Parental Responsibility
Parental responsibility is a legal terminology. It refers to the act of being responsible for the well-being of children and taking part in making critical decisions in the life of a child. Such decisions include education, medical treatment, and the general social life of the child. Most children are growing without the basic parental care that the constitution of America requires them to have. It is the legal right of all children in America to have access to adequate parental care.
Society has assumed that all parents should adequately give care to their children in terms of providing quality education, food, shelter, clothing, quality medical attention, and other basic social needs that a child should get. However, research has indicated that there are some parents who have neglected their responsibilities of providing care to their children. Some are defiant to this requirement to the level of missing on some of the benefits that other parents get for being responsible of their families. I agree with the argument that there are parents who can knowingly undermine their responsibilities as parents. They end up missing on the benefits available to them. “One problem that is increasing childhood obesity is a parent’s lack of support for a healthier lifestyle.
Parents have become extremely lenient when it comes to their children’s activity and eating habits” (Robinson 199). For instance, many children are suffering fom cases of obesity due to poor attention from parents. Children suffer from obesity when they consume unhealthy food and drinks. Parents need to ensure that their children have healthy food such as fruits and healthy drinks at home or school. However, research has indicated that most parents have neglected monitoring the types of food that their children eat. In fact, some parents are always buying unhealthy foodstuffs for their children and taking them to lunch outs.
Autism is another social and medical concern that affects children because of the lack of parental responsibility among parents. Medical practitioners have related autism to the environment in which the mother of a child stays during pregnancy. “This is because the environment affects how the mother treats the baby and the odors and chemicals the baby ingests because of the air that the mother breathes.” For example, when a mother inhales harmful gases, there is a likelihood that the child will suffer from autism. In addition, the foodstuffs that the mother consumes during pregnancy also massively affect the chances of a child suffering from autism.
Some parents fail to take responsibility of the health condition of their children and risk their children’s lives. Another way through which undermining parental responsibility can affect the social and medical condition of parents and children is the environment in which children grow. The environment is likeely to affect the chances of such children to acquire obsessive-compulsive disorder. This disorder makes children to be highly nervous over certain things surrounding them. When parents identify such deficiencies in time, there are chances that they can come up with ways of controlling deficiencies.
“A more sensible approach might involve starting with a children’s book about dinosaurs. Read that book over and over until the child is no longer frightened. Then one might go to the dollar store and buy a packet of little dinosaurs. Hide them around and have the boy search for dinosaurs. Later, consider getting a bigger toy dinosaur.
Then, after much play, take the child to a natural history museum to look at large dinosaurs. That could be one way to get rid of a fear one with OCD has” (Hudak 8).The above illustrations all indicate how responsibility of parents can massively affect the social and medical lives of children. When parents do not keep a close look at the food that children eat, it may lead to obesity. If parents also fail to stay in a calm and clean environment, there are chances that their children may suffer from autism. Similarly, parents should raise their children in a happy and friendly environment to prevent children from suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.
One can thus conclude that undermining parental responsibility will affect the social and medical lives of both parents and children.
