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Some parents aren't good enough and aren't raising good children. Trouble is they're not to blame for the skills they don't have. What is to blame? Entropy. Plain old time degrading memory and skills and effort. It's almost as if a larger pattern of skill and memory retention would be useful. Something old and robust, yet flexible and humane.

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It's been a long time since I decided that better parenting was probably the only world issue worth focusing on. I think it would trickle down into everything else. I'm not sure at what point the returns would be worth less than the effort, but given it has a 1.5 - 2.5 generation return rate, it's really hard to tell.

This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley:

“Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.”

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