Today I shall rant about responsibility, or the refusal to accept it. Today, for example, Maclaren (the buggy maker) agreed to pay compensation to [the parents of] children injured by its buggies’ closing mechanisms. Hmm. Ok, I can just about get by with that, though I don’t really agree with it, it represents the continuing slide towards compensating for everything, but that’s not what annoyed me. What annoyed me was that on the TV news reports of this, parents were shown whose children had been injured by the buggies. These parents were (paraphrasingly) saying that they were pleased that they could now stop feeling guilty about harming their children. I find this attitude of the passing on of responsibility exceptionally sucky. Maclaren may be compensating, but they are not accepting liability, and that’s the key thing here – it’s still the responsibility of a parent to look after their kids.
Yes, it’s horrible when you do something or omit something that means your kid gets hurt. But you have to accept it as being your fault. You close a door on your child’s hand, it’s not the builder’s fault for putting the door there. Your child gets hurt on something hot in the kitchen, it’s not the makers of the hot device that are at fault. Your child gets their finger trapped in a buggy mechanism… Do you see the pattern here? I really hate this culture that exists of late whereby everything is everyone else’s fault but yours.
You make a mistake, you suck it up.
Argh. Rant over.
