Children deserve caring parents
by Mary Barrera, Editor-In-Chief

    A woman in California left her two children home alone for three weeks over the holidays. Authorities discovered the 4-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl after a neighbor heard the children crying.

   Janet Chen, 31, the mother, had gone to North Carolina to visit a man she met over the Internet. She left her children with frozen food and instructions to hide if strangers came to the apartment.

    I would be more afraid of Chen than any strangers who might come around.

    Chen was charged with child endangerment.

    Barbara Atkinson, 31, now serving a prison sentence, starved her 8-year-old daughter and locked her in a dark, lice-infested closet for months.

    The child weighed 25 pounds when authorities found her. A healthy girl the same age weighs about 65 pounds.

    She suffered from brain atrophy; her body could no longer metabolize food, and her muscles had wasted away.

    Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once said that if you mess up raising your children, nothing else in life matters.

    Too many young people underestimate the responsibility one acquires when deciding to have children. The decision will cost them, at the very least, 18 years.

    Children require every available moment of a parent's time.

    They need to eat, brush their teeth, go to the doctor. They need to be dressed and out the door in time for school; they need lunch money, and they need to be picked up at the day's end. They need to sleep, even if they don't want to.

    Their wants and needs cost more money than future parents can imagine.

    Perhaps because people do not realize the scope of the parental sacrifice, many children are abused and neglected.

    Parents unwilling to care for children properly repeatedly put them in danger.

    Those parents, and I believe they know who they are, should have their children taken away and put in foster care. Only parents who suffer from some form of dementia might not realize whether or not they are adequately caring for their child.

    Parents are supposed to be the greatest source of support and comfort to their children.

    Children think the world of their parents. It is up to the parents to deserve it.

    Those two children in California probably still worry about their mother.

    It is a shame she did not worry about them.