A lot of what could be described as 'soft' abuse, is down to incredibly poor parenting. Or being unable to protect your children from abusers because you can't or won't recognize abusive behavior in others.

Morris, unfortunately it's that kind of opinion which perpetuates the myth that abuse only happens in poor families and by strangers.

Quite frankly it doesn't, the majority of children abused, non sexually, are from all backgrounds regardless of parents education or financial capability. The majority of abused children know, personally, their abuser/s.

It does a great disservice to children to say abuse happens just because you are poor/low educated.

My siblings were "saved" from a lot of abuse by being sent away to school but were still subjected to abuse at home.

My mother, a wealthy, educated woman, doesn't comprehend love. I wish she hadn't had children but, for whatever reason, she did.

It isn't poverty which causes abuse and neglect.