
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994                   TAG: 9404190002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By PATRICIA F. HUTSON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GRANDPARENTS HAVE PAID THEIR DUES

THE CONTROVERSY over welfare mothers and pregnant teens, and the effort to solve these problems without harming innocent children involved, continue. All too often it's suggested that grandparents of these innocents, especially paternal grandparents, shoulder the burden.

As a mother of two girls and a boy, ages 32, 22 and 18, I'm appalled at the attitude of those who think in this day and age a parent can possibly convince his or her children to abstain or even practice enough restraint concerning sex to prevent pregnancy. If any parents out there have been successful at this, I applaud them. However, don't judge those of us who've failed for not having tried.

I was a full-time mother throughout my children's childhoods and adolescences, talked constantly to them of all kinds of responsibility and the importance of acquiring a secure adult life before starting a family. To my dismay, I found the message from the media, schools, their peers, teen idols and society in general took unconditional preference over anything I taught them. Society's values clash with moral values of parents, and society's values prevail because they're more permissive and more desirable.

Childhood doesn't exist anymore, due to society's acceptance of sex-saturated entertainment for our youth and society's double standard of exposing children to the adult world and then expecting them to remain innocent. Most children today are little adults, ill-equipped to deal with responsibilities that accompany premature knowledge.

Parallel with the joy of parenthood today, and just as intense, is the quality of hell when parents must compete with society's constantly decreasing standards of morality. Chances of reaching your child through society's barriers are practically nonexistent.

Society's failure to practice control, because censorship has been labeled unacceptable, has resulted in a free-for-all that, in turn, has resulted in a frightening slide toward depths of depravity that doesn't belong in civilization and that threatens our children's futures.

For the sake of all concerned, especially innocent babies, we need to practice tough love with unwed mothers, giving them all help possible to become responsible parents, but removing their children until responsibility becomes reality.

The adoption system should be reconstructed to provide good homes for those unwanted babies. It would be a tedious, expensive path. But at the end, children would be the winners, with the chance of becoming productive citizens who escaped the destructive cycle their parents are now caught in, and it would be less expensive in the long run than the cost of our present predicament.

Grandparents have their own difficulties to face, sets of problems pertaining to age and planning for retirement. They've earned the freedom to live their lives, unencumbered with another round of raising children, the responsibility of which belongs elsewhere, unless it's actively and joyously sought.

Patricia F. Hutson lives in Newport.

by CNB