Little Quiver

"The way farmers used to get new chickens was to allow the hen to sit on her eggs until they hatched. The proud mother would lead the little chicks around the barnyard, teaching them what it meant to be a chicken. But unknowingly she as teaching them how to be good mothers (parents) when they grew up. When they grow up and are capable, they too will find a nice place to lay a dozen eggs and incubate them into chicks. Then, just like their mom, they will proudly carry on the farm tradition.
But there is a new way. Every spring, we go to the Co-op and but a new batch of chicks. They have been hatched in an incubator and are only a few days old. When you look down in their box you notice that they are all grouped according to age and size, and usually grouped according to sex. They grow up with their peers. They remind me of children in a schoolyard or grouped in a daycare center. They learn to compete and survive in this prefabricated social order. It is not like the old barnyard, where the chicks followed the mother hen around looking for something to eat. The new way is much more efficient. Where efficiency is the goal, it is definitely progress. It is a fast new world, you know.
The only problem with this new way is that the young chicks, who grow up among their peers without a mother's care, have lost the natural instinct to be mothers. It is rare that one of these modern egg layers will devote the time and energy to sit on their eggs and care for young chicks. They are too busy with their own fulfillment to care for the brood of young chicks.
There are millions of young couples struggling to raise their brood , but somewhere in the former generations the knowledge of the simple "how to" was lost. For many of (us) raised in a classroom and nursed on TV, being a parent does not come naturally. You must imagine what parents should be like."
pg. 12, No Greater Joy Vol. 2, Michael & Debi Pearl

- please don't take offense - just food for my thought - and fuel for my homeschool!