Hard Knock School
I think schools should bring back home economics and shop (or some variation) and make them required classes for everyone. They should also throw in a life skills class which talks about having and raising children and learning to deal with sickness and death. When I look back on my life, I was woefully unprepared to have children, raise them, and to figure out how to deal with illness and the loss of a loved one. It was sheer dumb luck that I managed to figure any of it out with any degree of success, and there might be arguments still about that.
Of course, that will never happen because, for some reason, we think parents should handle those jobs even though they, like I, are equally ill-prepared for the job. How in the world is someone still figuring out how things work supposed to then turn around and train up and coming parents. I bet teen pregnancy numbers would tell you how well that works, or the number of kids in foster care.
And even now, with the loss of another friend of longstanding, I’m supposed to magically sail the waters of emotional turmoil without any sort of guidebook as to how best to process these feelings. Instead I’m supposed to buckle up and look back on what I’ve learned in three score and eighteen years. At least I managed to find professional help along the way, and without wanting to sound flip, I’ve had a lot of practice recently. So, I’ll probably make it through, but it's a real test, and more training would have helped.