Hehe, I don't know which is worse: to have a single irresponsible non-empathic parent, or to have two parents both irresponsible, non-empathic and contradicting each other :/ But, yeah, I'd guess we are pretty much pointing to the same direction: problems with bad parenting.

I'm not quite sure what should be done to improve the situation, and that is one of the reasons I've been avoiding writing directly about this kind of issues. Or, to be more precise; I know what I tried to do different from my own parents, and I sometimes discuss parenting with my friends who now have little kids of their own. I like to discuss these topics in a personal grass-roots level. But I have very little ideas when it comes to the political level, ie. the question "what could the society / the state / any organized group of people do to improve the conditions of poor families?".

In Finland we have used to have a welfare state which in some ways functioned pretty well. No, it never was perfect, but some aspects were great, effectively helping some troubled families to get out of their misery. I know people who now are responsible, well educated, hard working adults - but without our welfare system they would've been trapped in the poor conditions of their initial family. So, I can't say that a welfare system in itself is a part of the problem. But I do think that it can be organized in many ways, and some ways are a lot worse than others. So, for me the question would be "if there is any kind of organized support for troubled persons / families, then how should that support be best organized so that it actually delivers the help it is intended to do."

And in that sense, I think that I agree a lot with Mr. Polecat - if there is a system which encourages single parents to go on with their irresponsible nonempathic parenting, then the system clearly is in need of re-arranging and improving.

And here we reach again a terrain where I think that there is no "one solution fits them all". Cultures are different in Finland and USA, so what works here might fail miserably in USA. And USA is such a vast country with a great variation in local sub-cultures, that I'd guess there hardly is one nationwide solution for many questions. Actually, I think the same goes for EU and Finland, too. If you ask me, we could have EU-wide legislation like "no killing, no stealing, no slavery!", and then everything down from that would be up to local communities to organize and to decide. =)

Uh oh, let's see how this goes =) Maybe we will need a separate topics about
a) political discussion
b) general discussion about discussion itself, like questions "is it OK to rant and to let one's uncencored thougts out? What is this thing with some people getting offended - should we avoid that, or should we expect everyone not to get offended? To which extent there are common solutions for everyone, and to which degree it is better to have local solution for local communities? (As, I think, a lot of discussion degenerates into quarrel because of this - members of different sub-cultures fail to agree about common decisions, because they each think that the other is wrong and should adopt the ways of our tribe... But I think that in some cases a better solution would be just to accept there being different tribes with different traditions, values and solutions, living next to each other or intermixed in same area - as long as they both respect the basic common rules like "no killing, no stealing".)